We wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.
—Joseph Addison, 1711
Archive
Quotes
Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant, democracy to many.
—Marguerite Gardiner, 1839Every fool becomes a philosopher after ten days of rain.
—Clover Adams, 1882The nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.
—Empedocles, c. 450 BCNature never breaks her own laws.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCEveryone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944Like a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BCWe never are definitely right; we can only be sure we are wrong.
—Richard P. Feynman, 1965More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880The purest joy is to live without disguise, unconstrained by the ties of a grave reputation.
—Al-Hariri, c. 1108The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1929There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
—Elias Canetti, 1960