Then he asked himself:

If he were the only one who had done wrong in the course of his fatal history? If, in the first place, it were not a grievous thing that he, a workman, should have been in want of work; that he, an industrious man, should have lacked bread. If, moreover, the fault having been committed and avowed, the punishment had not been savage and excessive. If there were not a greater abuse, on the part of the law, in the penalty, than there had been, on the part of the guilty, in the crime.

He questioned himself if human society could have the right alike to crush its members in the one case by its unreasonable carelessness, and in the other by its pitiless care; and to keep a poor man for ever between a lack and an excess, a lack of work, an excess of punishment.

If it were not outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution of wealth that chance had made, and who where, therefore, most worthy of indulgence.

These questions asked and decided, he condemned society and sentenced it.

He sentenced it to his hatred.

Les Miserables

The guillotine is the concretion of the law; it is called the Avenger: it is not neutral and does not permit you to remain neutral.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

So parents often err, many fond mothers especially, doat so much upon their children, like Aesop’s ape, till in the end they crush them to death, Corporum nutrices animarum novercaie, pampering up their bodies to the undoing of their souls: they will not let them be corrected or controlled, but still soothed up in everything they do, that in conclusion “they bring sorrow, shame, heaviness to their parents” (Eccles. xxx, 8, 9), “become wanton, stubborn, wilful, and disobedient”; rude, untaught, headstrong, incorrigible, and graceless. “They love them so foolishly,” saith Cardan, “that they rather seem to hate them, bringing them up not to virtue but injury, not to learning but to riot, not to sober life and conversation but to all pleasure and licentious behaviour.”

Anatomy of Melancholy

Many mortal men came to see fair Psyche, the glory of her age, they did admire her, commend, desire her for her divine beauty, and gaze upon her; but as on a picture; none would marry her, quod indotata [because she had no dowry]; fair Psyche had no money. So they do by learning.

Anatomy of Melancholy (paraphrasing Apuleius)

Meanwhile, Bramanti went on: “Sublime Hierogam of the Chemical Wedding, Sublime Rodostauric Psychopomp, Sublime Referendarium of the Most Arcane Arcana, Sublime Steganograph of the Hieroglyphic Monad, Sublime Astral Connector Utriusque Cosmi, Sublime Keeper of the Tomb of Rosencreutz… Imponderable Archon of the Currents, Imponderable Archon of the Hollow Earth, Imponderable Archon of the Mystic Pole, Imponderable Archon of the Labyrinths, Imponderable Archon of the Pendulum of Pendula…” Bramanti paused, and it seemed to me that he uttered the last formula with reluctance: “And the Imponderable Archon of Imponderable Archons, the Servant of Servants, Most Humble Secretary of the Egyptian Oedipus, Lowest Messenger of the Masters of the World and Porter of Agarttha, Last Thurifer of the Pendulum, Claude-Louis, Comte de Saint-Germain, Prince Rackoczi, Comte de Saint-Martin, and Marchese di Aglie, Monsieur de Surmont, Mr. Welldone, Marchese di Monferrato, of Aymar, and of Belmar, Count Sol-tikoff, Knight Schoening, Count of Tzarogy!”

Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

If anyone can achieve power, then all will try and government becomes a mere battle in which principle is sacrificed for interest. The lowest will impose themselves, for the best will shun the gutter.

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost

When Sir Philip Sidney was making the grand tour, three centuries ago, he came to Vienna, where he studied horsemanship with Pagliano, who, says Sir Philip, in praise of the horse, became such a poet “that, if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, he would have persuaded me to wish myself a horse.”

Harper’s (1871)

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river.
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.

My God, armies slaughtered one another across the plains of Europe, popes hurled anathemas, emperors met, hemophiliac and incestuous, in the hunting lodge of the Palatine gardens, all to supply a cover, a sumptuous facade for the work of these wireless operators who in the House of Solomon were listening for pale echoes from the Umbilicus Mundi.

Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

Literature, like virtue, is its own reward, and the enthusiasm some experience in the permanent enjoyments of a vast library, have far outweighed the neglect or the calumny of the world, which some of its votaries have received. From the time that Cicero poured forth his feelings in his oration for the poet Archias, innumerable are the testimonies of men of letters of the pleasurable delirium of their researches; that delicious beverage which they have swallowed, so thirstily, from the magical cup of literature.

D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature