That sweet bondage which is freedom’s self.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1813
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Quotes
Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.
—Bhartrihari, c. 400I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.
—Gregory VII, c. 1085The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
—Hermann Hesse, 1950The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1746Memory is like the moon, which hath its new, its full, and its wane.
—Margaret Cavendish, 1655I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1816Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
—Oscar Wilde, 1893Style is the image of character.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1789Sooner or later if the activity of the mind is restricted anywhere, it will cease to function even where it is allowed to be free.
—Edith Hamilton, 1930Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BC