Archive

Quotes

My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

—Timothy Leary, 1966

If there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.

—Thomas Paine, 1778

I would delight in music, but the music is discordant.

—Xie Lingyun, c. 425

Can we not live without pleasure, who cannot but with pleasure die?

—Tertullian, c. 215

From a man’s face, I can read his character. If I can see him walk, I know his thoughts.

—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 60

The only function of a school is to make self-education easier.

—Isaac Asimov, 1974

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

—Aldous Huxley, 1934

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939

The friend of all humanity is no friend to me.

—Molière, 1666

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

—George Santayana, c. 1905

Health care delivery is one of the tragedies still in America.

—Jewel Plummer Cobb, 1989

The sea is mother-death, and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

—Anne Sexton, 1971