Orts #789
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
— Emerson, in an essay, Beauty
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
— Oscar Wilde, in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
Of all authors Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences, or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.
— T. S. Eliot, quoted in How to LIve: or a LIfe of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Blakewell, 2010
That such a man [Montaigne] wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth.
— Nietzsche, quoted in How to LIve: or a LIfe of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Blakewell, 2010
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REQUIRED READING: President Trump's First Term
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/president-trumps-first-term
(by Evan Osnos, in The New Yorker, September 26, 2016)