As man disappears from sight, the land remains.
—Maori proverb
Archive
Quotes
The sleep of reason produces monsters.
—Francisco Goya, 1799There’s folks ’ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
—George Eliot, 1859Cows are among the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them—and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.
—Thomas De Quincey, 1821The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972Man and animals are really the conduit of food, the sepulcher of animals, and resting place of the dead, one causing the death of the other, making themselves the covering for the corruption of other dead bodies.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500That obtained in youth may endure like characters engraved in stones.
—Ibn Gabirol, 1040There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883Good fortune is light as a feather, but nobody knows how to hold it up. Misfortune is heavy as the earth, but nobody knows how to stay out of its way.
—Zhuangzi, c. 300 BCOther nations use “force”; we Britons alone use “might.”
—Evelyn Waugh, 1938Money is mourned with deeper sorrow than friends or kindred.
—Juvenal, 128Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
—William Hazlitt, 1819Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.