Archive

Quotes

Is there no way out of the mind?

—Sylvia Plath, 1962

Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, “I would stay here and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”

—Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, 1989

The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.

—Ira Berkow, 1987

Fate leads the willing and drags along those who hang back.

—Cleanthes, c. 250 BC

Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling.

—Philip Sidney, 1582

I curse the night, yet doth from day me hide.

—William Drummond, 1616

Dance tunes are always right.

—Dylan Thomas, 1936

A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

—Jane Austen, 1815

All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

—Samuel Butler, c. 1890

To safeguard one’s health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome illness indeed.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1678

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981

To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.

—Albert Camus, 1951

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

—George Washington, 1796