Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784
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Quotes
Don’t hit a man at all if you can avoid it, but if you have to hit him, knock him out.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1916What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1850Show me someone who never gossips, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t interested in people.
—Barbara Walters, 1975A passion for horses, players, and gladiators seems to be the epidemic folly of the times. The child receives it in his mother’s womb; he brings it with him into the world, and in a mind so possessed, what room for science, or any generous purpose?
—Tacitus, c. 100The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.
—William Empson, 1928I had rather be in a state of misery and envied for my supposed happiness than in a state of happiness and pitied for my supposed misery.
—Elizabeth Inchbald, 1793He knows the water best who has waded through it.
—Danish proverbA false report rides post.
—English proverbMen are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1600The world began without man, and it will end without him.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955