Twenty-fifth Quotes
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year...
T. S. Eliot
I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December.
Tom Robbins
It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.
John Stuart Mill
Dialogue in Hell:
Twenty-third through twenty-fifth dialogues
Machiavelli: The cult of the prince is a sort of religion and, like all possible religions, this cult prescribes contradictions and mysteries beyond reason.
...I wish my aims to be impenetrable, even to those who are closest to me. I would only communicate my projects when I gave the command for execution....
His counselors ask one another secretly what he will think of next. He personifies in their eyes the Providence whose ways are.
Will Eisner
From the Colchester Grammar-School, when eighteen years of age, he went, in 1819, to Trinity College, Cambridge. Three years afterward he was elected to a scholarship. In 1823, on his graduating B. A., young Airy came out as Senior Wrangler. In 1824 he obtained his fellowship at Trinity. His degree of M. A. was taken in 1826, and he was simultaneously elected, though only then in his twenty-fifth year, as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge. Illustrious philosophers like Barrow and Newton had preceeded him... Latterly, however, the office had become, in a great measure, purely honorary, and might also be said to have degenerated into a sinecure.
George Biddell Airy
We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer. Hence this upset, this disequilibrium that makes weaker people anxious and apprehensive, that makes it so difficult for them to adapt to the mechanism of modern life. ... We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean. In the future - not soon, perhaps by the twenty-fifth century - these concepts will have lost their relevance. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.
Michelangelo Antonioni
