Archive

Quotes

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

—Norman Douglas, 1917

Men, my dear, are very queer animals—a mixture of horse nervousness, ass stubbornness, and camel malice.

—T. H. Huxley, 1895

Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

—James Thurber, 1955

Alas! We are ridiculous animals.

—Horace Walpole, 1777

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

—Charles Darwin, 1859

Is there no way out of the mind?

—Sylvia Plath, 1962

Punishment is a sort of medicine.

—Aristotle, c. 340 BC

I curse the night, yet doth from day me hide.

—William Drummond, 1616

’Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables?

—Thomas Browne, 1642

Oligopoly, plutocracy, kleptocracy: All things that are good for a shareholder. 

—James J. Cramer, 2006

There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.

—Rumi, c. 1250

Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906