Archive

Quotes

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

—Hermann Hesse, 1950

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

—Roald Dahl, 1984

A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.

—Stendhal, 1822

The men of today are born to criticize; of Achilles they see only the heel.

—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880

As the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.

—Chinua Achebe, 1958

I came upon no wine, / So wonderful as thirst.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1923

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for a while their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

—Maya Angelou, 2011

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

—Willa Cather, 1918

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves very little trace in history.

—Fernand Braudel, 1979

Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches?

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1862

Whenever in history equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.

—Mary McCarthy, 1971