The Dry Salvages

“ Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

— Albert Einstein

“ Love is passion, obsession, someone you can’t live without. If you don’t start with that, what are you going to end up with? Fall head over heels. I say find someone you can love like crazy and who’ll love you the same way back. And how do you find him? Forget your head and listen to your heart. I’m not hearing any heart. Run the risk, if you get hurt, you’ll come back. Because, the truth is there is no sense living your life without this. To make the journey and not fall deeply in love - well, you haven’t lived a life at all. You have to try. Because if you haven’t tried, you haven’t lived.

— Bill Parrish, played by Anthony Hopkins in Meet Joe Black

“ War is not so much a matter of weapons as of money.

— Thucydides

“ Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

“ All these years, all these memories, there was you. You pulled me through time.

— Tom Creo, played by Hugh Jackman in The Fountain

“ Ninety percent of the casualties of World War I were soldiers, fraulein. But half the people who died in World War II were civilians… Half of sixty-one million. I know why I’m fighting, fraulein. I don’t want to see World War III.

— Captain America, Captain America vol. 4 #5. Actual WW2 death figures around 72 million. Thank you, veterans.

“ Ever heard of chaos theory, Ed? It’s a science, tries to determine underlying patterns in chaotic systems like weather, ocean currents, blood flow sort of things. But it turns out that are few things more chaotic than the beat of a human heart. Its beating up, slowing down. Pretty face, flirty stares. It’s always changing on what’s happening to ourselves out there. It’s an erratic son of a bitch. But underneath all of that bump-da-bump mess, there is in fact a pattern, the truth, and it’s love. Most important thing about love is that we choose to give it, and we choose to receive it. Making it the least random act in the entire universe. It transcends blood, it transcends betrayal and all the dirt and makes us human.

— Frank Allen, played by Ryan Reynolds in Chaos Theory

“ I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.

— Aristotle, Quoted in Florilegium by Joannes Stobaeus

“ Where execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, then intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum.

— Carl von Clausewitz

“ Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables — slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy things we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

— Tyler Durden, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk.

“ What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

— T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, Little Gidding, Part V

“ Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.

— Valeria Page, V for Vendetta

“ Dear as remember’d kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Pt. IV, Song: Tears, Idle Tears, st. 4

“ O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

— T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

“ I put no stock in religion. By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of God. I’ve seen too much religion in the eyes of murderers. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness. What God desires is here in your head and here in your heart and what you decide to do every day will make you a good man or not.

— Hospitaler, from Kingdom of Heaven