Archive

Quotes

Guard more faithfully the secret which is confided to you than the money which is entrusted to your care.

—Isocrates, c. 370 BC

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.

—Philip Stubbes, 1583

Good or ill fortune is very little at our disposal.

—David Hume, 1742

As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.

—David Sedaris, 1997

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

—Marcel Marceau, 1958

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

—Gore Vidal, 1973

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

Two crimes undid me: a poem and a mistake. 

—Ovid, 10

Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.

—John Camden Hotten, 1859

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

—Robert Burton, 1621

Oil! Our secret god, our secret sharer, our magic wand, fulfiller of our every desire, our coconspirator, the sine qua non in all we do!

—Margaret Atwood, 2015

The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

—James Joyce, 1922