Strength of mind is exercise, not rest.
—Alexander Pope, 1733
Archive
Quotes
The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.
—Lester Bangs, 1971Our whole life is but one great school; from the cradle to the grave we are all learners; nor will our education be finished until we die.
—Ann Plato, 1841There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
—H.L. Mencken, 1920Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.
—Hans Zinsser, 1935Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
—Rudy Giuliani, 1999Men are able to assist fortune but not to thwart her. They can weave her designs, but they cannot destroy them.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, 1531I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.
—Cato the Elder, c. 184 BCNo matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
—Abraham LincolnYou never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
—Cormac McCarthy, 2005“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964The past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—Zadie Smith, 2000