I cannot but bless the memory of Julius Caesar, for the great esteem he expressed for fat men and his aversion to lean ones.
—David Hume, 1751
Archive
Quotes
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.
—Edward O. Wilson, 2009Despotism achieves great things illegally; democracy doesn’t even take the trouble to achieve small things legally.
—Honoré de Balzac, 1831Dance tunes are always right.
—Dylan Thomas, 1936Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
—Anacharsis, c. 550 BCI think it makes small difference to the dead if they are buried in the tokens of luxury. All this is an empty glorification left for those who live.
—Euripides, 415 BCA miracle entails a degree of irrationality—not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.
—Emmanuel Lévinas, 1952The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society.
—Mark Twain, 1873Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
—Albert Camus, c. 1940The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1911