Archive

Quotes

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

—B.F. Skinner, 1964

The deed is everything, the glory naught.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832

These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.

—Claude Monet, 1908

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

—John Locke, 1695

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.

—William Penn, 1693

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1928

Words pay no debts.

—William Shakespeare, 1601

There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

—Mark Twain, 1894

‘Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.

—Hesiod, c. 700 BC

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1755

A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.

—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987