Curse on all laws but those which love has made.
—Alexander Pope, 1717
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Quotes
If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930The king times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end.
—Lord Byron, 1821Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCThe law is established from above but becomes custom below.
—Su Zhe, c. 1100The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—André Breton, 1937Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCNobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
—Jane Austen, 1815One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.
—Ernst Jünger, 1977Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
—Margaret Mitchell, 1936Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.
—Robert Benchley, 1935Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues.
—Larry Kramer, 1992Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live.
—Anatole Broyard, 1989