Archive

Quotes

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

—Willa Cather, 1918

In meeting again after a separation, acquaintances ask after our outward life, friends after our inner life.

—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.

—Plato, c. 375 BC

Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It’s the glory of the sea that has turned my head.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883

I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

Curse on all laws but those which love has made.

—Alexander Pope, 1717

One’s friends are divided into two classes, those one knows because one must and those one knows because one mustn’t.

—Sybil Taylor, 1922

Nature is immovable.

—Euripides, c. 415 BC

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

—Mark Twain, 1897

Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

—James Thurber, 1955

There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.

—Aeschylus, c. 458 BC