Like a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BC
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Quotes
Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906He 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. 1600One thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCIf a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 45 BCNobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
—Jane Austen, 1815In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830Business? Why, it’s very simple; business is other people’s money.
—Alexandre Dumas, 1857If they prescribe a lot of remedies for some sickness or other, it means that the sickness is incurable.
—Anton Chekhov, 1904All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma.
—Gretel Ehrlich, 1994I do love cricket—it’s so very English.
—Sarah Bernhardt, c. 1908