Archive

Quotes

The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1903

How gloriously legible are the constellations of the heavens!

—Anthony Trollope, 1859

If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”

—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930

Lord, I do not ask that thou shouldst give me wealth; only show me where it is, and I will attend to the rest.

—Kate Douglas Wiggin, 1898

Nature never jests.

—Albrecht von Haller, 1751

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.

—The Dhammapada, c. 400 BC

There are some who, if a cat accidentally comes into the room, though they neither see it nor are told of it, will presently be in a sweat and ready to die away.

—Increase Mather, 1684

With the dead there is no rivalry.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1839

Life is the art of being well deceived.

—William Hazlitt, c. 1817

In the country gossip is a pastime; in the city it is a warfare.

—W.M.L. Jay, 1870

Family! Thou art the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.

—August Strindberg, 1886

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.

—Diane Arbus, c. 1950

A functioning police state needs no police.

—William S. Burroughs, 1959