Archive

Quotes

Every ass thinks himself worthy to stand with the king’s horses.

—Gnomologia, 1732

The friend of all humanity is no friend to me.

—Molière, 1666

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.

—Lewis Strauss, 1954

Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390

Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.

—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think.

—Lawrence Durrell, 1957

A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832

“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

—Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Rivalry adds so much to the charms of one’s conquests.

—Louisa May Alcott, 1866

Memory is necessary for all operations of reasoning.

—Blaise Pascal, c. 1658

Colonialism has meant selling our ore and being left with the holes.

—Samora Moisés Machel, c. 1976

It’s easy to be independent when you’ve got money. But to be independent when you haven’t got a thing—that’s the Lord’s test.

—Mahalia Jackson, 1966

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817