Do you suppose that will change the sense of the morals, the fact that we can’t use morals as a means of judging the city because we couldn’t stand it? And that we’re changing our whole moral system to suit the fact that we’re living in a ridiculous way?
—Philip Johnson, 1965
Archive
Quotes
In meeting again after a separation, acquaintances ask after our outward life, friends after our inner life.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880The earth is beautiful and bright and kindly, but that is not all. The earth is also terrible and dark and cruel.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1970Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?
—Brooks Atkinson, 1940The drunken man is a living corpse.
—St. John Chrysostom, c. 390In every man is a wild beast; most of them don’t know how to hold it back, and the majority give it full rein when they are not restrained by terror of law.
—Frederick the Great, 1759Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCMemory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.
—Barbara Kingsolver, 1990Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821Fear is a poor guarantor of a long life.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 44I prefer liberty with unquiet to slavery with quiet.
—Sallust, c. 35 BCAfter each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams.
—E.M. Cioran, 1949The mind is not, I know, a highway but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.
—Margaret Fuller, 1844