How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

And custom the spreading laurel tree.

--W. B. Yeats, “A Prayer For My Daughter”

"Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. . . . It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic."  --G. K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying

“I think that little by little I'll be able to solve my problems and survive.”  --Frida Kahlo 

...[M]usic itself is a ghost. You can’t touch it or see it but you can feel it and you can measure those feelings in vibrations and these vibrations continue after the music stops, echoing and reverberating, reminding you: remember me."  --Denise S Robbins, "noticements: My belly button mole is a ghost named Boris," Mar 22, 2026  

https://denisesrobbins.substack.com/p/my-belly-button-mole-is-a-ghost-named

“They are deceiv’d that acquiesce to things which they have heard, and believe not what they have seen.”  --Thomas Bartholin, The Anatomical History (1653)

“About five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.”  --Peter Galison

"Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think."  --Werner Heisenberg