Samuel Johnson book The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 1
Source: Speech at Oxford Diocesan Conference (25 November 1864), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 105.
Samuel Johnson book The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 1
“I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future.”
Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands
Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 20.
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian
p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)
“One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backward in time.”
Brian W. Aldiss book Greybeard
Source: Greybeard (1964), Chapter 1 “The River: Sparcot” (p. 21)
Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer
Tomorrow it will no longer have the least interest. There is even good reason to believe that there is no interest at the time of the event. The medium is the televised image, instead of the permanent to which one must return in order to grow on one's own. It continually falls into a nothingness from which it will never be able to leave. The media world thus does not offer a self-realization of life; it offers escape. For all those whose laziness represses their energy and thus always leaves them discontent with themselves, it offers the opportunity to forget about their discontent. This forgetting recurs at each moment with each new rise of Force and Desire. Each weekend, students from the Parisian suburbs spend an average of twenty-one hours in front of their televisions, just like their teachers. At least they will have something to talk about the next day.
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)
Source: Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 141
John Nash (1928–2015) American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate
Autobiographical essay (1994)
Context: At the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.
Richard Matheson book I Am Legend
Source: I Am Legend (1954), Ch. 3
Context: Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passé; Summers’ idylls or Stoker’s melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the Britannica or grist for the pulp writer’s mill or raw material for the B-film factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century.
Well, it was true.
“Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now.”
Pericles (-494–-429 BC) Greek statesman, orator, and general of Athens
As quoted in Eternal Greece (1961) by Rex Warner, p. 34
Context: Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer, or of anyone else whose words may delight us for the moment, but the estimation of facts will fall short of what is really true.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
"Oscariana" (1907), Complete Works, p. 32 https://books.google.com/books?id=-CtXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA32
H.L. Mencken book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908/1913)
1900s