Quotes I've kept

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"

Isn't it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time's so desperately short!

-Seneca

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

Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

-George Orwell, Fahrenheit 451