Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.
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Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
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Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
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More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.
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The age of the book is almost gone.
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The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
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The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
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The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
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There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
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To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs - but a tribute nevertheless.
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We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
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Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.
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