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Quotes

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.

—Horace, 20 BC

The most may err as grossly as the few.

—John Dryden, 1681

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

—Virginia Woolf, 1899

To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

—William Hazlitt, 1823

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1735

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

The money market is to a commercial nation what the heart is to man.

—William Pitt, 1805

Some memories are like lucky charms, talismans, one shouldn’t tell about them or they’ll lose their power.

—Iris Murdoch, 1985

By night an atheist half believes a God.

—Edward Young, c. 1745

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.

—Paul Valéry, 1931

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.

—Charles Lamb, 1810