Archive

Quotes

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

—Robert Burton, 1621

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

—Upton Sinclair, 1935

There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

—John Locke, 1689

The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and, looking at each other with grief and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.

—Blaise Pascal, 1669

The human mind is an evolutionary product, just like the human body.

—Tetsuro Matsuzawa, 2010

Charity is murder and you know it.

—Dorothy Parker, 1956

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880

Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.

—Zadie Smith, 2000

It was lonesome, the leaving.

—Wetatonmi, c. 1877

Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.

—Samuel Johnson, 1771

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

—Jean Genet, 1949