The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972
Archive
Quotes
He who travels by sea is nothing but a worm on a piece of wood, a trifle in the midst of a powerful creation. The waters play about with him at will, and no one but God can help him.
—Muhammad as-Saffar, 1846I think we are inexterminable, like flies and bedbugs.
—Robert Frost, 1959They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.
—Martin Luther, c. 1530I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.
—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900I look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive.
—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BCThe human working stock is of interest only insofar as it is profitable.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1970The life of a sailor is very unhealthy.
—Francis Galton, 1883I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.
—Xenocrates, c. 350 BCWe must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.
—Lucretius, c. 57 BCIn the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897Cooking is the most massive rush. It’s like having the most amazing hard-on, with Viagra sprinkled on top of it, and it’s still there twelve hours later.
—Gordon Ramsey, 2003