People, it seems, have lives on Fridays. So blogging here will be light today (compared to, say, yesterday and the day before).

Some interesting quotes from Book IV of the younger Pliny's letters:

• “A torch will stay lit if it is kept moving but, if once the spark is lost, it is difficult to revive it again; similarly, continuity keeps up a speaker's fire and an audience's attention, but both weaken once the tension is relaxed and broken.”
• “Affection usually runs ahead with its demands, and besides, in a country where opportunities have to be seized for anything to be done, if things wait for their due season they ripen not in time, but too late; and finally, anticipation to of the object desired brings its own pleasure.”
• “[W]e must work at our profession and not make anyone else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.”
• “The most serious diseases of the body, personal or politic, are those which spread from the head.”