'all approximations are rational'

...it is obvious that irrationals are uninteresting to an engineer, since he is concerned only with approximations, and all approximations are rational.

—G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940)

"Good work is not done by 'humble' men."

Some egotism of this sort is inevitable, and I do not feel that it really needs justification. Good work is not done by 'humble' men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking "Is what I do worth while?" and "Am I the right person to do it?" will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve. This is not too difficult: it is harder not to make his subject and himself ridiculous by shutting his eyes too tightly.

—G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940)

Nothing is simpler than love.

Nothing is simpler for man than the act of love, which in this case can indeed dispense with every precaution and care since the self-surrender to the person one adores is at the same time self-surrender to the promise of eternal bliss and, as such, is an act which could never be surpassed by a greater or a better. When one's beloved is none other than God, the ego's experience of losing the ground under its feet as a result of genuine love is none other than the beatific shudder of self-surrender which every believer is basically disposed to experience and which the mystic actually experiences already here on earth.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (1961) 

'the flaming liquor'

Since then Bartley had always thought of the British Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality, where all the dead things in the world were assembled to make one's hour of youth the more precious. One trembled lest before he got out it might somehow escape him, lest he might drop the glass from over-eagerness and see it shivered on the stone floor at his feet. How one hid his youth under his coat and hugged it! And how good it was to turn one's back upon all that vaulted cold, to take Hilda's arm and hurry out of the great door and down the steps into the sunlight among the pigeons—to know that the warm and vital thing within him was still there and had not been snatched away to flush Caesar's lean cheek or to feed the veins of some bearded Assyrian king. They in their day had carried the flaming liquor, but to-day was his!

—Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge (1912)

Life Could be Capable of Small Beauties

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.  

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence. 

"Someday the meek might actually want it," he said.

--Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (2009)

'the height from which past and [future] are ... equally visible'

She has the novelist's preoccupation with logic, the logic of Time past and Time future, not so much the real short-story teller's obsession with Time present—the height from which past and [future]* are presumed to be equally visible.

—Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1963)

*text says "past and present," but I think he meant future.

'the salt, bitter passion of the sea'

The trouble began at evening. Then a yearning for something unknown came over her, a passion for something she knew not what. She would walk the foreshore alone after dusk, expecting, expecting something, as if she had gone to a rendezvous. The salt, bitter passion of the sea, its indifference to the earth, its swinging, definite motion, its strength, its attack, and its salt burning, seemed to provoke her to a pitch of madness, tantalizing her with vast suggestions of fulfilment. And then, for personification, would come Skrebensky, Skrebensky, whom she knew, whom she was fond of, who was attractive, but whose soul could not contain her in its waves of strength, nor his breast compel her in burning, salty passion.

—D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

You Want to Rebel Against Society?

"Art as a weapon?" he said to me, the word "weapon" rich with contempt and itself a weapon. "Art as taking the right stand on everything? Art as the advocate of good things? Who taught you all this? Who taught you art is slogans? Who taught you art is in the service of 'the people'? Art is in the service of art--otherwise there is no art worthy of anyone's attention. What is the motive for writing serious literature, Mr. Zuckerman? To disarm the enemies of price control? The motive for writing serious literature is to write serious literature. You want to rebel against society? I'll tell you how to do it--write well. You want to embrace a lost cause? Then don't fight in behalf of the laboring class. They're going to make out fine. They're going to fill up on Plymouths to their heart's content. The workingman will conquer us all--out of his mindlessness will flow the slop that is this philistine country's cultural destiny. We'll soon have something in this country far worse than the government of the peasants and the workers--we will have the culture of the peasants and the workers. Not the high-flown word, not the inspiring word, not the pro-this and anti-that word, not the word that advertises to the respectable that you are a wonderful, admirable, compassionate person on the side of the downtrodden and the oppressed. No, for the word that tells the literate few condemned to live in America that you are on the side of the word! This play of yours is crap. It's awful It's infuriating. It is crude, primitive, simple-minded, propagandistic crap. It blurs the world with words. And it reeks to high heaven of your virtue. Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than an artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation to idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place--your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love! Start preaching and taking positions, start seeing your own perspective as superior and your worthless as an artist, worthless and ludicrous. Why do you write these proclamations? Because you look around and you're 'shocked'? Because you look around and you're 'moved'? People give up too easily and fake their feelings. They want to have feelings right away, and so 'shocked' and 'moved' are the easiest. The stupidest. Except for the rare case, Mr. Zuckerman, shock is always fake. Proclamations. Art has no use for proclamations! Get your lovable shit out of this office, please."

--Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (1998)

"the rattle of everything that led to the future"

The third time he got up to look at the woods, it was almost six o'clock and the gaunt trunks appeared to be raised in a pool of red light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them. The old man stared for some time, as if for a prolonged instant he were caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future and were held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that he had not apprehended before. He saw it, in his hallucination, as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood. After a few minutes this unpleasant vision was broken by the presence of Pitts's pick-up truck grinding to a halt below the window. He returned to his bed and shut his eyes and against the closed lids hellish red trunks rose up in a black wood.

—Flannery O'Connor, "A View of the Woods" (1957; reprinted 1965 in Everything That Rises Must Converge)

the real vocation of a theologian

For Balthasar, challenging misremembering is essential to the contemporary theological task. Challenging Hegelian thought is absolutely crucial, since this discourse represents the most powerful act of misremembering that Christianity encounters in the modern world....Still, important as the enterprise is, it is not on a par with the real vocation of the theologian, which is remembering the live voices of the tradition as they witness to the mystery of the triune God revealed in Christ, and as they attest to the logic of love.

—Cyril O'Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering (2014)