Archive

Quotes

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.

—B.F. Skinner, 1969

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

—The Book of Changes, c. 350 BC

God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.

—Maxim Gorky, 1913

One thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

All people have the common desire to be elevated in honor, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing it.

—Mencius, c. 330 BC

Whatsoever is, is in God.

—Benedict de Spinoza, 1677

Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?

—Aristophanes, 423 BC

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

—Søren Kierkegaard, 1850

The men of today are born to criticize; of Achilles they see only the heel.

—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

—Horace, c. 35 BC

Life is the art of being well deceived.

—William Hazlitt, c. 1817

The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.

—Molière, 1670

It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.

—Aldous Huxley, 1925