Archive

Quotes

Two crimes undid me: a poem and a mistake. 

—Ovid, 10

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?

—William Law, 1728

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.

—Gertrude Stein, 1914

It is so difficult not to become vain about one’s own good luck.

—Simone de Beauvoir, 1963

Memory is the only
afterlife I can understand.

—Lisel Mueller, 1996

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

—Will Self, 1994

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.

—Arthur Koestler, 1967

A dead enemy always smells good.

—Aulus Vitellius, 69

The enlightened man says: I am body entirely and nothing beside.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

—Frank Zappa, c. 1975

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. 

—Heinrich Heine, 1827

That which the sober man keeps in his breast, the drunken man lets out at the lips. Astute people, when they want to ascertain a man’s true character, make him drunk.

—Martin Luther, 1569