Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen, 1818
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Quotes
A college degree is a social certificate, not a proof of competence.
—Elbert Hubbard, 1911“Abroad,” that large home of ruined reputations.
—George Eliot, 1866What is life but organized energy?
—Arthur C. Clarke, 1958By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.
—Confucius, c. 500 BCMethinks 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, 1899As is the face, so is the mind.
—Roman proverbIn psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
—Theodor Adorno, 1951To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
—Georges Bataille, 1957’Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1595Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906The planet keeps to the astronomer’s timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.
—John Henry Poynting, 1899We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
—Anna Sewell, 1877