What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
—William Law, 1728
Archive
Quotes
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
—Anaïs Nin, 1939Idolatry is the mother of all games.
—Novatian, c. 255Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.
—Pablo Picasso, 1929Shamelessness is the shame of being without shame.
—Mencius, c. 290 BCAttend to earth,
for it is to earth that kings are truly wedded.
Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any program our fear has sketched out.
—George Eliot, 1860Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and through rebellion.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1967The law is far, the fist is near.
—Korean proverbUsually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveler just returned from abroad.
—Jonathan Swift, c. 1730One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.
—William Faulkner, 1958In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.
—Novalis, c. 1798