humanity
Perfect
And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.
— Voltaire
Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.
— Confucius (maybe)
Poe and La Rochefoucauld
The true genius shudders at incompleteness—and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Solemnity is a mystery of the body, which serves to hide the defects of the mind.
— La Rochefoucauld
Rorty: On Solidarity
Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.
— Richard Rorty
Squaring the circle
As the geometer his mind applies
To square the circle, nor for all his wit
Finds the right formula, howe’er he tries
— Dante, Paradise, Canto XXXIII, Lines 133–135
The Old World Is Dying
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.
— Antonio Gramsci
Truth
For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left free to combat it.
— Thomas Jefferson to William Roscoe, December 27, 1820