Inskeep Booksellers Quotes & Sayings

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens's descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the "normally accepted meaning of words" broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language - specifically the scission of word and meaning - as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the "vera vocabula rerum," literally, the "true names of things."18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion - spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible - that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends. — Mark John Thompson

Three reasons God commands us to pray correlate to our three deepest needs, the fundamental needs of the three powers of our soul: prayer gives truth to our mind, goodness to our will, and beauty to our heart. 'The true, the good, and the beautiful' are the three things we need and love the most, because they are the three attributes of God. — Peter Kreeft

I'm so popular it's scary sometimes. I suppose I'm just everybody's type. — Catherine Deneuve

We were all Romans once, I guess. — Omar Epps

Solitude is very sad, Too much company twice as bad. — William Allingham

Your only job is creating a life that contains a story worth telling. — Carolyn Parkhurst