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Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
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Next to the virtue, the fun in this world is what we can least spare.
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Since fame is an illusion and death is in our future all we have is the next moment before we are swallowed into oblivion.
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We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
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God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else. It would be an awfully boring world.
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Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.
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I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
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Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasn’t easy. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.
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It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.
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Each community has a curious and distorted image of itself which is always flattering.
