The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.
—Francis Bacon, 1605
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Quotes
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
—James Joyce, 1922Music is our myth of the inner life.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1942Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.
—Albert Camus, 1951I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.
—John F. Kennedy, 1960As man disappears from sight, the land remains.
—Maori proverbBetter sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
—Herman Melville, 1851I do love cricket—it’s so very English.
—Sarah Bernhardt, c. 1908An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods.
—Epicurus, c. 250 BCWhen 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, 1984A person who sees only fashion in fashion is a fool.
—Honoré de Balzac, 1830When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight.
—Chinua Achebe, 1960