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Quotes

Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

—George Santayana, c. 1905

The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886

New things are always ugly.

—Willa Cather, 1921

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

It was lonesome, the leaving.

—Wetatonmi, c. 1877

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

—William Blake, c. 1790

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

—Plato, c. 348 BC

If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

—Kurt Vonnegut, 1988

That which the sober man keeps in his breast, the drunken man lets out at the lips. Astute people, when they want to ascertain a man’s true character, make him drunk.

—Martin Luther, 1569

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.

—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977

Time will reveal everything. It is a babbler and speaks even when not asked.

—Euripides, c. 425 BC

He laughs best who laughs last.

—French proverb