"What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head." --Kenko, "Essays in Idleness"
"To the extent that useful thoughts are fuller and more solid, they are also more absorbing and more burdensome." --Montaigne, "On Some Verses of Virgil"
"There is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit (not the one which has been so well allegorised in the admirable "Lines to a Spider," but another of the same edifying breed); he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly towards me, he stops -- he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe -- but as I do not start up and seize upon the straggling caitiff, as he would upon a hapless fly within his toils, he takes heart, and ventures on with mingled cunning, impudence, and fear." --William Hazlitt, "On the Pleasure of Hating"
"M. Bergson, in his well-known essay on this theme, says ... well, he says many things; but none of these, though I have just read them, do I clearly remember, nor am I sure that in the act of reading I understood any of them." --Max Beerbohm, "Laughter"
"I had strongly hoped that they would say sweetbreads instead of testicles, but I was wrong." --Sara Suleri, "Meatless Days"
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