To 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. 1872
Archive
Quotes
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty, and death of public opinion.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1902Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1923Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1886The severity of a teacher is better than the love of a father.
—Saadi, 1258Exchange is no robbery.
—German proverbFriendship! Sir, there can be no such thing without an equality.
—George Farquhar, 1702Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.
—Thomas Hughes, 1857Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958I am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.
—Clarence Darrow, 1932Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
—W.H. Auden, 1957Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.
—Marty Feldman, 1969When you name yourself, you always name another.
—Bertolt Brecht, 1926