Archive

Quotes

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

—Anthony Burgess, 1964

To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma.

—Gretel Ehrlich, 1994

The sea hath no king but God alone.

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881

Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

—Henry George, 1879

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

—Charles Darwin, 1871

Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1911

An honest man is all right even if he’s an idiot…but a crook must have brains.

—Maxim Gorky, 1902

When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1594

Before the earth could become an industrial garbage can, it had first to become a research laboratory.

—Theodore Roszak, 1972

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

—André Gide, 1897

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696

Many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is down there that the sea folk live.

—Hans Christian Andersen, 1837

We never are definitely right; we can only be sure we are wrong.

—Richard P. Feynman, 1965