One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
—Virginia Woolf, 1929
Archive
Quotes
There are many civil questions that arise between individuals in which it is not so important the controversy be settled one way or another as that it be settled.
—William Howard Taft, 1921Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body, to try the manners of different nations, to hear the chimes at midnight.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1758Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
—W.H. Auden, 1957I said of laughter, “It is mad,” and of pleasure, “What use is it?”
—Book of Ecclesiastes, 225 BCWorry over what has not occurred is a serious malady.
—Solomon ibn Gabirol, 1050There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
—Rebecca West, 1912If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
—Raymond Chandler, 1945A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726I do desire we may be better strangers.
—William Shakespeare, 1600It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515