Great Books Are Readable Anyway. Dickens Is

What Makes Us Want To Know The Worst? Is It That We Tire Of Preferring To Know The Best? Does Curiosity Always Hurdle Self-interest? Or Is It, More Simply, That Wanting To Know The Worst Is Love's Favorite Perversion.

If A Man Cannot Tell What He Wants To Do, Then He Must Find Out What He Ought To Do. If Desire Has Become Complicated, Then Hold Fast To Duty.

Life … Is A Bit Like Reading. … If All Your Responses To A Book Have Already Been Duplicated And Expanded Upon By A Professional Critic, Then What Point Is There To Your Reading? Only That It’s Yours. Similarly, Why Live Your Life? Because It’s Yours. But What If Such An Answer Becomes Less And Less Convincing?

[flaubert] Didn’t Just Hate The Railway As Such; He Hated The Way It Flattered People With The Illusion Of Progress. What Was The Point Of Scientific Advance Without Moral Advance? The Railway Would Merely Permit More People To Move About, Meet And Be Stupid Together.

That's One Of The Central Problems Of History, Isn't It, Sir? The Question Of Subjective Versus Objective Interpretation, The Fact That We Need To Know The History Of The Historian In Order To Understand The Version That Is Being Put In Front Of Us.