# April 15

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!
May Sarton
(Redirected from 15 April)
Quotes of the day from previous years:
2004
The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr. ~ Will Rogers (US income tax filing deadline, April 15)
2005
Here forms, here colours, here the character of every part of the universe are concentrated to a point; and that point is so marvellous a thing ... Oh! marvellous, O stupendous Necessity — by thy laws thou dost compel every effect to be the direct result of its cause, by the shortest path. These are miracles... ~ Leonardo da Vinci (born 15 April 1452)
2006
Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena. ~ Leonhard Euler (born 15 April 1707)
2007
We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. ~ Henry James
2008
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative — much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius — it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. ~ Henry James
2009

## Suggestions

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it. ~ Henry James (born April 15, 1843)

If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things. ~ Henry James

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone. ~ Henry James

We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar. ~ Henry James

Perversely adorable always — and I scarce know why — the late afternoon light in deserted haunts of study; with the secret of supreme dignity lurking, above all, in high, dusky, wainscoted chambers where the sound of one's footfall lingers, to one's pleasure, like a caress, and where portraits of the appurtenant worthies, the heroes and patrons, grow vague in the twilight. It is a tribute to the forces of idealism lurking again and again, over the country, in the amenity of the general Collegiate appearance, that the last thing these conditions overtly suggest, or seem to accept as their imputed virtue, is this precipitation of the young intelligence into the mere vociferous market. ~ Henry James

$e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0. \,\!$

Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth. ~ Benjamin Peirce on the equation known as Euler's identity (Leonhard Euler born 15 April 1707)

• 3 Kalki 00:45, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
• 1 Zarbon 23:49, 22 April 2008 (UTC)