«У Менделеева две жены, но Менделеев-то у меня один!» — Царь Алекса́ндр II
• “Yes, Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev!” — Tsar Alexander II responds to a complaint about Mendeleev’s bigamy
Category Archives: Quotations
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Figure Philia
“I love figures, it gives me an intense satisfaction to deal with them, they’re living things to me, and now that I can handle them all day long I feel myself again.” — the imprisoned accountant Jean Charvin in W. Somerset Maugham’s short-story “A Man with a Conscience” (1939)
Still-Popper
“My only drugs are silence and solitude.” — Frederick Forsyth in The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue (2015)
The Comatose Never Knows
“What’s it like to be in a coma?”
“How the fuck do I know? I was in a coma.” — stunt-rider Evel Knievel (1938-2007)
Sóccrates Says…
“A beleza vem primeiro. A vitória é secundária. O que importa é a alegria.” — Sócrates, o futebolista brasileiro
• “Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.” — Brazilian footballer Sócrates
I’ve also found the quote as:
“A beleza está primeiro. A vitória é secundária. O que é interessa é o prazer.”
• “Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is pleasure.”
Reflet de Robert
[I]t was hard to pierce Robert de Montesquiou’s carapace — and he wouldn’t have wanted you to. He was perhaps at heart a melancholic: he liked to say that his mother had “given me the sad present of life”. His restlessness and furious inquisitiveness might have been a response to this. He was vain without being especially self-reflective, one of those who, rather than look inside to discover who they are, prefer to see themselves in the reflections that come back from others. — Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat (2019), pp. 192-3
Elsewhere Other-Accessible…
• Portait of a Peacock — Cornelia Otis Skinner’s essay on Montesquiou
• Le Paon dans les Pyrénées — review of Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat
Chevaleurs Oniriques
« Les valeurs oniriques l’ont définitivement emporté sur les autres et je demande à ce qu’on tienne pour un crétin celui qui se refuserait encore, par exemple, à voir un cheval galoper sur une tomate. » André Breton (1896-1966)
• “Oneiric values have definitely won out over the others, and I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot.” — André Breton, viâ Soluble Fish by Incunabula Media
Renoir et la Reine Noire
« Le noir, une non-couleur ? Où avez-vous encore pris cela ? Le noir, mais c’est la reine des couleurs ! » — Renoir (1841-1919)
• “Black, a non-color? Where did you get that idea? Black, why, it’s the queen of colors!”
Gorge the Gaze on God’s Gift
“The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.” — John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. 2 (1853)
Bored Bard
Pol. How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter: yet he knew me not at first; he said I was a Fishmonger: he is farre gone, farre gone: and truly in my youth, I suffred much extreamity for loue: very neere this. Ile speake to him againe. What do you read my Lord?
Ham. Words, words, words. — Hamlet (c. 1600), Act 2, Scene 2
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 