Archive

Quotes

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

—George Eliot, 1857

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1852

All people have the common desire to be elevated in honor, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing it.

—Mencius, c. 330 BC

Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power.

—Thomas Hardy, 1874

Oil dependency is not just an economic attachment but appears as a kind of cognitive compulsion.

—Peter Hitchcock, 2010

Who draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard.

—James Howell, 1659

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings.

—Anna Quindlen, 2012

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

—Karl Kraus, c. 1910

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

—Xenocrates, c. 350 BC

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

—Charles Darwin, 1871

It seems to me that we all look at nature too much and live with her too little.

—Oscar Wilde, 1897

War is fear cloaked in courage. 

—William Westmoreland, 1966

Whatever the pace of this technological revolution may be, the direction is clear: the lower rungs of the economic ladder are being lopped off.

—Bayard Rustin, 1965