Speak without regard for the consequences, and it is too late for silence when disaster strikes.
—Huan Kuan, 81 BC
Archive
Quotes
We die of comfort and by conflict live.
—May Sarton, 1953Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
—Honoré de Balzac, 1847Good fortune is light as a feather, but nobody knows how to hold it up. Misfortune is heavy as the earth, but nobody knows how to stay out of its way.
—Zhuangzi, c. 300 BCThis is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.
—Horace, c. 35 BCAll people have the common desire to be elevated in honor, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing it.
—Mencius, c. 330 BCOf troubles none is greater than to be robbed of one’s native land.
—Euripides, 431 BCmy mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing
A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, / And say my glory was I had such friends.
—W.B. Yeats, 1937Memory is like the moon, which hath its new, its full, and its wane.
—Margaret Cavendish, 1655The sea yields action to the body, meditation to the mind, the world to the world, all parts thereof to each part, by this art of arts—navigation.
—Samuel Purchas, 1613No lyric poems live long or please many people which are written by drinkers of water.
—Horace, 20 BC