Those things are better which are perfected by nature than those which are finished by art.
—Cicero, c. 45 BC
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Quotes
Do you not see how God is praised by those in the heavens and those on earth? The very birds praised Him as they wing their way.
—The Qur’an, c. 620I live by good soup, and not on fine language.
—Molière, 1672The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.
—Aldous Huxley, 1956We wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.
—Joseph Addison, 1711The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.
—Hunter S. Thompson, 1971There are truths that prove their discoverers witless.
—Karl Kraus, 1909Without a decisive naval force, we can do nothing definitive, and with it, everything honorable and glorious.
—George Washington, 1781A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
—Harriet Doerr, 1978Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
—Anatole France, 1881The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
—Salvador Dalí, 1953Health in all lands is among the indispensable guarantees of human progress.
—Helen Keller, 1936