Recreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.
—Thomas Gouge, 1672Quotes
The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.
—W. Russell Brain, 1952The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
—Virginia Woolf, 1921The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.
—Molière, 1670Sex: in America, an obsession; in other parts of the world, a fact.
—Marlene Dietrich, 1962The atavistic urge toward danger persists and its satisfaction is called adventure.
—John Steinbeck, 1941The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.
—André Gide, 1927The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.
—Plato, c. 375 BCMen 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, 1665Necessity knows no law except to conquer.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCThe successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
—Erich Fromm, 1941What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
—Voltaire, 1723Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
—Noël Coward, 1930