Quotes

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!

—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1843

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

—Charles Darwin, 1859

Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth. Suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.

—Julie Burchill, 1986

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880

Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.

—Patricia Highsmith, 1960

Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.

—Hesiod, c. 700 BC

With the dead there is no rivalry.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1839

Other nations use “force”; we Britons alone use “might.”

—Evelyn Waugh, 1938

In the society of men, the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

—R.D. Laing, 1967

To hold a throne is luck; to bestow it, virtue.

—Seneca the Younger, c. 45

Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.

—Charles Baudelaire, 1897

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

—Richard Feynman, 1986

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