It is permitted to learn even from an enemy.
—Ovid, c. 8
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Quotes
As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery.
—John Donne, 1622Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H.G. Wells, 1920There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
—H.L. Mencken, 1920Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.
—Robert Wilson, 1991God is our father, but even more is God our mother.
—Pope John Paul I, 1978Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.
—Walter Scott, 1823You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880Every creature in the world is like a book and a picture, to us, and a mirror.
—Alain de Lille, c. 1200Of troubles none is greater than to be robbed of one’s native land.
—Euripides, 431 BCI do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
—Galileo Galilei, 1615The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
—Michel Foucault, c. 1982Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
—Agnes Repplier, 1916