Good fortune is light as a feather, but nobody knows how to hold it up. Misfortune is heavy as the earth, but nobody knows how to stay out of its way.
—Zhuangzi, c. 300 BC
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Quotes
Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.
—Robert Southey, 1809When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.
—Blaise Pascal, c. 1657Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Oligopoly, plutocracy, kleptocracy: All things that are good for a shareholder.
—James J. Cramer, 2006All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 45 BCMan’s great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes.
—Lewis Mumford, 1962There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in the midst of wretchedness.
—Dante Alighieri, c. 1321There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1790A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.
—The BibleTelevision has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1816