It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.
—Marguerite Duras, 1987
Archive
Quotes
God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.
—Maxim Gorky, 1913One thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCHad Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.
—Blaise Pascal, 1658What timid man does not avoid contact with the sick, fearing lest he contract a disease so near?
—Ovid, c. 10As he brews, so shall he drink.
—Ben Jonson, 1598Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.
—Robert P. Hudson, 1983If 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, 1930Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
—Theodor Adorno, 1951Seafarers go to sleep in the evening not knowing whether they will find themselves at the bottom of the sea the next morning.
—Jean de Joinville, c. 1305Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, / And drinks, and gapes for drink again.
—Abraham Cowley, 1656