A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
—Jane Austen, 1815
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Quotes
A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.
—Karl Kraus, 1909No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
—Magna Carta, 1215Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations—wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
—Edmund Burke, 1795A god cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good.
—Pliny the Elder, c. 77When you name yourself, you always name another.
—Bertolt Brecht, 1926Alas! We are ridiculous animals.
—Horace Walpole, 1777One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1664If I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.
—John Donne, 1623The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.
—Nadine Gordimer, 1971I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860Men worry over the great number of diseases, while doctors worry over the scarcity of effective remedies.
—Bian Qiao, c. 500 BCLord, I do not ask that thou shouldst give me wealth; only show me where it is, and I will attend to the rest.
—Kate Douglas Wiggin, 1898