I 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, 1860
Archive
Quotes
One may like the love and despise the lover.
—George Farquhar, 1706No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.
—Emma Goldman, 1917If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.
—Francis Bacon, 1615Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1938Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
—George Eliot, 1857Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.
—Horace Walpole, 1745Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with the necessities.
—John Lothrop Motley, 1858Pride and excess bring disaster for man.
—Xunzi, 250 BCA dog starved at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state.
—William Blake, 1807The future...something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
—C.S. Lewis, 1941The Mediterranean has the colors of a mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet—you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing light has taken on a tinge of pink or gray.
—Vincent van Gogh, 1888