I hate the sight of monkeys; they remind me so of poor relations.
—Henry Luttrell, 1820
Archive
Quotes
Happiness (as the mathematicians might say) lies on a curve, and we approach it only by asymptote.
—Christopher Morley, 1919Most men employ the first years of their life in making the last miserable.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.
—Moses Mendelssohn, 1783An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die.
—George Jackson, 1971Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.
—John Updike, 1989There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1898What will not attract a man’s stare at sea?—a gull, a turtle, a flying fish!
—Richard Burton, 1883There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866The first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect especially those who seem sincere to him.
—Umberto Eco, 1980The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
—Agnes Repplier, 1929The elephant, although a gross beast, is yet the most decent and most sensible of any other upon earth. Although he never changes his female, and hath so tender a love for her whom he hath chosen, yet he never couples with her but at the end of every three years, and then only for the space of five days.
—St. Francis de Sales, 1609We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969