The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
—Gustave Flaubert, 1871
Archive
Quotes
Fear has a smell, as love does.
—Margaret Atwood, 1972Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
—Jane Austen, 1815Not all heads have a brain.
—French proverbA self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
—Christina Stead, 1938What hath night to do with sleep?
—John Milton, 1637Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.
—Molière, 1670The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.
—Juvenal, c. 125Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.
—Charles Dickens, 1843Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling.
—Philip Sidney, 1582I 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, 1955