The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
—Joseph Conrad, 1899
Archive
Quotes
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.
—Anaïs Nin, 1935It belongs to a nobleman to weep in an hour of disaster.
—Euripides, 412 BCRidicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.
—Walter Scott, 1823We all have a contract with the public—in us they see themselves, or what they would like to be.
—Clark Gable, 1935Children are all foreigners. We treat them as such.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1839God is our father, but even more is God our mother.
—Pope John Paul I, 1978The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.
—Booth Tarkington, 1914Luck, in the great game of war, is undoubtedly lord of all.
—Arthur Griffiths, 1899Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it, and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1790