’Tis a portentous sign / When a man sweats and at the same time shivers.
—Plautus, c. 180 BC
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Quotes
Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889Such then is the human state, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors.
—Voltaire, 1764People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.
—Richard Nixon, 1975The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.
—P.G. Wodehouse, 1929Nature is immovable.
—Euripides, c. 415 BCA tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W.H. Auden, 1946The universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851A woman should never be seen eating or drinking unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands.
—Lord Byron, 1812There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.
—John Ruskin, 1850The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
—B.F. Skinner, 1969