Archive

Quotes

I imagined it was more difficult to die. 

—Louis XIV, 1715

If fame is only to come after death, I am in no hurry for it.

—Martial, c. 86

There is no small pleasure in sweet water.

—Ovid, c. 10

To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

—William Hazlitt, 1823

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

—Simone Weil, 1947

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.

—The Dhammapada, c. 400 BC

Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

—Henry George, 1879

There is no art without Eros. 

—Max Frisch, 1983

The United States has virtually set up an empire on impounded and redistributed water.

—Charles P. Berkey, 1946

To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864

In the country gossip is a pastime; in the city it is a warfare.

—W.M.L. Jay, 1870

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

—Erich Fromm, 1941

Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.

—Jonathan Swift, 1738