I used to think that everyone was just being funny. But now I don’t know. I mean, how can you tell?
—Andy Warhol, 1970Quotes
Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390People living deeply have no fear of death.
—Anaïs Nin, 1935The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.
—Galen, c. 175Idolatry is the mother of all games.
—Novatian, c. 255If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.
—Francis Bacon, 1625That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
—Willa Cather, 1918I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
—Elbert Hubbard, 1911More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880