Archive

Quotes

The future...something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

—C.S. Lewis, 1941

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

—Pausanias, c. 450 BC

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BC

Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment.

—Dorothy M. Richardson, 1923

Some to the common pulpits, and cry out / “Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!”

—William Shakespeare, c. 1599

I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first.

—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

—Barbara Ward, 1972

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”

—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911

In every ill turn of fortune, the most unhappy sort of unfortunate man is the one who has been happy.

—Boethius, c. 520

The planet keeps to the astronomer’s timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.

—John Henry Poynting, 1899

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all.

—Eva Perón, 1949

Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1944

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

—James Madison, 1794