What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.
—Epictetus, c. 110
Archive
Quotes
Whatsoever was the father of a disease, an ill diet was the mother.
—George Herbert, 1651The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
—Tacitus, c. 117Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.
—George Orwell, 1945Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things—but each according to its nature—and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1821The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence, the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?
—Mary Renault, 1956Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.
—Samuel Johnson, 1751Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1735You must not grow used to making money out of everything. One sees more people ruined than one has seen preserved by shameful gains.
—Sophocles, c. 442 BCEvery house: temple, empire, school.
—Joseph Joubert, 1800All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full.
—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCDread attends the unknown.
—Nadine Gordimer, 1998