Archive

Quotes

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

—Barbara Ward, 1972

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

—Joseph Conrad, 1899

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

—James Madison, 1794

Appearances are a glimpse of the obscure.

—Anaxagoras, c. 450 BC

The sea is mother-death, and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

—Anne Sexton, 1971

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

—Margaret Atwood, 1976

The art of invention grows young with the things invented.

—Francis Bacon, 1605

I think that to get under the surface and really appreciate the beauty of any country, one has to go there poor.

—Grace Moore, 1944

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

—D.H. Lawrence, 1920

A merchant may, perhaps, be a man of an enlarged mind, but there is nothing in trade connected with an enlarged mind.

—Samuel Johnson, 1773

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

—Phyllis Rose, 1991

Journalists belong in the gutter, because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.

—Gerald Priestland, 1988