Archive

Quotes

I’ve been bathing in the poem / Of star-infused and milky sea / Devouring the azure greens.

—Arthur Rimbaud, 1871

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

—Agnes Repplier, 1916

Just to fill the hour—that is happiness.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

I cannot live without books, but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1815

You can put wings on a pig, but you don’t make it an eagle.

—Bill Clinton, 1996

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500

Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers, and springs and believes it civilization.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1911

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.

—Leonard Cohen, 1970

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.

—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955

There is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943

Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

—Pericles, c. 431 BC

I would delight in music, but the music is discordant.

—Xie Lingyun, c. 425

What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.

—Erasmus, 1515