In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
—Voltaire, 1764
Archive
Quotes
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
—André Gide, 1926The twilight is the crack between the worlds.
—Carlos Castaneda, 1968The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.
—Nadine Gordimer, 1971If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well.
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1954It is easy to distinguish between the joking that reflects good breeding and that which is coarse—the one, if aired at an apposite moment of mental relaxation, is becoming in the most serious of men, whereas the other is unworthy of any free person, if the content is indecent or the expression obscene.
—Cicero, c. 44 BCMy stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.
—John Quincy Adams, 1844Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater.
—Anthony Doerr, 2006Thanks be to God: since my leaving drinking of wine, I do find myself much better and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.
—Samuel Pepys, 1662Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
—William Hazlitt, 1819Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the cities.
—Marcus Terentius Varro, c. 70 BCReality is always the foe of famous names.
—Petrarch, 1337All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1890