Archive

Quotes

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.

—Anaïs Nin, 1935

A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in / A minute to smile and an hour to weep in.

—Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1895

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

—André Gide, 1926

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

—William Hazlitt, 1819

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880

Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.

—Horace Walpole, 1745

No man will take counsel, but every man will take money: therefore money is better than counsel.

—Jonathan Swift, 1702

Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Such then is the human state, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors.

—Voltaire, 1764

One of the important requirements for learning how to cook is that you also learn how to eat.

—Julia Child, 2001

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

—William Shakespeare, 1603