{"author":"Mark Helprin","author_id":"Mark+Helprin","total_quotes":60,"quotes":[{"text":"The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn’t matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["virtue"],"id":3935,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"},{"text":"Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You'll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["books","reading","reading-books","reading-habits"],"id":5875,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"},{"text":"As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["believe","inspirational"],"id":13057,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"},{"text":"I see no justice in that plan.'Who said,' lashed out Isaac Penn, 'that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand -- until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.'No choreographer, no architect, engineer, or painter could plan more thoroughly and subtly. Every action and every scene has its purpose. And the less power one has, the closer he is to the great waves that sweep through all things, patiently preparing them for the approach of a future signified not by simple human equity (a child could think of that), but by luminous and surprising connections that we have not imagined, by illustrations terrifying and benevolent -- a golden age that will show not what we wish, but some bare awkward truth upon which rests everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["justice"],"id":20866,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"},{"text":"The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don't have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["time","history","community "],"id":28535,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"},{"text":"Young Bindo Altovini, looking out from time, made a perfect coalition with the mountains, the sky, and the tall redheaded woman who had bent over just slightly to examine a raging battle that was long over. Alessandro imagined that Bindo Altovini was saying, half with longing, half with delight, 'These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds.'In the eyes of Bindo Altoviti, Alessandro saw wisdom and amusement, and he knew why the subjects of paintings and photographs seemed to look from the past as if with clairvoyance. Even brutal and impatient men, when frozen in time, assumed expressions of extraordinary compassion, as if they had reflected the essence of their redemption back into the photograph. In a sense they were still living. ","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["art"],"id":39124,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"},{"text":"Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful.","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["gratefulness","vanity"],"id":49083,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"},{"text":"Reason excludes faith,' Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the rim. 'It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that.","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["faith","reason","religion"],"id":88704,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"},{"text":"Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["emotion","intensity","laughter","loneliness","lonely-people"],"id":97688,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"},{"text":"Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium.","author":"Mark Helprin","tags":["climate-change","freeze","weather","winter"],"id":100331,"author_id":"Mark+Helprin"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":60,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}