Archive

Quotes

When arms speak, the laws are silent.

—Cicero, 52 BC

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.

—Matsuo Basho, c. 1685

Strength of mind is exercise, not rest.

—Alexander Pope, 1733

Of troubles none is greater than to be robbed of one’s native land.

—Euripides, 431 BC

The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.

—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

—William Empson, 1928

A merchant shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong.

—Ecclesiasticus, c. 180 BC

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

—Pablo Neruda, 1924

Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

—Xenocrates, c. 350 BC

The body says what words cannot.

—Martha Graham, 1985

The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

—James Joyce, 1922