Finally, I’ve finished Anna Karenina.  It’s only taken months, what with 800 pages and 15 minute bursts of reading.  Is it because I’m getting older that my attention span is shot, or can I blame the internet?  I’m going to discuss the book again shortly, but for now, the famous opening line:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

And because I love opening lines as much as titles, here’s the brilliant opening of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

Supposing truth to be a woman — what?  is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women?  that the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have hitherto been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench?

And this from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, via my friend Rob M.  As fresh as the day it was uttered over 25 centuries ago:

The soul is dyed the colour of its thoughts.
Think only on those things that are in line with your
principles and can bear the light of day.
The content of your character is your choice.
Day by day, what you do is who you become. 

Image: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)