“Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.”

Source: The Moviegoer

Letter to Charles James Fox (8 October 1777)
1770s

Die Fackel no. 46 (9 October 1917)
Die Fackel

Source: House of Leaves

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 585.

Aphorism 95
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

Source: Gardens of the Moon (1999), Chapter 13 (p. 399)

Source: The Witch Of Portobello