We seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BC
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Quotes
My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1967No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.
—Socrates, 399 BCDespotism achieves great things illegally; democracy doesn’t even take the trouble to achieve small things legally.
—Honoré de Balzac, 1831We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706Very shy people don’t even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up.
—Andy Warhol, 1975One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1664Many are the wonders of the world, and none so wonderful as man.
—Sophocles, c. 441 BCWorldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, now that, and changes names as it changes in direction.
—Dante Alighieri, c. 1315The men of today are born to criticize; of Achilles they see only the heel.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880When arms speak, the laws are silent.
—Cicero, 52 BCThe believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature—and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878