Quotes

A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in / A minute to smile and an hour to weep in.

—Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1895

I do love cricket—it’s so very English.

—Sarah Bernhardt, c. 1908

I 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, 1929

Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, now that, and changes names as it changes in direction.

—Dante Alighieri, c. 1315

Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.

—Gertrude Stein, 1914

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BC

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

—Antiphanes, c. 370 BC

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

—Philip K. Dick, 1972

The smell of rain is rich with life.

—Estela Portillo Trambley, 1975

Man is no man, but a wolf, to a stranger.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

If fame is only to come after death, I am in no hurry for it.

—Martial, c. 86

It’s only the futility of the first flood that prevents God from sending a second.

—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, c. 1794

There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.

—Annie Proulx, 2008

Search form