Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.
—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC
Archive
Quotes
It is a luxury to be understood.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.
—P.G. Wodehouse, 1929I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.
—Walt Whitman, 1842A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
—Jane Austen, 1814If they prescribe a lot of remedies for some sickness or other, it means that the sickness is incurable.
—Anton Chekhov, 1904The boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage.
—Plato, c. 348 BCThe desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
—Laurence Sterne, 1760The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.
—Congolese proverbI order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.
—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
—H.L. Mencken, 1920He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.
—Plautus, c. 200 BC