We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Solitude seems to me to wear the best favor in such as have already employed their most active and flourishing age in the world's service…. We have lived enough for others; let us at least live out the small remnant of life for ourselves; let us now call in our thoughts and intentions to ourselves, and to our own ease and repose…. We must break the knot of our obligations, how strong soever, and hereafter love this or that, but espouse nothing but ourselves: that is to say, let the remainder be our own, but not so joined and so close as not to be forced away without flaying us or tearing out part of our whole. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own. 'Tis time to wean ourselves from society when we can no longer add anything to it; he who is not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow. Our forces begin to fail us; let us call them in and concentrate them in and for ourselves. He that can cast off within himself and resolve the offices of friendship and company, let him do it. In this decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome, and importunate to others, let him take care not to be useless, burdensome, and importunate to himself. Let him soothe and caress himself, and above all things be sure to govern himself with reverence to his reason and conscience to that degree as to be ashamed to make a false step in their presence.... The stoutest and most resolute natures render even their seclusion glorious and exemplary.

Michel de Montaigne

All information is imperfect.

Jacob Bronowski 

He admitted the possibility of a central intelligent cause, while being unable to identify that cause, or understand why its designs should be brought to fulfillment in such roundabout and often terrible ways.

Julian Barnes, Arthur & George

You don't need to be a deer to know to stay off the highway.


Heard on the Equator

There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can’t believe it.


Mark Twain, as quoted in The Consciousness Deniers, Galen Strawson (NYRB, March 13, 2018)

Everybody has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.


Mike Tyson, as quoted by Avishai Margalit in the NYRB.

The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.
 

Michel de Montaigne 

The world is nothing but babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather prate too much, than speak too little.

Michel de Montaigne

A man may say too much even upon the best subjects.

Michel de Montaigne

In truth, knowledge is not so absolutely necessary as judgment; the last may make shift without the other, but the other never without this.

Michel de Montaigne

What we look for does not happen;
what we least expect is fashioned by the gods.


Euripides, Bacchae (as quoted from Robin Robertson in the Sept. 25, 2014 New York Review)

Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life.  That is its job.  Your job is to notice.


Michael Harris, as quoted by The Economist (August 16, 2014)

Empowering friends, picking your battles, always checking principle with prudence, never overestimating American capacities, but never overestimating the enemy’s strength: this is best seen not as a strategy for all contingencies but as a disposition, a habit of mind, a temperament.

Michael Ignatieff on George Kennan's approach to US foreign policy, America's Melancholic Hero (The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2014).

Non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est

(“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”).

Quoted by Pope Francis on the vision of St. Ignatius