Archive

Quotes

When night in her rusty dungeon has imprisoned our eyesight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keeps his audit in our sin-guilty consciences.

—Thomas Nashe, 1594

Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913

The wonderful sea charmed me from the first.

—Joshua Slocum, 1900

If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1843

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

—William Jennings Bryan, 1899

The oldest voice in the world is the wind.

—Donald Culross Peattie, 1950

I’ve been bathing in the poem / Of star-infused and milky sea / Devouring the azure greens.

—Arthur Rimbaud, 1871

Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.

—Charles Kuralt, c. 1980

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

—Pierre Gassendi, 1655

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

—The Book of Changes, c. 350 BC

An exile with no home anywhere is a corpse without a grave.

—Publilius Syrus, 50 BC

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

—Gaston Bachelard, 1960

Other nations use “force”; we Britons alone use “might.”

—Evelyn Waugh, 1938