You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882
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Quotes
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
—Samuel Johnson, 1776Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
—Voltaire, 1769When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.
—St. Jerome, 395We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.
—Cyril Connolly, 1944Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.
—William Shakespeare, 1592All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.
—James Joyce, 1939God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
—Arthur Koestler, 1967The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it by conversation.
—Oscar Wilde, 1890The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1929There is something stirring in the way civilization gapes like a savage at the achievements of nature.
—Karl Kraus, 1909I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953