Archive

Quotes

Better free in a strange land than a slave at home.

—German proverb

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

Of my friends, I am the only one I have left.

—Terence, 161 BC

A crowded police court docket is the surest sign that trade is brisk and money plenty.

—Mark Twain, 1872

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

—Orson Welles, 1953

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

—André Malraux, 1951

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.

—John Updike, 1989

More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling—it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.

—Gertrude Stein, 1943

We never are definitely right; we can only be sure we are wrong.

—Richard P. Feynman, 1965

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921

I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.

—Antonio Porchia, 1943

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