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Quotes

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

—Sigmund Freud, 1912

Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or racial hatred. To me all men are equal; there are flatheads everywhere and I despise them all equally.

—Karl Kraus, 1909

When night in her rusty dungeon has imprisoned our eyesight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keeps his audit in our sin-guilty consciences.

—Thomas Nashe, 1594

If you would help another man, you must do so in minute particulars.

—William Blake, 1804

Whatsoever was the father of a disease, an ill diet was the mother.

—George Herbert, 1651

It’s the educated barbarian who is the worst: he knows what to destroy.

—Helen MacInnes, 1963

Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking. 

—La Rochefoucauld, 1665

One who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

—Ptahhotep, c. 2400 BC

Better free in a strange land than a slave at home.

—German proverb

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

—Edith Wharton, 1905

Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.

—Aldo Leopold, 1933

Man has here two and a half minutes—one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.

—Jean Paul, 1795