What one man can invent another can discover.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1905
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Quotes
A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.
—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.
—Charles Baudelaire, 1897Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.
—Jacob Burckhardt, c. 1875We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887One may like the love and despise the lover.
—George Farquhar, 1706People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing’s as eternal as the dishes.
—Margaret Mahy, 1985I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.
—Henry James, 1884The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—André Breton, 1937Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
—Honoré de Balzac, 1847All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849The envious die not once, but as often as the envied win applause.
—Baltasar Gracián, 1647