The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843
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Quotes
You must not grow used to making money out of everything. One sees more people ruined than one has seen preserved by shameful gains.
—Sophocles, c. 442 BCWhat can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
—William Law, 1728I am sick and tired of publicity. I want no more of it. It puts me in a bad light. I just want to be forgotten.
—Al Capone, 1929As usual, what we call “progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
—Havelock Ellis, 1914The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.
—Herodotus, c. 440 BCThe deed is everything, the glory naught.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832What a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1852To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.
—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?
—Jane Austen, 1813These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.
—Claude Monet, 1908Better no law than no law enforced.
—Danish proverb