Archive

Quotes

There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.

—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, 1989

Animals are good to think with.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.

—John F. Kennedy, 1960

’Tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1600

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.

—Pablo Picasso, 1964

Life is the art of being well deceived.

—William Hazlitt, c. 1817

The boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage. 

—Plato, c. 348 BC

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857

To outwit an enemy is not only just and glorious but profitable and sweet.

—Plutarch, c. 100

If anything affects your eye, you hasten to have it removed; if anything affects your mind, you postpone the cure for a year.

—Horace, 20 BC

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

—Anatole France, 1881

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773