It is permitted to learn even from an enemy.
—Ovid, c. 8
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Quotes
Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
—Martin Heidegger, 1949The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue.
—Margot Asquith, 1922It is a luxury to be understood.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000Good or ill fortune is very little at our disposal.
—David Hume, 1742Your body is the church where nature asks to be reverenced.
—Marquis de Sade, 1797The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest.
—Adam Smith, 1776The mind is led on, step by step, to defeat its own logic.
—Dai Vernon, 1994He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1786We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
—Anna Sewell, 1877