Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
Category Archive: April 15
The history of the Franks becomes, therefore, the history of the Netherlands.
A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.
For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the swarming nations are now in full career.
That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit.
Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness – it’s not an unusual thing – and maybe that’s not written about enough.
A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.
A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.