One must love people a good deal whom one takes pains to convince or instruct.
—Mary de la Riviere Manley, 1720
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Quotes
Can you take your country with you on the soles of your shoes?
—Georg Büchner, 1835Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCIf I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.
—Samuel Johnson, 1777All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence, the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?
—Mary Renault, 1956The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
—George Santayana, 1905It is a luxury to be understood.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1942The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.
—Molière, 1670The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—André Breton, 1937Attend to earth,
for it is to earth that kings are truly wedded.