What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.
—Epictetus, c. 110
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Quotes
Write 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, 1852The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
—John Updike, 1963It is remarkable that only small birds properly sing.
—Charles Darwin, 1871Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations.
—Thomas JeffersonThose who are awake have a world that is one and common, but each of those who are asleep turns aside into his own particular world.
—Heraclitus, c. 500 BCCarnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.
—Tom Stoppard, 1993The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
—Michel Foucault, c. 1982The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
—Euripides, c. 415 BCThere is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1898God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.
—Maxim Gorky, 1913When man wanted to make a machine that would walk, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.
—Guillaume Apollinaire, 1917What water gives, water takes away.
—Portuguese proverb