A Quote by Daniel Rigby

For some reason, I got really obsessed with Samuel Pepys and his diaries when I read them, and with that period. I was probably a man with a wig and a frock coat in a past life!
Margaret Cavendish was one of the people who came up in the course. That was when I started thinking about her as a character for a book, but my idea was for a totally different book. It had all these characters in it; Samuel Pepys was one of the main characters. He famously wrote these extensive diaries through the period that are really funny and sort of saucy, actually.
My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma.
I had, in college, a professor called Walter Jackson Bate, and he taught a course called The Age of Johnson. It's about Samuel Johnson and his period, 18th-century British writing. So we all got to endure Samuel Johnson, and Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is now my favorite book. I read it all the time I can; it's great for going to sleep.
[F]or academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.
When a fellow's got what he set out for in this world, he should go off into the woods for a few weeks now and then to make sure that he's still a man, and not a plug-hat and a frock-coat and a wad of bills.
The Brigadier had no wish to shake hands with the improbable young man in the ridiculous frock-coat.
Back in the day, when a man in a wig had to 'lip sync for their life,' they relied on a wig reveal, rose petals or picking up their opponent and twirling them around.
Avisitor from Mars contemplating a man in a frock coat and top hat and a woman in a crinoline might well have supposed that they belonged to different species.
To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.
I am really, truly a hopeless romantic, myself, and I am also obsessed with past lives, knowing someone from a past life and knowing that right away, when you meet them. I really believe in inexplicable connections with people, and the way your subconscious enters your dreams. Those are themes in life that I'm really fascinated in.
Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.
I laugh about it all the time, but, for whatever reason, a lot of people think that I wear a wig. I get emails and tweets about people commenting on my hair being a wig. It's one of the strangest but most entertaining things I've read about myself online.
Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair oboots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet? If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model.
I don't think I've ever googled myself. But I do read some things... I mean, if I know that I was with an interviewer and I kind of figure that he or she got something bad or something good from the interview, then I'll read the piece when it comes out. But other than that, I'd have to have a reason to read it - and, usually, I don't have a reason.
The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.
A man who has broken with his past feels a different man. He will not feel it a shame to confess his past wrongs, for the simple reason that these wrongs do not touch him at all.
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