Archive

Quotes

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

—Henry Kissinger, 1977

There’s plenty of fire in the coldest flint!

—Rachel Field, 1939

Few sons are equal to their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them. 

—Homer, c. 750 BC

It costs a lot of money to be rich.

—Peter Boyle, 2002

Is all our fire of shipwreck wood?

—Robert Browning, 1862

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

—George Washington, 1796

What man was ever content with one crime?

—Juvenal, c. 125

I can’t see (or feel) the conflict between love and religion. To me they’re the same thing.

—Elizabeth Bowen, c. 1970

“Abroad,” that large home of ruined reputations.

—George Eliot, 1866

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

—George Eliot, c. 1872

We are to go to law never to revenge, but only to repair.

—Samuel Pepys, 1661

I 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, 1860