Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
—Herman Melville, 1849
Archive
Quotes
I have been a stranger here in my own land all my life.
—Sophocles, c. 441 BCHave you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?
—Aristophanes, 423 BCIf there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy.
—Charles Dickens, 1865On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
—Bertrand Russell, 1961One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.
—Phyllis Rose, 1991I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
—Woody Allen, 1971The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774Water is the first principle of everything.
—Thales of Miletus, c. 600 BCI 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, 1793I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of Man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.
—Frantz Fanon, 1961