Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
Archive
Quotes
Repetition is the mother of education.
—Jean Paul, 1807No man ever distinguished himself who could not bear to be laughed at.
—Maria Edgeworth, 1809It is far, far better and much safer to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
—Jean Genet, 1986The legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835Dance tunes are always right.
—Dylan Thomas, 1936Is it only the mouth and belly which are injured by hunger and thirst? Men’s minds are also injured by them.
—Mencius, 300 BCLabor is no disgrace.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCNo man has any natural authority over his fellow man.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762The various modes of religion which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.
—Edward Gibbon, 1776