The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sightseeing.”
—Daniel Boorstin, 1961
Archive
Quotes
It is one thing to slander, another to accuse.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 56 BCThe law’s made to take care o’ raskills.
—George Eliot, 1860You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
—Jane Austen, 1811The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
—Joseph Conrad, 1899A jest breaks no bones.
—Samuel Johnson, 1781If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.
—Samuel Johnson, 1777Water is the readiest means of making friends with nature.
—Ludwig Feuerbach, 1841I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.
—Cato the Elder, c. 184 BCA first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys.
—Saul Bellow, 1989“I think, therefore I am” is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
—Milan Kundera, 1990If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930