Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
—Mark Twain, c. 1900
Archive
Quotes
There is no greater disaster than not to know contentment.
—Laozi, c. 550 BCThere is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.
—Rumi, c. 1250I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God.
—Madonna, c. 1985Once you hear the details of a victory it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1951It is more blessed to give than to receive.
—Acts of the Apostles, c. 80Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
—Carl Sandburg, 1936What one man can invent another can discover.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1905He that commands the sea is at great liberty and may take as much and as little of the war as he will.
—Francis Bacon, c. 1600A monument is money wasted. My memory will live on if my life has deserved it.
—Pliny the Younger, c. 109In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of wisdom and should not be done.
—Confucius, c. 500 BCEnemies to me are the sauce piquant to my dish of life.
—Elsa Maxwell, 1955It is easy to distinguish between the joking that reflects good breeding and that which is coarse—the one, if aired at an apposite moment of mental relaxation, is becoming in the most serious of men, whereas the other is unworthy of any free person, if the content is indecent or the expression obscene.
—Cicero, c. 44 BC