Archive

Quotes

The sea hath no king but God alone.

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and, looking at each other with grief and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.

—Blaise Pascal, 1669

I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.

—Groucho Marx, 1959

A world is sooner destroyed than made.

—Thomas Burnet, 1684

Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.

—Hans Zinsser, 1935

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

—Rebecca West, 1959

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

The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.

—Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2008

The pleasure we hold in esteem for the course of our lives ought to have a greater share of our time dedicated to it; we should refuse no occasion nor omit any opportunity of drinking, and always have it in our minds.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

—E.M. Forster, 1951

A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844

The deed is everything, the glory naught.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832

Tomorrow we take to the mighty sea.

—Horace, 23 BC