Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906
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Quotes
The envious die not once, but as often as the envied win applause.
—Baltasar Gracián, 1647To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872A fool and water will go the way they are diverted.
—Ethiopian proverbWhen you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
—Chinese proverbLaw makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.
—William Empson, 1928Till taught by pain, / Men really know not what good water’s worth.
—Lord Byron, 1819Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.
—Italo Calvino, 1957Every ass thinks himself worthy to stand with the king’s horses.
—Gnomologia, 1732In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
—Colette, 1944One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
—Elbert Hubbard, 1911A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag, 1977The mind is not, I know, a highway but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.
—Margaret Fuller, 1844