Financially, my knowledge of Spanish has yielded me exactly ten-and-sixpence—for the translation of a stupid aria! But I have never given it up, and I find that running over Spanish irregular verbs is an infallible cure for insomnia.

–Edward Agate in James Agate's Ego (73)

L'histoire accueille et renouvelle ces gloires déshéritées; elle donne nouvelle vie a ces morts, les ressuscite. Sa justice associe ainsi ceux qui n'ont pas vécu en même temps, fait réparation a plusieurs qui n'avaient paru qu'un moment pour disparaitre. Ils vivent maintenant avec nous qui nous sentons leurs parents, leurs amis. Ainsi se fait une famille, une cité commune entre les vivants et les morts.

-Michelet, Preface to Histoire du XIXe Siécle, Vol II. history

And so it was necessary to teach people not to think and make judgments, to compel them to see the non-existent, and to argue the opposite of what was obvious to everyone.

-Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago politics

Whatever his merits, a man in good health is always disappointing. –E.M. Cioran health

Took Leo to supper at the Trocadero and was very glad when he only wanted to drink beer. This enabled me to have my usual pint of champagne. I am dead without it. But I cannot afford to buy champagne for other people. If, therefore, I invite anybody to a meal--which owing to the impecuniousity of my friends I must always do--either I must behave like a cad or remain dead. I prefer the former. Leo said that to get the best out of a love-affair one should never ask for more passion than the beloved one is competent to provide. It is impossible to convey the amount of erotic dissolusion in Leo's voice as he said this. Wordsworth would have called it dissapointment recollected in tranquillity. Apropos of Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle, Leo defined History as "the way things get about."

-A Shorter Ego I (41), James Agate money love history

Heart & Mind: What is sentimentality? If one asks somebody who ought to know, one is told: an excess of emotion; or again, misplaced emotion. Both answers miss the point. Who can judge when emotion is too much? People vary not only in the power to feel and to express feeling, but also in their imagination, so that a stolid nature will deem it excessive as soon as love or grief is expressed vividly or strongly. Shakespeare is full of “exaggerated” emotion, but never sentimental. The same remark applies to the other answer. When is feeling misplaced? at the sufferings of a tragic hero? at the death of a pet? at the destruction of a masterpiece? One may argue that any emotion out of the common should be restrained in public, but that is another question, one of social manners that has nothing to do with a feeling’s fitness to its occasion. The diagnostic test must be found somewhere else.

Sentimentality is feeling that shuts out action, real or potential. It is self-centered and a species of make-believe. William James gives the example of the woman who sheds tears at the heroine’s plight on the stage while her coachman is freezing outside the theatre. So far is the sentimentalist from being one whose emotions exceed the legal limit that he may be charged with deficient energy in what he feels; it does not propel him. That is why he finds pleasure in grief and when he is in love never proposes.

-Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (411)

Politics: There is a general folk belief, derived largely from Burke and the nineteenth-century historians, that political stability is of slow, coral-like growth; the result of time, circumstances, prudence, experience, wisdom, slowly building up over the centuries. Nothing is, I think, further from the truth (…) Political stability, when it comes, often happens to a society quite quickly, as suddenly as water becomes ice.

– J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in 18C England

Certains auteurs, parlant de leurs ouvrages, dissent: ‘Mon livre, mon commentaire, mon histoire, etc.’ Ils feraient mieux de dire: ‘Notre livre, notre commentaire, notre histoire, etc.’ Vu que d’ordinaire il y a plus en cela du bien d’autrui que du leur. 

–Pascal, Pensees books