Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together. ~ Petrarch
A good death does honor to a whole life. ~ Petrarch
- 4 Zarbon 19:16, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
- 1 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 23:40, 16 July 2014 (UTC)
2 Kalki 22:22, 19 July 2008 (UTC) this is true, but there are more important things to note than something which can be misconstrued as a glorification of honored deaths rather than honorable lives.
- 2 InvisibleSun 21:08, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
- 3 //Gbern3 (talk) 13:05, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
It is better to will the good than to know the truth. ~ Petrarch
- 3 Zarbon 19:16, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
- 2 Kalki 22:22, 19 July 2008 (UTC) with a lean toward 3.
- 3 InvisibleSun 21:08, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
- 2 //Gbern3 (talk) 13:05, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
The powers, aspirations, and mission of man are such as to raise the study of his origin and nature, inevitably and by the very necessity of the case, from the mere physiological to the psychological stage of scientific operations. ~ Richard Owen
Manifold subsequent experience has led to a truer appreciation and a more moderate estimate of the importance of the dependence of one living being upon another. ~ Richard Owen
[L]ife itself sends its own stories across billions of years. It's a message that every one of us carries inside, inscribed in all the cells of our bodies, in a language that all life on Earth can read. ~ In commemoration of the 20 July 1822 birth of Gregor Mendel, from the eleventh episode of the science documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).
- 4 Pithy Francoln (talk) 22:04, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
- 1 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 09:00, 18 July 2017 (UTC) with a lean toward 2, but would probably prefer an actual quote by Mendel, rather than a quote about the subject of genetic heredity which he pioneered.
| What an excellent horse do they lose, for want of address and boldness to manage him! … I could manage this horse better than others do. |
| ~ Alexander the Great ~ |
| There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird's first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| She waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| What discordant vespers do the tinker's goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of the day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he is sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their blood in history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him? |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesnt mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. |
~ Cormac McCarthy ~
in
~ No Country for Old Men ~ |
| Getting hurt changed me, he said. Changed my perspective. I've moved on, in a way. Some things have fallen into place that were not there before. I thought they were, but they werent. The best way I can put it is that I've sort of caught up with myself. That's not a bad thing. It was overdue. |
~ Cormac McCarthy ~
in
~ No Country for Old Men ~ |
| The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities. In their minds. They pretend to themselves that they are in control of events where perhaps they are not. And it is always one's stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one's enemies. Or discourages it. |
~ Cormac McCarthy ~
in
~ No Country for Old Men ~ |
| Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning. |
~ Cormac McCarthy ~
in
~ No Country for Old Men ~ |
| We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such value. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |
| I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away. |
| ~ Cormac McCarthy ~ |