Archive

Quotes

I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

—Charles Lindbergh, 1948

Being thus arrived in good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stale earth, their proper element.

—William Bradford, 1630

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

—William James, 1902

What man was ever content with one crime?

—Juvenal, c. 125

Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power.

—Thomas Hardy, 1874

The king times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end.

—Lord Byron, 1821

A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.

—Susan Sontag, 1977

The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself.

—Anna Jameson, 1846

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

—Hannah Arendt, 1958

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

The fact is certain because it is impossible.

—Tertullian, c. 200

Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so shall you come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

—D.H. Lawrence, 1908