Justin Lancy

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

At the heart of this formulation is an essential deceit: that dissent from institutional authority involves a moral or ideological choice, while obedience does not. With that false premise in place, society pays great attention to the motives of dissenters, but none to those who submit to our institutions, either by ensuring that their actions rema

In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.

Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.

Seneca supplied him with one of his favorite epigrams: “Death weighs on him who is known to all, but dies unknown to himself.”

So the unwanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants.

get hold of Tropic of Cancer, get hold of Black Spring and read especially the first hundred pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetical word. The; adjective h

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. —RAINER MARIA RILKE

To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium. And if, as Napoleon wrote to Carnot, “the art of government is not to let men go stale,” then it is essentially an art of unbalancing.