Archive

Quotes

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889

There is no art without Eros. 

—Max Frisch, 1983

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

—William Empson, 1928

It is very foolish to attack one’s enemy openly if one can injure him in secret.

—Giambattista Giraldi, 1543

Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power.

—Thomas Hardy, 1874

Friendship itself will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long.

—Robert Wilson Lynd, 1924

The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.

—Nadine Gordimer, 1971

Shame on the soul, to falter on the road of life while the body still perseveres.

—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.

—Herman Melville, 1853

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

—Bernard De Voto, 1951

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry, 1943

The earth is our existence, and our body is attached to the earth.

—Daulat Qazi, c. 1650

Seafarers go to sleep in the evening not knowing whether they will find themselves at the bottom of the sea the next morning.

—Jean de Joinville, c. 1305