The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform…. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.
Ada Lovelace, notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine
Possession is more often secular than supernatural. Men are possessed by their thoughts of a hated person, a hated class, race or nation. At the present time the destinies of the world are in the hands of self-made demoniacs — of men who are possessed by, and who manifest, the evil they have chosen to see in others. They do not believe in devils, but they have tried their hardest to be possessed — have tried and been triumphantly successful.
Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon
I now rambled about in great uneasiness from the coffee-house to the promenade, from thence to the museum, from the museum to the tavern, from the tavern to the exhibition of wild beasts, and at last to the playhouse, but I could nowhere find tranquillity.
Lawrence Flammenberg, The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest
We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
There is little else to do but write this clear explanation of everything that has happened to me since the misfortune of birth. He that has fared better, and without deceiving himself, let him utter his jackass cry.
For art is like a living organism — better dead than dying.
Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform, neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty.
When the artichoke flowers, and the chirping grass-hopper sits in a tree and pours down his shrill song continually from under his wings in the season of wearisome heat, then goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest.
At that time let me have a shady rock and wine of Biblis, a clot of curds and milk of drained goats with the flesh of an heifer fed in the woods, that has never calved, and of firstling kids; then also let me drink bright wine, sitting in the shade, when my heart is satisfied with food, and so, turning my head to face the fresh Zephyr, from the everflowing spring which pours down unfouled thrice pour an offering of water, but make a fourth libation of wine.
Fools! They know not how much more the half is than the whole, nor what great advantage there is in mallow and asphodel.
Full many a stoic eye and aspect stern
Mask hearts where grief hath little left to learn;
And many a withering thought lies hid, not lost,
In smiles that least befit who wear them most.
