I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.
—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900
Archive
Quotes
Anyone who in discussion quotes authority uses his memory rather than his intellect.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500The righteous know the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 500 BCIt’s only the futility of the first flood that prevents God from sending a second.
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, c. 1794Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1790I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860Once a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from nothing.
—Tacitus, c. 100That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
—Willa Cather, 1918We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveler just returned from abroad.
—Jonathan Swift, c. 1730Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
—Edmund Burke, 1765True friendship withstands time, distance, and silence.
—Isabel Allende, 2000