Archive

Quotes

Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.

—Lucretius, c. 57 BC

If the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet.

—Charles M. Allen, 1967

Nature never breaks her own laws.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500

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

—Hipponax, c. 550 BC

“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

—Marshall McLuhan, 1964

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880

One religion is as true as another.

—Robert Burton, 1621

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”

—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911

It is a luxury to be understood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831

Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819

The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

—Euripides, c. 415 BC

God is our father, but even more is God our mother.

—Pope John Paul I, 1978

The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

—Lester Bangs, 1971