What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971
Archive
Quotes
He who commands the sea has command of everything.
—Francis Bacon, c. 1600Great 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, 1862We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
—Oscar Wilde, 1887You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880Television is democracy at its ugliest.
—Paddy Chayefsky, 1976What will not attract a man’s stare at sea?—a gull, a turtle, a flying fish!
—Richard Burton, 1883Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them; it is destiny which makes them prudent.
—Voltaire, 1764This is Year Zero.
—Pol Pot, 1975