Archive

Quotes

We should always presume the disease to be curable until its own nature proves it otherwise.

—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845

Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.

—Walter Scott, 1823

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.

—William Blake, 1793

In life our absent friend is far away: / But death may bring our friend exceeding near.

—Christina Rossetti, 1881

Punishment is a sort of medicine.

—Aristotle, c. 340 BC

I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.

—Virginia Woolf, 1931

It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well, and justly, and impossible to live wisely, well, and justly without living pleasurably.

—Epicurus, c. 300 BC

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

—Xenocrates, c. 350 BC

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

—André Breton, 1937

Man is no man, but a wolf, to a stranger.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

—Henry George, 1879

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.

—Elias Canetti, 1960