We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals. - Saul Bellow

It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.

Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument — that, friends, is real wisdom.

"This development is possibly related to the fact that so much of "value" has been absorbed by technology itself. It is "good" to electrify a primitive area. Civilization and even morality are implicit in technological transformation...New techniques are in themselves bien pensant and represent not only rationality but benevolence...Romantic individuals (a mass of them by now) accuse this mass civilization of obstructing their attainment of beauty, nobility, integrity, intensity. I do not want to sneer at the term Romantic. Romanticism guarded the "inspired condition," preserved the poetic, philosophical, and religious teachings...during the greatest and most rapid of transformations, the most accelerated phase of modern scientific and technical transformation."