the principal business of life is to enjoy it. - Samuel Butler

I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism — better dead than dying.

Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.