All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the paradoxical nature of cities, where chaos and beauty coexist in complex ways.
Christopher Morley's quote captures the duality of urban life, suggesting that while cities may exhibit chaotic behaviors ('madness'), there is something noble and brave about that fervor. Similarly, the beauty found in cities often comes with an underlying sense of melancholy, highlighting that what appears attractive can simultaneously carry a sense of sadness or harsh reality. This reflects the complexities of human experience in urban environments.
In practice
In a speech about urban development, one might quote Morley to emphasize the complexity of city life.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.
Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.
Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length--and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.
Today, nobody sees, or wishes to see, that in our time the enslavement of the majority of men is based on money taxes, levied on land and otherwise, which are collected by government from the subjects.
Can man, the finite and sinful one, cooperate with God, the Infinite and Holy One? Yes, he can, precisely because God Himself has become man, become body, and here (in the liturgy), again and again, he comes through his body to us who live in the body.
Pride is a vice, which pride itself inclines every man to find in others, and to overlook in himself
The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can't be intimidated. Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why - they've been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don't give a damn.
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