Reality is always the foe of famous names.
—Petrarch, 1337
Archive
Quotes
A woman should never be seen eating or drinking unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands.
—Lord Byron, 1812The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.
—Aldous Huxley, 1956My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
—Allen Ginsberg, 1981The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851The law looks at no one’s face.
—Gabriel Okara, 1964I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.
—Antonio Porchia, 1943The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851Whatsoever is, is in God.
—Benedict de Spinoza, 1677You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
—Joseph Conrad, 1900The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
—Erich Fromm, 1941The peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms.
—Frantz Fanon, 1961No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
—Bertrand Russell, 1961