Miguel Ángel F.

“We see here,” said I, “how much in art depends on a great personality, which indeed was common enough in earlier ages.” “Certainly,” said Goethe, “personality is everything in art and poetry; nevertheless, there are many weak personages among the modern critics who do not admit this, but look upon a great personality in a work of poetry or art merely as a kind of trifling appendage. However, to feel and respect a great personality you must be something of one yourself. All those who denied the sublime to Euripides were either poor wretches incapable of comprehending such sublimity, or shameless charlatans, who, by their presumption, wished to make more of themselves, and really did make more of themselves than they were.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann

Saint Vincent de Paul was born on April 24, 1581 He founded the Daughters of Charity: the first non-cloistered women's religious order in history Nuns who ran hospitals, orphanages, and schools across Europe They built the modern social welfare system we now know Vatican II ruined this order

24 avril 1856, naissance de Philippe Pétain, Maréchal de France. « Deux fois, en effet, Philippe Pétain a surgi de notre Histoire. Les deux fois, ce fut lorsque la France était à l'extrême bord de la catastrophe, de sorte que lui seul, manifestement, était capable de faire prévaloir le salut. Une première fois durant la Grande Guerre, une double fois si l'on veut, au moment où le front de Verdun allait craquer, puis lorsque les mutineries étaient sur le point de tourner à la débandade. La seconde fois en 1940, quasiment à l'issue de la débâcle, et lorsque la nature même de la France risquait d'être anéantie. » André Figueras

Lots of people don't know this but you can actually fix your attention span just by reading one long, phenomenal book again. I recommend The Brothers Karamazov.

Paul Schrader on why Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity" (1944) is an influential Film-Noir: "When the movies of the Forties turned to the American 'tough' moral understrata, the hardboiled school was waiting with preset conventions of heroes, minor characters, plots, dialogue and themes. Like the German expatriates, the hardboiled writers had a style made to order for film noir; and, in turn, they influenced noir screenwriting as much as the Germans influenced noir Cinematography. The most hard-boiled of Hollywood's writers was Raymond Chandler himself, whose script of 'Double Indemnity' (1944) (from a James M. Cain story) was the best written and most characteristically noir of the period. 'Double Indemnity' was the first film which played film noir for what it essentially was: small-time, unredeemed , unheroic; it made a break from the romantic noir cinema of 'Mildred Pierce' (1945) and 'The Big Sleep' (1946). (...) The Wilder/Chandler 'Double Indemnity' provided a bridge to the post-war phase of film noir. The unflinching noir vision of 'Double Indemnity' came as a shock in 1944, and the film was almost blocked by the combined efforts of Paramount, the Hays Office and star Fred McMurray. Three years later, however, Double Indemnitys were dropping off the studio assembly lines." ('Notes of Film Noir', Paul Schrader, 1972) P.S: On this day, 82 years ago, 'Double Indemnity' (1944) was released in Brazil.

'I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak, and write, . . . everything I love has come to me through English.' W. B. Yeats

Tell an Argentine you eat dinner at 6 pm and they’ll act like you murdered someone.

Victor Hugo’s Hauteville House

'Shakespeare, who scarcely relies upon philosophy, is more central to Western culture than are Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein.' 'There is no cognitive originality in the whole history of philosophy comparable to Shakespeare's, and it is both ironic and fascinating to overhear Wittgenstein puzzling out whether there is an authentic difference between the Shakespearean representation of thinking and thinking itself.' Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." — G.K. Chesterton