The self is like an infant: given free rein, it craves to suckle.
—al-Busiri, c. 1250Quotes
The earth is beautiful and bright and kindly, but that is not all. The earth is also terrible and dark and cruel.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1970People who’ve drunk neat wine don’t care a damn.
—Hipponax, c. 550 BCEducate people without religion and you make them but clever devils.
—Arthur Wellesley, c. 1830Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
—Jean Baudrillard, c. 1987It costs a lot of money to be rich.
—Peter Boyle, 2002God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.
—Martin LutherWere I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849A monument is money wasted. My memory will live on if my life has deserved it.
—Pliny the Younger, c. 109There will always be a lost dog somewhere that will prevent me from being happy.
—Jean Anouilh, 1934The pleasure we hold in esteem for the course of our lives ought to have a greater share of our time dedicated to it; we should refuse no occasion nor omit any opportunity of drinking, and always have it in our minds.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.
—Karl Marx, 1847Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958