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Art is not life, but in a sense something contrary to life, since life is transient and changing, while art is permanent.

Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world.

Nihilism, then, is the end process of rationalism. It is man's self conscious will to destroy his past and control his future. It is modernity at its extreme.

The one thing that would utterly destroy the new capitalism is the serious practice of deferred gratification.

That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that no man in his right mind ever read a book through from beginning to end.

Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon.

 "Absurd" originally means "out of harmony," in a musical context. Hence its dictionary definition: "out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical." In common usage, "absurd" may simply mean "ridiculous," but this is not the sense in which Camus uses the word, and in which it is used when we speak of the Theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco defined his understanding of the term as follows: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose. . . . Cut from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."

The virtue of the market is that it disperses responsibility.

If the language of art is not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience, how can it be accessible to ordinary people?

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Gina.

“Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don’t have enough to do,” she murmured back. “So they’ve invented a new acronym.”

You shouldn’t be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that’s what science is all about.

It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.