Archive

Quotes

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings.

—Anna Quindlen, 2012

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

—James Thurber, 1955

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

—William Blake, c. 1790

My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

—W.H. Auden, c. 1967

Strength of mind is exercise, not rest.

—Alexander Pope, 1733

An exile with no home anywhere is a corpse without a grave.

—Publilius Syrus, 50 BC

Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.

—William Penn, 1693

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.

—Joseph Addison, 1711

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1898

It costs a lot of money to be rich.

—Peter Boyle, 2002

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

—E.B. White, 1977

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969