Such then is the human state, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors.
—Voltaire, 1764
Archive
Quotes
Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.
—John Camden Hotten, 1859The slander of some people is as great a recommendation as the praise of others.
—Henry Fielding, 1730I am not Athenian or Greek but a citizen of the world.
—Socrates, c. 420 BCMemory is the only
afterlife I can understand.
Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
—William Morris, 1882Everyone 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, 1944Modern life is often a mechanical oppression, and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1935They say, “We only have the life of this world. We die and we live, and nothing destroys us but time.” Yet, not true knowledge have they of this—only belief.
—The Qur’an, c. 620Once you hear the details of a victory it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1951Every fool becomes a philosopher after ten days of rain.
—Clover Adams, 1882’Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1595Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903