Archive

Quotes

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

—André Gide, 1897

Men are able to assist fortune but not to thwart her. They can weave her designs, but they cannot destroy them.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, 1531

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

—Charles Lamb, 1833

A garden must be looked into, and dressed as the body.

—George Herbert, 1640

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915

Wit enables us to act rudely with impunity.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1678

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

—Basho, c. 1690

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

—Dean Acheson, 1970

Two crimes undid me: a poem and a mistake. 

—Ovid, 10

Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

—George Santayana, c. 1905

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens. 

—Abraham Lincoln