Let us make our own mistakes, but let us take comfort in the knowledge that they are our own mistakes.
—Tom Mboya, 1958
Archive
Quotes
Those who are awake have a world that is one and common, but each of those who are asleep turns aside into his own particular world.
—Heraclitus, c. 500 BCThe chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.
—Galen, c. 175God never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, that he might make the message clear for them.
—The Qur’an, c. 620Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
—Pablo Neruda, 1924Men were born to lie, and women to believe them.
—John Gay, 1728The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983The brain is an unreliable organ, it is monstrously great, monstrously developed. Swollen, like a goiter.
—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. War is hell.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1879Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
—Harriet Doerr, 1978If the people be the governors, who shall be governed?
—John Cotton, c. 1636Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
—Noël Coward, 1930The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851