The law is established from above but becomes custom below.
—Su Zhe, c. 1100
Archive
Quotes
After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.
—Amelia Earhart, 1935Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.
—Wendell Phillips, 1859I wants to make your flesh creep.
—Charles Dickens, 1837You can put wings on a pig, but you don’t make it an eagle.
—Bill Clinton, 1996I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
—Thomas Hobbes, 1679There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.
Refrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.
—Czesław Miłosz, 1960If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.
—Congolese proverbI do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.
—Robertson Davies, 1985