Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
—Simone Weil, 1947
Archive
Quotes
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self; for what we wish, that we readily believe.
—Demosthenes, 349 BCThe newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.
—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1858I am sure of this: that if everybody was to drink their bottle a day, there would not be half the disorders in the world there are now.
—Jane Austen, c. 1798My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
—Karl Kraus, c. 1910There are many civil questions that arise between individuals in which it is not so important the controversy be settled one way or another as that it be settled.
—William Howard Taft, 1921Who hears the fishes when they cry?
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.
—Lewis Strauss, 1954We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.
—Karl Marx, 1847In a court of fowls, the cockroach never wins its case.
—Rwandan proverbTo live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.
—John Buchan, 1940The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
—B.F. Skinner, 1969The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go on a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences—to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others.
—William Hazlitt, 1822