kuny's unfamiliar quotations

"He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction."

Belief in form, but disbelief in content - that's what makes an aphorism charming.

Fascism was triumphantly anti-liberal. It also provided the proof that man can, without difficulty, combine crack-brained beliefs about the world with a confident mastery of contemporary high technology. ... Nevertheless, the combination of conservative values, the techniques of mass democracy, and an innovative ideology of irrationalist savagery, essentially centered in nationalism, must be explained..

Age of Extremes

The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.
Letters from Prison (1946)

For a man to pride himself on this kind of wealth, as if it enriched him, is as ridiculous as if one struggling in the ocean with a bag of gold on his back should gasp out, "I am worth a hundred thousand dollars!" I see his ineffectual struggles just as plainly, and what it is that sinks him.
Journal November 5, 1857

And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control.

-from Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing

One must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise one is just dreaming.

God is usually on the side of the big squadrons against the small.

The future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.