The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1776
Archive
Quotes
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
—Cyril Connolly, 1944The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.
—Basho, c. 1690There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
—Mark Twain, 1876I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.
—Federico Fellini, c. 1950There is nothing sillier than a silly laugh.
—Catullus, c. 60 BCDarkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power.
—Thomas Hardy, 1874The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
—William Blake, 1793Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCSpeak without regard for the consequences, and it is too late for silence when disaster strikes.
—Huan Kuan, 81 BCTime’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.
—James Joyce, 1922Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.
—Germaine Greer, 1970The universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962