The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
—George Eliot, 1876
Archive
Quotes
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
—Edward Gibbon, 1788So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, c. 1950And then, sir, there is this consideration: that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up and, claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.
—Samuel Johnson, 1791I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886Once a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from nothing.
—Tacitus, c. 100Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?
—Alfred Hitchcock, 1962I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
—Rebecca West, 1939I have been ever of the opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844If you read somebody’s diary, you get what you deserve.
—David Sedaris, 2004The earth is our existence, and our body is attached to the earth.
—Daulat Qazi, c. 1650Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821