Archive

Quotes

I look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive. 

—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BC

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

—Hermann Hesse, 1950

Fear has a smell, as love does.

—Margaret Atwood, 1972

The atavistic urge toward danger persists and its satisfaction is called adventure.

—John Steinbeck, 1941

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

—Sigmund Freud, 1930

Nobody works as hard for his money as the man who marries it.

—Kin Hubbard

A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

—Simone Weil, 1947

Mammon, n. The god of the world’s leading religion. His chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1911

A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

—Jonathan Swift, 1726

The future is no more uncertain than the present.

—Walt Whitman, 1856

It is wretched business to be digging a well just as you’re dying of thirst.

—Plautus, c. 193 BC

Whatever the apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness.

—Thomas Paine, 1792