It is a luxury to be understood.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831
Archive
Quotes
If you steal, do not steal too much at a time. You may be arrested. Steal cleverly, little by little.
—Mobutu Sese Seko, 1991The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.
—Ira Berkow, 1987Do we want laurels for ourselves most, / Or most that no one else shall have any?
—Amy Lowell, 1922It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1790The fact is certain because it is impossible.
—Tertullian, c. 200All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1890Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.
—Patricia Highsmith, 1960Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
—Harriet Doerr, 1978Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1480Punishment is a sort of medicine.
—Aristotle, c. 340 BCCan we not live without pleasure, who cannot but with pleasure die?
—Tertullian, c. 215The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.
—Aldous Huxley, 1956