Music today is nothing more than the art of performing difficult pieces.
—Voltaire, 1759
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Quotes
What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830Those who believe in freedom of the will have never loved and never hated.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1893I do desire we may be better strangers.
—William Shakespeare, 1600Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
—Jane Austen, 1811Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.
—Blaise Pascal, 1658Enemies are so stimulating.
—Katharine Hepburn, 1969On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCAll women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1861To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
—Georges Bataille, 1957