The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
—Wendell Berry, 1983
Archive
Quotes
There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
—Mark Twain, 1876I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
—Marcel Proust, c. 1922At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
—Rose Macaulay, 1925The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.
—Ira Berkow, 1987Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
—John Lennon, 1970Just to fill the hour—that is happiness.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844Many are the wonders of the world, and none so wonderful as man.
—Sophocles, c. 441 BCBest is water.
—Pindar, 476 BCAlongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.
—Jacob Burckhardt, c. 1875