Archive

Quotes

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

Don’t hit a man at all if you can avoid it, but if you have to hit him, knock him out.

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1916

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1850

Show me someone who never gossips, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t interested in people.

—Barbara Walters, 1975

A 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. 100

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

—William Empson, 1928

I 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, 1793

He knows the water best who has waded through it.

—Danish proverb

A false report rides post.

—English proverb

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1600

The world began without man, and it will end without him.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955