The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888
Archive
Quotes
Someone will remember us
I say
even in another time.
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
—John Berger, 1972Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995When they shout “Long live progress,” always ask, “Progress of what?”
—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943It would be madness, and inconsistency, to suppose that things which have never yet been performed can be performed without employing some hitherto untried means.
—Francis Bacon, 1620Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.
—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BCMusic is our myth of the inner life.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1942If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.
—Congolese proverbIf I see something sagging, dragging, or bagging, I’m going to go have the stuff tucked or plucked.
—Dolly Parton, 2003Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
—George Washington, 1796