I always think of nature as a great spectacle, somewhat resembling the opera.
—Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686Quotes
A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1732We are to go to law never to revenge, but only to repair.
—Samuel Pepys, 1661All the married heiresses I have known have shipwrecked.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.
—George Moore, 1888The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870We get a deal o’ useless things about us, only because we’ve got the money to spend.
—George Eliot, 1860One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
—E.B. White, 1958A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851‘Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906All art is a revolt against man’s fate.
—André Malraux, 1951The beginning of health lies in knowing the disease.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615