If they prescribe a lot of remedies for some sickness or other, it means that the sickness is incurable.
—Anton Chekhov, 1904
Archive
Quotes
Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so shall you come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.
—Ernst Jünger, 1977To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Life is no way to treat an animal.
—Kurt Vonnegut, 2005All those who suffer in the world do so because of their desire for their own happiness.
—Shantideva, c. 750God is alive. Magic is afoot.
—Leonard Cohen, 1966A dead enemy always smells good.
—Aulus Vitellius, 69When poets don’t know what to say and have completely given up on the play, just like a finger, they lift the machine and the spectators are satisfied.
—Antiphanes, c. 350 BCWhat does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1850In a true democracy, everyone can be upper-class and live in Connecticut.
—Lisa Birnbach, 1980Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1923A joke is at most a temporary rebellion against virtue, and its aim is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.
—George Orwell, 1945