Archive

Quotes

The gratitude is greater than the gift.

—Pierre Corneille, 1641

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self; for what we wish, that we readily believe.

—Demosthenes, 349 BC

A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

—Dorothy L. Sayers, 1947

There is no small pleasure in sweet water.

—Ovid, c. 10

Whole nations have melted away like balls of snow before the sun.

—Dragging Canoe, 1775

I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.

—Groucho Marx, 1959

Your piping-hot lie is the best of lies.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

—Marcel Proust, c. 1922

The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.

—Johannes Kepler, 1605

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915

The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

—Leviticus, c. 600 BC

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings.

—Anna Quindlen, 2012

There are truths that prove their discoverers witless.

—Karl Kraus, 1909