Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.
—Bhartrihari, c. 400
Archive
Quotes
One thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCVanity of vanities; all is vanity.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCBefore the earth could become an industrial garbage can, it had first to become a research laboratory.
—Theodore Roszak, 1972The young leading the young is like the blind leading the blind.
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1747My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1967Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.
—Derek Walcott, 1986Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
—Samuel Johnson, 1780Necessity knows no law except to conquer.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCThe winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
—Edward Gibbon, 1788The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.