To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891
Archive
Quotes
Death keeps no calendar.
—George Herbert, 1640We and the dead ride quick at night.
—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
—Samuel Johnson, 1776Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant—democracy to many.
—Marguerite Gardiner, 1839The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, / And drinks, and gapes for drink again.
—Abraham Cowley, 1656Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCOnce suspicion is aroused, everything feeds it.
—Amelia Edith Barr, 1885When man wanted to make a machine that would walk, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.
—Guillaume Apollinaire, 1917Family! Thou art the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
—August Strindberg, 1886Great inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions, as it were, by the way, in the course of their everyday life.
—Elizabeth Charles, 1862Speak without regard for the consequences, and it is too late for silence when disaster strikes.
—Huan Kuan, 81 BC