Archive

Quotes

I can’t see (or feel) the conflict between love and religion. To me they’re the same thing.

—Elizabeth Bowen, c. 1970

Unfortunately, humanitarianism has been the mark of an inhuman time.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1932

Machines do not run in order to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machines.

—Simone Weil, 1934

Those who cross the seas change their climate but not their character.

—Roman proverb

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

—Erich Fromm, 1941

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

—Philip K. Dick, 1972

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

—Hannah Arendt, 1963

When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

—Desmond Tutu, 1984

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891

The world is made of the very stuff of the body.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1961

There 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, 1921

You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars.

—Thomas Traherne, c. 1670

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

—Basho, c. 1690