Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905
Archive
Quotes
Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851We and the dead ride quick at night.
—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
—Havelock Ellis, 1921It is remarkable that only small birds properly sing.
—Charles Darwin, 1871Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.
—Veronica Wedgwood, 1946The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
—Gaston Bachelard, 1960I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860Happiness (as the mathematicians might say) lies on a curve, and we approach it only by asymptote.
—Christopher Morley, 1919A win always seems shallow: it is the loss that is so profound and suggests nasty infinities.
—E.M. Forster, 1919When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
—Desmond Tutu, 1984Water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element.
—Christopher Hitchens, 2008