Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.
—Robert Southey, 1809
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Quotes
Living is an ailment that is relieved every sixteen hours by sleep. A palliative. Death is the cure.
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, c. 1790Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?
—Brooks Atkinson, 1940To gaze upon a drop of water is to behold the nature of all the waters of the universe.
—Huangbo Xiyun, c. 850The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
—Hermann Hesse, 1950Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
—Herbert Hoover, 1936No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
—Hannah Arendt, 1963I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.
—Xenocrates, c. 350 BCToil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
—Herman Melville, 1849It’s your business when your neighbor’s wall is in flames.
—Horace, 19 BCCharity begins at home, and justice begins next door.
—Charles Dickens, 1843The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.
—Ernst Jünger, 1977