Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power.
—Thomas Hardy, 1874
Archive
Quotes
I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?
—Andy Warhol, 1963At the start there’s always energy.
—Suzan-Lori Parks, 2006To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation.
—Oliver Sacks, 2012I imagined it was more difficult to die.
—Louis XIV, 1715I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
—Voltaire, 1723If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in / A minute to smile and an hour to weep in.
—Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1895Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.
—E. R. Dodds, 1951Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.
Those who travel heedlessly from place to place, observing only their distance from each other and attending only to their accommodation at the inn at night, set out fools, and will certainly return so.
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1747