Archive

Quotes

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

—Walter Pater, 1873

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

—Persius, c. 60

Oil dependency is not just an economic attachment but appears as a kind of cognitive compulsion.

—Peter Hitchcock, 2010

An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880

I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him.

—Book of Revelations, c. 90

Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.

—Socrates, c. 430 BC

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817

A private sin is not so prejudicial in this world as a public indecency.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.

—Elizabeth I, 1588

It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear. 

—Charlotte Brontë, 1847

Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.

—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957

Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.

—Norman Douglas, 1917