Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.
—Saint Augustine, 397
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Quotes
One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath.
—Pindar, c. 450 BCThe mill will never grind with water that is past.
—Daniel McCallum, 1870We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
—Anna Sewell, 1877That which the sober man keeps in his breast, the drunken man lets out at the lips. Astute people, when they want to ascertain a man’s true character, make him drunk.
—Martin Luther, 1569The fear of war is worse than war itself.
—Seneca, c. 50The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
—Virginia Woolf, 1921At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
—Rose Macaulay, 1925Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.
—William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.
—St. Jerome, 395Fear is a poor guarantor of a long life.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 44I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895