Thanks be to God: since my leaving drinking of wine, I do find myself much better and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.
—Samuel Pepys, 1662
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Quotes
Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them; it is destiny which makes them prudent.
—Voltaire, 1764How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object.
—Charles Lamb, 1833I imagined it was more difficult to die.
—Louis XIV, 1715Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.
—Socrates, c. 430 BCDoes anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?
—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992No one makes a revolution by himself, and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.
—George Sand, 1851Men argue, nature acts.
—Voltaire, 1764The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.
—Derek Walcott, 1986All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCI have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.
—Walt Whitman, 1842I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.
—Cato the Elder, c. 184 BC