Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.
—Matsuo Basho, c. 1685
Archive
Quotes
Till taught by pain, / Men really know not what good water’s worth.
—Lord Byron, 1819Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.
—Albert Einstein, 1929Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal, 1981The ability to store our data externally helps us imagine that our time is limitless, our space infinite.
—Carina Chocano, 2012Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
—Herbert Hoover, 1936In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.
—Simon Hoggart, 1990At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
—Søren Kierkegaard, 1850The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1929The best quarantine is hygiene.
—Richard D. Arnold, 1871God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.
—Maxim Gorky, 1913Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.
—Denis Diderot, 1774How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do.
—William James, 1902