Archive

Quotes

Every fool becomes a philosopher after ten days of rain.

—Clover Adams, 1882

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

A woman should never be seen eating or drinking unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands.

—Lord Byron, 1812

Moderation in all things.

—Terence, 166 BC

Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

—Arnold Toynbee, 1948

The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

—Lester Bangs, 1971

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world: it gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. The picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

—Susan B. Anthony, 1896

Style is the image of character.

—Edward Gibbon, c. 1789

If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”

—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

—Germaine Greer, 1970

The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, / And drinks, and gapes for drink again.

—Abraham Cowley, 1656

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

Appearances often are deceiving.

—Aesop, c. 550 BC