No lyric poems live long or please many people which are written by drinkers of water.
—Horace, 20 BCQuotes
Of all objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea or ocean. A troubled ocean, to a man who sails upon it, is, I think, the biggest object that he can see in motion, and consequently gives his imagination one of the highest kinds of pleasure that can arise from greatness.
—Joseph Addison, 1712If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930The severity of a teacher is better than the love of a father.
—Saadi, 1258Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCIt’s the educated barbarian who is the worst: he knows what to destroy.
—Helen MacInnes, 1963A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
—Charles Baudelaire, 1852Water is the readiest means of making friends with nature.
—Ludwig Feuerbach, 1841What are men anyway but balloons on legs, a lot of blown-up bladders?
—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 64You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
—Joseph Conrad, 1900The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
—Bertrand Russell, 1938Give us this day our television, and an automobile, but deliver us from freedom.
—Jean-Luc Godard, 1966Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.
—The Dhammapada, c. 400 BC