Archive

Quotes

A merchant shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong.

—Ecclesiasticus, c. 180 BC

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773

Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.

—Tertullian, c. 217

I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.

—Groucho Marx, 1959

What is outside my mind means nothing to it.

—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1774

What mighty contests rise from trivial things.

—Alexander Pope, 1712

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

—Francis Bacon, 1605

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of these two has the grander view?

—Victor Hugo, 1862

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

—E.B. White, 1977

God never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, that he might make the message clear for them.

—The Qur’an, c. 620

Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

—T.S. Eliot, 1911

The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.

—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843