Archive

Quotes

Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.

—Horace, c. 20 BC

Men take diseases, one of another. Therefore let men take heed of their company.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1600

In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.

—Novalis, c. 1798

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

—Henry Kissinger, 1977

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

—Alexander Pope, 1709

I always think of nature as a great spectacle, somewhat resembling the opera.

—Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686

Health can make money, but money cannot make health.

—Maria Edgeworth, 1833

An ugly sight, a man who’s afraid. 

—Jean Anouilh, 1944

Don’t hit a man at all if you can avoid it, but if you have to hit him, knock him out.

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1916

Honest commerce is the great civilizer. We exchange ideas when we exchange fabrics.

—Robert G. Ingersoll, 1882

I 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

It would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading.

—Virginia Woolf, 1924