If I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.
—John Donne, 1623
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Quotes
’Tis the destroyer, or the devil, that scatters plagues about the world.
—Cotton Mather, 1693No law is sufficiently convenient to all.
—Roman proverbFriends are fictions founded on some single momentary experience.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1864It’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, 2011Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.
—William Shakespeare, 1592Of troubles none is greater than to be robbed of one’s native land.
—Euripides, 431 BCThe fox knows lots of tricks, the hedgehog only one—but it’s a winner.
—Archilochus, c. 650 BCIn the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
—Colette, 1944What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855God sells us all things at the price of labor.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500Best is water.
—Pindar, 476 BCWhen poets don’t know what to say and have completely given up on the play, just like a finger, they lift the machine and the spectators are satisfied.
—Antiphanes, c. 350 BC