“Words perturb our powers of reason. The only safe words are our own.”
Emilio Massera (1925–2010) Argentine military officer
Obituary, The Economist, 27 November 2010, p. 98
[From Twitter, July 22, 2010]
“Words perturb our powers of reason. The only safe words are our own.”
Emilio Massera (1925–2010) Argentine military officer
Obituary, The Economist, 27 November 2010, p. 98
José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses
Chap.II: The Rise Of The Historic Level
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)
“Chance and chance alone has a message for us… Only chance can speak to us.”
Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, pg 48
Lewis Morris (poet) (1833–1907) Welsh poet in the English language
"Evensong", line 25, in Songs of Two Worlds: Third series (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875), p. 23.
“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.”
Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea
Tout existant naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre.
Nausea (1938)
John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian
Letter to John Benson (5 October 1770); published in Wesley's Select Letters (1837), p. 207
1770s
“The only safe thing is to take a chance.”
Elaine May (1932) American screenwriter, film director, actress, and comedian
“Chance favors only the prepared mind.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
Thomas Pynchon book V.
Source: V. (1963), Chapter Eight
Context: The eyes of New York women do not see the wandering bums or the boys with no place to go. Material wealth and getting laid strolled arm-in-arm the midway of Profane’s mind. If he’d been the type who evolves theories of history for his own amusement, he might have said all political events: wars, governments and uprisings, have the desire to get laid as their roots; because history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whoever he chooses. All he believed at this point, on the bench behind the library was, that any body who worked for inanimate money so he could by more inanimate objects was out of his head. Inanimate money was to get animate warmth, dead fingernails in the living shoulderblades, quick cries against the pillow, tangled hair, lidded eyes, listing loins.