Archive

Quotes

What hath night to do with sleep?

—John Milton, 1637

Rivalry adds so much to the charms of one’s conquests.

—Louisa May Alcott, 1866

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

—George Santayana, 1905

Be courteous to all but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.

—George Washington, 1783

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

—Theodor Adorno, 1951

Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.

—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.

—Diane Arbus, c. 1950

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.

—John Ruskin, 1850

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

—Thomas Hobbes, 1679

A first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys.

—Saul Bellow, 1989

All men recognize the right of revolution, that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1849

Diseases, at least many of them, are like human beings. They are born, they flourish, and they die.

—David Riesman, 1937

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

—Mark Twain, 1893