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1 " I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us. "
― Sebastian Barry , The Secret Scripture (McNulty Family)
2 " Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. "
― Charles Kingsley
3 " This was no longer art: it even destroyed the harmony of the portrait itself. They were alive, they were human eyes! It seemed as if they had been cut out of a living man and set there. Here there was not that lofty pleasure which comes over the soul at the sight of an artist's work, however terrible its chosen subject; here there was some morbid, anguished feeling. 'What is it?' the artist asked himself involuntarily. 'It's nature all the same, its living nature––why, then, this strangely unpleasant feeling? Or else the slavish, literal imitation of nature is already a trespass and seems like a loud, discordant cry? "
― Nikolai Gogol , The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
4 " When the Rabbis stated that obedience or disobedience to the commandments depends not on the will of Hashem but on man’s free will, they echoed Jeremiah, who said, “Out of the mouth of the Most High there comes neither the bad nor the good” (Lamentations 3:38). By the bad he meant vice, and by the good he intended virtue, meaning that Hashem does not predetermine any person as bad or good. Since this is so, a person owes it to himself to mourn his sins and transgressions, since he has committed them of his own free will, as Jeremiah says, “For what should a living man mourn? Let every man mourn because of his sins” (Lamentations 3:39). Jeremiah answers his question positively, telling us that the remedy for our disease lies with us. Just as our failings stemmed from our own free will, so do we have the power to repent of our evil deeds. "
― Maimonides , Rambam: Shemonah Perakim, The Eight Chapters; Maimonides' Introduction to Ethics of the Fathers; Perek Chelek; Discourse on the World to Come
5 " Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from... human souls we never saw... And yet these arouse us terrify us teach us comfort us open their hearts to us as brothers. "
