God is our father, but even more is God our mother.
—Pope John Paul I, 1978
Archive
Quotes
Ashore it’s wine, women, and song; aboard it’s rum, bum, and concertina.
—British naval saying, c. 1800Is there no way out of the mind?
—Sylvia Plath, 1962There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
—Elias Canetti, 1960Quarreling must lead to disorder, and disorder exhaustion.
—Xunzi, c. 250 BCEducation—a debt due from present to future generations.
—George Peabody, 1852If you have any soul worth expressing, it will show itself in your singing.
—John Ruskin, 1865Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891When one has a famishing thirst for happiness, one is apt to gulp down diversions wherever they are offered.
—Alice Hegan Rice, 1917God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.
—Martin LutherWithout doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things—but each according to its nature—and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1821I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
—Rebecca West, 1939Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings.
—Anna Quindlen, 2012