There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1790
Archive
Quotes
Friends are ourselves.
—John Donne, 1603Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
—Herman Melville, 1849Nature’s rules have no exceptions.
—Herbert Spencer, 1851The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.
—William James, 1902When the root lives on, the new leaves come back.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BCIf a king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.
—Mencius, c. 330 BCChildhood has no forebodings—but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
—George Eliot, 1860Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.
—The Dhammapada, c. 400 BCThe more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1817Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.
—Louis Brandeis, 1928A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903