The universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962
Archive
Quotes
I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
—James Baldwin, 1961They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
—Francis Bacon, 1605The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1903Power is so apt to be insolent, and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good terms.
—George Savile, c. 1690If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910All revolutions devour their own children.
—Ernst Röhm, 1933Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
It seems to me that we all look at nature too much and live with her too little.
—Oscar Wilde, 1897We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction.
—Aesop, c. 600 BCWe must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
—Aldous Huxley, 1925