Archive

Quotes

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.

—Anaïs Nin, 1935

One who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

—Ptahhotep, c. 2400 BC

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco pipes of those who diffuse it; it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

—George Eliot, 1876

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

—André Gide, 1897

Those things are better which are perfected by nature than those which are finished by art.

—Cicero, c. 45 BC

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

—Willa Cather, 1918

That sweet bondage which is freedom’s self.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1813

I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.

—Walt Whitman, 1842

Good or ill fortune is very little at our disposal.

—David Hume, 1742

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

—Robert Burton, 1621

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

—Edmund Burke, 1796

Life is no way to treat an animal.

—Kurt Vonnegut, 2005

Peace is a natural effect of trade.

—Montesquieu, 1748