The Journal
Lines, books and notes worth keeping
I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 139, tr. W. F. Trotter
“After all this time?”
“Always.”
Dumbledore and Snape, in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2007
Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
Michael Corleone, in The Godfather Part II, 1974, written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, 1890, chapter 6
Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.
V, in the film V for Vendetta, 2005
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot, preface to Harry Crosby’s Transit of Venus, 1931
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia”, 1891