Archive

Quotes

Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

—T.S. Eliot, 1911

The sea serves the pirate as well as the trader.

—Prudentius, c. 405

I never yet could make out why men are so fond of hunting; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields—and all for a hare or a fox or a stag that they could get more easily some other way.

—Anna Sewell, 1877

Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

—Horace Walpole, 1784

The sea is mother-death, and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

—Anne Sexton, 1971

We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.

—Ida M. Tarbell, 1904

Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?

—Aristophanes, 423 BC

Sanity is madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

—George Santayana, 1920

And then, sir, there is this consideration: that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up and, claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

—Samuel Johnson, 1791

Nature contains no one constant form.

—Paul-Henri Dietrich d’Holbach, 1770

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

—Charles Lamb, 1833

Love lasteth as long as the money endureth.

—William Caxton, 1476

I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first.

—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863