There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.
—John Locke, 1689
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Quotes
A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.
—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrities when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves.
—Sarah Bernhardt, 1904Every gift has a personality—that of its giver.
—Nuruddin Farah, 1992In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.
—Veronica Wedgwood, 1946Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
—André Gide, 1926The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
—Virginia Woolf, 1921A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.
—David Sedaris, 1997We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887