Archive

Quotes

Of my friends, I am the only one I have left.

—Terence, 161 BC

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

—Albert Camus, c. 1940

I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?

—Andy Warhol, 1963

Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.

—Horace, c. 20 BC

In settling an island, the first building erected by a Spaniard will be a church, by a Frenchman a fort, by a Dutchman a warehouse, and by an Englishman an alehouse.

—Francis Grose, 1787

Strength of mind is exercise, not rest.

—Alexander Pope, 1733

Enemies to me are the sauce piquant to my dish of life.

—Elsa Maxwell, 1955

Other nations use “force”; we Britons alone use “might.”

—Evelyn Waugh, 1938

Animals are good to think with.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

—Gaston Bachelard, 1960

We 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, 1711

If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.

—Congolese proverb

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

—Maxine Hong Kingston, 1976