A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC
Archive
Quotes
In revolutions men fall and rise. Long before this war is over, much as you hear me praised now, you may hear me cursed and insulted.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1864Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.
—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it by conversation.
—Oscar Wilde, 1890Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905You can put wings on a pig, but you don’t make it an eagle.
—Bill Clinton, 1996It costs a lot to make a person look this cheap.
—Dolly Parton, 1994O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!
—William Shakespeare, c. 1596Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.
—Rachel Carson, 1962I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964