Archive

Quotes

What man was ever content with one crime?

—Juvenal, c. 125

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

—Persius, c. 60

I’ve dreamed enough to have a drink.

—François Rabelais, 1546

Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390

The sea receives us in a proper way only when we are without clothes.

—Pliny the Elder, 77

Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

—Samuel Johnson, 1780

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

People who’ve drunk neat wine don’t care a damn.

—Hipponax, c. 550 BC

Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.

—Hannah Arendt, 1978

Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.

—Saint Augustine, c. 387

Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.

—Ulysses S. Grant, 1877

I cannot live without books, but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1815