The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.
—Heinrich Heine, 1827
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Quotes
They exchange their home and sweet thresholds for exile, and seek under another sun another home.
—Virgil, c. 30 BCExchange is no robbery.
—German proverbA broken friendship may be soldered but will never be sound.
—Thomas Fuller, 1732Laughter always arises from a gaiety of disposition, absolutely incompatible with contempt and indignation.
—Voltaire, 1736There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
—Mark Twain, 1876I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.
—Leonard Cohen, 1970Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
—Frank Zappa, 1989I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
—Galileo Galilei, 1615Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1852A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
—Aldous Huxley, 1934This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash about civilization.
—Tony Blair, 2006The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—André Breton, 1937