Archive

Quotes

The day unravels what the night has woven.

—Walter Benjamin, 1929

The noblest kind of retribution is not to become like your enemy.

—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175

What timid man does not avoid contact with the sick, fearing lest he contract a disease so near?

—Ovid, c. 10

To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church; the third is the social revolution.

—Mikhail Bakunin, 1871

I am a man: I consider nothing human alien to me.

—Terence, 163 BC

In settling an island, the first building erected by a Spaniard will be a church, by a Frenchman a fort, by a Dutchman a warehouse, and by an Englishman an alehouse.

—Francis Grose, 1787

Nature’s rules have no exceptions.

—Herbert Spencer, 1851

Do not ask me to be kind; just ask me to act as though I were.

—Jules Renard, 1898

We should always presume the disease to be curable until its own nature proves it otherwise.

—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845

Happiness (as the mathematicians might say) lies on a curve, and we approach it only by asymptote.

—Christopher Morley, 1919

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

—Theodor Adorno, 1951

With the dead there is no rivalry.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1839

The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, / And drinks, and gapes for drink again.

—Abraham Cowley, 1656