One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
—Virginia Woolf, 1929Quotes
Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
—Simone Weil, 1947The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.
—Alexander of Tralles, c. 600Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.
—Richard Krause, 1982Before the earth could become an industrial garbage can, it had first to become a research laboratory.
—Theodore Roszak, 1972Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.
—Francis Bacon, 1605To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it—what greater gift?
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1975I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1911If they prescribe a lot of remedies for some sickness or other, it means that the sickness is incurable.
—Anton Chekhov, 1904It would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading.
—Virginia Woolf, 1924My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.
—John Quincy Adams, 1844