“Genius is eternal patience.”
Michelangelo (widely attributed online though I haven't seen any reference to where exactly he said it)
Walter Pater’s “Renaissance, Oscar Wilde told his friend William Butler Yeats, was his own ‘golden book… the very flower of decadence.’ Pater’s aestheticism, however – the cultivation of experience, sensuality, passion, the exotic – although possessing an obvious affinity to the decadents, had a high seriousness, even an ultimate sense of morality, that was lacking in the decadents.”
Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
“I have only one fault, namely, that I am evil.”
Another “Needhamism” from the then-just-deceased columnist Richard J. Needham, quoted by Malcolm MacLeod of St. John’s in letter to the Globe & Mail July 30, 1996
“Life isn’t a dress rehearsal. There are some mistakes that just can’t be corrected.”
A retired high school teacher quoted by Dave Brown in the Ottawa Citizen September 12, 1998
“It is quite certain that there is no good without the knowledge of God; that the closer one comes, the happier one is, and that ultimate happiness is to know him with certainty; that the further away one goes, the more unhappy one is, and that ultimate unhappiness would be to be certain of the opposite [to him].”
Pascal Pensées
“What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 No. 2 (Oct.-Nov. 2000)
“One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.”
Anthony Powell, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail June 5 2000
“Their art for art’s sake was a drunken variant of the stern age’s commerce for commerce’s sake, science for science’ sake.”
Garry Wills Chesterton (regarding the decadents of the 1880s and 1890s)