Archive

Quotes

If I see something sagging, dragging, or bagging, I’m going to go have the stuff tucked or plucked.

—Dolly Parton, 2003

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947

Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.

—John Donne, c. 1629

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

—Nadine Gordimer, 1971

Few sons are equal to their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them. 

—Homer, c. 750 BC

Why is a ship under sail more poetical than a hog in a high wind? The hog is all nature, the ship is all art.

—Lord Byron, 1821

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

—Pierre Gassendi, 1655

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

—William Blake, c. 1790

At the start there’s always energy.

—Suzan-Lori Parks, 2006

Now there is fame! Of all—hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public—fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation by God of the artist. It is sad. It is true.

—Pablo Picasso, c. 1961

The mind is led on, step by step, to defeat its own logic.

—Dai Vernon, 1994

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, c. 1884

Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903