Archive

Quotes

I count myself in nothing else so happy / As in a soul remembering my good friends.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1595

The life of spies is to know, not be known.

—George Herbert, c. 1621

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

—Thomas Mann, 1924

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.

—George Orwell, 1945

There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.

—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, 1989

Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.

—Emma Goldman, 1910

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

—James Thurber, 1955

Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.

—Samuel Johnson, 1771

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

—Thomas Hobbes, 1679

The gratitude is greater than the gift.

—Pierre Corneille, 1641

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

—Albert Einstein, 1936