"What’s the difference between provincialism, which unthinkingly takes its situation for everyone’s, and cosmopolitanism, which is confident it has the right to?"

James Richardson Politics See all quotes by James Richardson →

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“First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need.”

“Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.”

“Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we’d prefer a different drink.”

“Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?”

“The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want.”

“It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, …"

— Neal Stephenson

Literature1959

#mind

"The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or the walls of an inferno. The colours were devilish or angelical according to the colour of the mind that watched them. They swam, those wall…"

— Mervyn Peake

Literature1911–1968

#mind

"I always believed that at some time fate would take from me the terrible effort and duty of educating myself. I believed that, when the time came, I would discover a philosopher to educate me, a true …"

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy1844–1900

#knowledge

"There is no fulfillment in things whatsoever. And I think one of the reasons that depression reigns supreme amongst the rich and famous is some of them thought that maybe those things would bring them…"

— Ben Carson

Politics1951

#mind