The unknown is the largest need of the intellect.
—Emily Dickinson, 1876
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Quotes
Ah! Freedom is a noble thing!
—John Barbour, 1375All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933No time to marry, no time to settle down, I’m a young woman, and ain’t done runnin’ round.
—Bessie Smith, 1926As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
—Abraham Lincoln, c. 1858The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.
—Basho, c. 1690To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
—Anna Sewell, 1877Good or ill fortune is very little at our disposal.
—David Hume, 1742Nobody, sir, dies willingly.
—Antiphanes, c. 370 BCThe spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.
—François Guizot, 1830We wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.
—Joseph Addison, 1711The young man must store up, the old man must use.
—Seneca the Younger, c. 63