Search Results for "Mark Twain"
The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts. For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought.
Fernando Pessoa • The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)
The happiest men are those who are nearest the brutes and divest themselves of reason. The best happiness is that which is based on delusion, since it costs least: it is easier to imagine oneself a king than to make oneself a king in reality. Erasmus proceeds to make fun of national pride and of professional conceit: almost all professors of the ar
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
“There's a second component of reading that many people don't realize exists: searching for the good books. There are a huge number of books and only a small percentage of them are really good, so reading means searching. Someone who tries to read but doesn't understand about the need to search will end up reading bad books, and will wonder why peo... See more
Brain Food: The Rarest Thing You Possess
Gilbert Keith Chesterton—that Catholic equivalent of Hotei, the “laughing Buddha”—who, though neither a great poet nor a great theologian, had the sort of bewitched imagination from which great poetry and theology can be made. He shone as an essayist and fantast, and of all his many essays the most profound and provoking was “On Nonsense,” the