Archive

Quotes

Seafarers go to sleep in the evening not knowing whether they will find themselves at the bottom of the sea the next morning.

—Jean de Joinville, c. 1305

Don’t hit a man at all if you can avoid it, but if you have to hit him, knock him out.

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1916

A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1732

I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.

—John Ruskin, 1860

Anything one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human being that is being, listening, and hearing is never repetition.

—Gertrude Stein, 1935

To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.

—George Eliot, 1872

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

—Gore Vidal, 1981

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.

—Henry Adams, 1907

All law is of necessity defective in the beginning.

—Han Yu, c. 800

It would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading.

—Virginia Woolf, 1924

The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.

—Nell Scovell, 1991

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

—Salvador Dalí, 1953

Exchange is no robbery.

—German proverb