Archive

Quotes

No one wins a quarrel by quarreling.

—German proverb

Very shy people don’t even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up.

—Andy Warhol, 1975

Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.

—Blaise Pascal, 1658

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

A dog starved at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state.

—William Blake, 1807

Everyone who is sick is someone else’s patient zero.

—Leslie Jamison, 2020

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.

—E.B. White, 1944

“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

—Marshall McLuhan, 1964

The ability to store our data externally helps us imagine that our time is limitless, our space infinite.

—Carina Chocano, 2012

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

—Michel Foucault, 1975

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

—Lord Byron, 1813

Memory is like the moon, which hath its new, its full, and its wane.

—Margaret Cavendish, 1655

To outwit an enemy is not only just and glorious but profitable and sweet.

—Plutarch, c. 100