I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
—Maya Angelou, 1993
Archive
Quotes
If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330The peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms.
—Frantz Fanon, 1961Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
—Miguel de Unamuno, 1913Without a decisive naval force, we can do nothing definitive, and with it, everything honorable and glorious.
—George Washington, 1781Modern life is often a mechanical oppression, and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1935The law is not the same at morning and at night.
—George Herbert, c. 1633As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
—Pope John Paul II, 1986To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872The best way to fill time is to waste it.
—Marguerite Duras, 1987Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
—Virginia Woolf, 1899If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.
—Marie Bashkirtseff, 1884Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.
—Aldo Leopold, 1933