Water is the first principle of everything.
—Thales of Miletus, c. 600 BC
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Quotes
Of all the creatures that breathe and creep on the surface of the earth, none is more to be pitied than man.
—Homer, c. 750 BCThe dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.
—John Updike, 1989Disease is not of the body but of the place.
—Latin proverbExtraordinary how potent cheap music is.
—Noël Coward, 1930If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
—Francis Bacon, 1625A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag, 1977As usual, what we call “progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
—Havelock Ellis, 1914The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891For most of us, nighttime dreaming brings us closer to our identities and our power than any activity in the waking world.
—Walter Mosley, 2000We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.
—Winston Churchill, 1948Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?
—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992