Century Quote by Mark Lilla

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas…

— Marcel Proust

“All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense…

— Julio Cortázar

“Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence,…

— Bertrand Russell

If there is one thing that will make a man peculiarly and insufferable self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first…

— Mark Twain

“For you cannot know the world by just navel-gazing. This is why he reads history and studies philosophy: not to draw lessons and precepts,…

— Stefan Zweig

Old ideas from an old man about an old vision of Europe.

— Denis MacShane

“In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at…

— F Scott Fitzgerald

“There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably…

— Kevin Hearne

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization…

— Czeslaw Milosz

“Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and…

— Milan Kundera

“Those who are ignorant of history and the evolution of taste are apt at every turn to make the present age their standard, and…

— Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury

So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he…

— Willa Cather