The Art of Tetman Callis

“Swans on the river, moving with calm dignity, pretending they are doing something else, while all the time, like the noisy, desperately fluttering seagulls, they too search for food. They eat discreetly with beaks below water, so as not to be seen in the undignified act of feeding, which humans parade in public places without […]

[Read more →]

“Ulysses is an amazing tour de force when one considers the success which has been in the main achieved with such a difficult objective as Joyce set for himself. . . . [It] is not an easy book to read. It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns. In many places it seems […]

[Read more →]

“The first fellow that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck.” – James Joyce, Ulysses Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“Frederick the Great was accustomed to say: ‘The older one gets the more convinced one becomes that his Majesty King Chance does three-quarters of the business of this miserable universe.’ ” — Albet Sorel, The Eastern Question in the Eighteenth Century Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“There are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehended; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.” – Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. W. […]

[Read more →]

“Never let any Government imagine that it can choose perfectly safe courses; rather let it expect to have to take very doubtful ones, because it is found in ordinary affairs that one never seeks to avoid one trouble without running into another; but prudence consists in knowing how to distinguish the character of troubles, and […]

[Read more →]

“When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.” – Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. W. K. Marriott) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so […]

[Read more →]

“The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms.” – Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. W. K. Marriott) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“Guys who get A’s in law school become judges. Guys who get B’s change the world. Guys who get C’s make money.” – Lea Carpenter, “Look Up” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“This is old London. . . . This district is a unique hub, where major affairs are conducted and astronomical bills of sale for London’s wealthiest merchants are signed. Every single one of its buildings is a frenzy of action and work. No one steps in except to work and to earn, and no tongue […]

[Read more →]

“It is no crime that a person’s taste changes according to what he experiences and is exposed to. The youth for example are comforted by exaggerated prattle and obscenity. While the aged prefer speech that is free of such blemishes. Therefore we say that we cannot clearly define the limits of taste, for it is […]

[Read more →]

“Bad behavior heralds ruin.” – Jac Jemc, The Grip of It Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“In prison, the guards would see me late at night writing poetry. I was the only guy staying awake in the dorms. The other convicts would tell me, ‘Dude, don’t turn around, we’re gonna kill this guy tonight. If you hear some shit going down, Jimmy, just don’t turn around.’ So I’d hear some guy […]

[Read more →]

“It’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard in your life, to advertise a writing workshop and only get writers and poets. What’s the point in having a writing workshop? You want people to come who are not poets, who are not writers, but have kept their dream alive to be one. You know and […]

[Read more →]

“My only answer to anger is to work. Work it out, not for an on-the-mat yoga solution that professes we can heal from the curse of having so much money, entitlement, privilege—this is bullshit. Practice giving it away, heal yourself that way, be lightening the load you carry. Too much money creates all kinds of […]

[Read more →]

“The good die cold, the wicked in flames: the winds of hell are blue with the sweet ether of fever-flowers, horned snake-tongued children dance on lawns that are the surface of the sun, all loot from thievery tied to their tails like cat-cans, tokens of a life in crime.” – Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other […]

[Read more →]

“Unlasting, what could be forever? Or only what it seemed? Rock corrodes, rivers freeze, fruit rots; stabbed, blood of black and white bleeds alike; trained parrots tell more truth than most, and who is lonelier: the hawk or the worm? Every flowering heart shrivels dry and pitted as the herb from which it bloomed, and […]

[Read more →]

“The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what […]

[Read more →]

“Few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true […]

[Read more →]

“Narcissus was no egotist. . . He was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love. . . Poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.” – Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (ellipses in original) […]

[Read more →]

“All children are morbid; it’s their one saving grace.” – Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“Never surrender your sadness because that’s like a flower surrendering the rain. Be sad; it’s a power source for your humanity, for getting in touch with your gentleness, with your corazón, with your cry of grief. Sadness is with us all our lives, but that’s freedom. When you live within that room of sadness, everything […]

[Read more →]

“It’s a constant battle to stay human, to remind yourself in prison that you’re a human being, not an animal as they would wish you to think and unfortunately how many grow to see themselves—it’s a spiritual and emotional cancer—all prisons are cancer wards, run by infected cancerous Lobotomites—people who have had their conscience pot-holed […]

[Read more →]

“Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is no resting-place upon them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number. Doth not wealth satiate, and become nauseous, […]

[Read more →]

“Out of crimes come many good things, and out of good grows much evil. The cruel rage of the tyrant may prove a blessing to the thousands who come after him, and the sweetheartedness of a holy man may make a nation slaves. Man doeth this, and doeth that from the good or evil of […]

[Read more →]

“Day by day we destroy that we may live, since in this world none save the strongest can endure. Those who are weak must perish; the earth is to the strong, and the fruits thereof. For every tree that grows a score shall wither, that the strong one may take their share. We run to […]

[Read more →]

“Men are faithful for so long only as temptations pass them by. If the temptation be but strong enough, then will the man yield, for every man, like every rope, hath his breaking strain, and passion is to men what gold and power are to women—the weight upon their weakness.” – H. Rider Haggard, She […]

[Read more →]

“Each religion claims the future for its followers; or, at least, the good thereof. The evil is for those benighted ones who will have none of it; seeing the light the true believers worship, as the fishes see the stars, but dimly. The religions come and the religions pass, and the civilisations come and pass, […]

[Read more →]

“Ah, how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathereth it up like water, but like water it runneth through his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, ‘See, he is a wise man!’ ” – H. Rider Haggard, […]

[Read more →]