It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.
—Aldous Huxley, 1925
Archive
Quotes
The life of spies is to know, not be known.
—George Herbert, c. 1621Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things—but each according to its nature—and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1821We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850The righteous know the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 500 BCThere is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
—Woody Allen, 1971When night in her rusty dungeon has imprisoned our eyesight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keeps his audit in our sin-guilty consciences.
—Thomas Nashe, 1594Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.
—Zadie Smith, 2000An unjust law is no law at all.
—Saint Augustine, 395Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings.
—Anna Quindlen, 2012It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.
—Marguerite Duras, 1987Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906