Archive

Quotes

A maid that laughs is half taken.

—John Ray, 1670

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well.

—Martin Luther King Jr., 1954

If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.

—Reggie Jackson, 1976

A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

—Ralph Nader, 2000

Each night’s new terror drives away the terror of the night before.

—Sophocles, c. 450 BC

It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.

—Oliver Cromwell, 1658

Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.

—Thomas Hughes, 1857

I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough.

—R.D. Laing, 1967

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

—Basho, c. 1690

Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.

—Derek Walcott, 1986

One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

—George Santayana, c. 1914