It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits- like becoming a prime minister or a millionaire, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First -rate pursuits, involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napolean, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable.

--Malcolm Muggeridge.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge

"Considerate la vostra semenza

Fatti non foste a viver come bruti

Ma per seguir virtute e canonscenza"

--[Ulysses] Dante Aligheri, 'Inferno'

Idealization is very moving; it is also very false. It allows profound self-deceptions, at both the individual and the social level. Literature does not make us better, it does not make us worse; the study of it does not make us better, it does not make us worse. It only confirms what we are already.

--Harold Bloom, in conversation with Imre Salunsinsky

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

CHILDREN OF THE MIND, ORSON SCOTT CARD

If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, DAVE EGGERS

"The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something".

--Nick Hornby, 'A Long Way Down'

that's it and that's that

All we're talking about, finally is what is real? What is real? There's only one reality, you know. You can interpret reality in various ways. But there's only one. And if that reality is thousands of people being tortured to death at this very moment and hundreds and thousands of megatons of nuclear bombs standing there waiting to go off at this very moment, then that's it and that's that. It has to be faced.

-- Harold Pinter, in conversation with Nicholas Hern