Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so shall you come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838
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Quotes
How can we bear misfortune most easily? If we see our enemies faring worse.
—Thales of Miletus, c. 585 BCThe self is like an infant: given free rein, it craves to suckle.
—al-Busiri, c. 1250Power is so apt to be insolent, and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good terms.
—George Savile, c. 1690Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.
—Bharati Mukherjee, 1999Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater.
—Anthony Doerr, 2006The sea hath no king but God alone.
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.
—Saint Augustine, c. 387The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
—P.D. James, 1992The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
—John Updike, 1963