Archive

Quotes

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

—Epictetus, c. 100

I shall embrace my rival—until I suffocate him.

—Jean Racine, 1669

To make laws that man cannot and will not obey serves to bring all law into contempt.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1860

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

—John Ruskin, 1856

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

—Thomas Mann, 1924

To love a woman who scorns you is to lick honey from a thorn.

—Welsh proverb

In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance.

—Phillis Wheatley, 1774

Brains are the only things worth having in this world.

—L. Frank Baum, 1899

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1599

Refrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.

—Czesław Miłosz, 1960

To hold a throne is luck; to bestow it, virtue.

—Seneca the Younger, c. 45

There is no small pleasure in sweet water.

—Ovid, c. 10