Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
-Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library"
Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art.
-Jorge Luis Borges, "Blindness"
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
-G. K. Chesteron, "On Running After One's Hat"
And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realizing that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilization; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk.
-G. K. Chesterton, "A Piece of Chalk"
If someone in the street were entrusted with your body, you would be furious. Yet you entrust your mind to anyone around who happens to insult you, and allow it to be troubled and confused. Aren't you ashamed of that?
-Epictetus, "Enchiridion #28"
Isn't it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time's so desperately short!
-Seneca