Archive

Quotes

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

The nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

—Empedocles, c. 450 BC

Nature is the art of God.

—Thomas Browne, 1635

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

—Confucius, c. 515 BC

The sick man is the parasite of society.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889

If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar, and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?

—Olive Schreiner, 1883

The happy ending is our national belief.

—Mary McCarthy, 1947

We seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BC

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

—Kurt Vonnegut, 1988

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

—William Blake, c. 1790

Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.

—Walter Scott, 1823

There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction which inclines every man first to hope and then to believe that nature has given him something peculiar to himself. 

—Samuel Johnson, 1763