When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”
—Pausanias, c. 450 BC
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Quotes
Alas! We are ridiculous animals.
—Horace Walpole, 1777A merchant may, perhaps, be a man of an enlarged mind, but there is nothing in trade connected with an enlarged mind.
—Samuel Johnson, 1773Childhood has no forebodings—but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
—George Eliot, 1860A passion for horses, players, and gladiators seems to be the epidemic folly of the times. The child receives it in his mother’s womb; he brings it with him into the world, and in a mind so possessed, what room for science, or any generous purpose?
—Tacitus, c. 100To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat.
—Milan Kundera, 1978Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
—Herman Melville, 1851It is very foolish to attack one’s enemy openly if one can injure him in secret.
—Giambattista Giraldi, 1543Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
—Frank Zappa, c. 1975Unfortunately, humanitarianism has been the mark of an inhuman time.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1932The young man must store up, the old man must use.
—Seneca the Younger, c. 63A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1732Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.
—Rachel Carson, 1962