Archive

Quotes

Man punishes the action, but God the intention.

—Thomas Fuller, 1732

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

—Book of Genesis, c. 800 BC

The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.

—Juvenal, c. 125

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

—W.H. Auden, 1947

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

—Jean Genet, 1949

Water is the first principle of everything.

—Thales of Miletus, c. 600 BC

Seafarers go to sleep in the evening not knowing whether they will find themselves at the bottom of the sea the next morning.

—Jean de Joinville, c. 1305

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

—Samuel Johnson, 1750

Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations.

—Thomas Jefferson

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

—James Thurber, 1955

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971

Hoping for new friendship from old enemies is / Like expecting to find a rose in a furnace.

—Muhammad Baqir Najm-i Sani, 1612

The brightest light burns the quickest.

—Olive Beatrice Muir, 1900