'[they] have transferred their artificial ideas to nature"

[C]ertainly nothing could be more unaccountably whimsical, than for an architect to model his performance by the human figure, since no two things can have less resemblance or analogy, than a man, and an house or temple; do we need to observe that their purposes are entirely different? What I am apt to suspect is this: that these analogies were devised to give a credit to the works of art, by shewing a conformity between them and the noblest works in nature, not that the latter served at all to supply hints for the perfection of the former. And I am the more fully convinced, that the patrons of proportion have transferred their artificial ideas to nature, and not borrowed from thence the proportions they use in works of art; because in any discussion of this subject, they always quit as soon as possible the open field of natural beauties, the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and fortify themselves within the artificial lines and angles of architecture. For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views, and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever.

—Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd edition, 1759)

'knocking so ineffectively at the doors of the palace'

He capped the pen. It was a service someone had to perform, he felt. A translation service. What was all this, but a modern tower of Babel? Here was someone speaking nothing but dance, and someone else speaking paint, and someone speaking poetry, and someone speaking music. And what were they trying to express, but the inexpressible? If there existed words, regular words, to say what they were aiming at, then why would they even need to do what they did? Why were they all living here, knocking so ineffectively at the doors of the palace? The ink was insufficient as anything else, but perhaps it was a start. If he'd been a sculptor, he'd have sculpted it for them: Look! There! Love.

—Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House (2014)

'some promise my idiot heart made itself'

"Look at her up there, offering herself like—"

"Who? Sobriety doesn't suit you. Good God." Marlon handed over his own drink. "It's delicious," he said.

Viktor looked down at it. "I don't drink."

"You don't?" Marlon thought through the past weeks, and took back his glass. "You mixed the vat last night. And you're always dropping things. You're the drunkest man I know."

"I've never touched the stuff. I couldn't dance."

"But when you were younger."

"I started training when I was eight." Viktor poked the fire with a long branch and said, "Tell me something. Tell me why I could walk down a street in the city and see two faces in the crowd. And one of them—a stranger—it might be a beautiful woman—for one of them I feel nothing, I remain intact. And the other, no more beautiful, no more spectacular: When I see her, I fall through the universe. And only because of our past, only because of some promise my idiot heart made itself years before."

"Why don't you try a drink."

"The truth is, there's no such thing as love. There's only history."

—Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House (2014)

fastened to a dying animal

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

—William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928)

'All of them are different, like the fingers on a hand.'

[Pope] Francis has frequently used his public audience in St. Peter's Square as a venue to focus on the importance of the family.

In his talk, Francis repeatedly praised children as "the joy of family and society" and the key to humanity's future. As he often does, he departed from his prepared text to speak off the cuff, at one point noting that he was one of five children growing up in Argentina, and that when his mother was asked which was her favorite child she would compare them to her five fingers.

"If you hit this one it hurts me, if you hit that one, it hurts me," he recalled his mother saying. "All of them are mine. All of them are different, like the fingers on a hand."

—David Gibson, "Pope Francis: Opting not to have children a 'selfish choice,'" Religious News Service, February 11, 2015