Labor is no disgrace.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BC
Archive
Quotes
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one.
—Simone Weil, 1943I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”
—Michel Serres, 1982The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
—Saint Augustine, c. 390We seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BCWhat can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
—William Law, 1728Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959Jests and scoffs do lessen majesty and greatness and should be far from great personages and men of wisdom.
—Henry Peacham, 1622It is so difficult not to become vain about one’s own good luck.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1963The mere existence of nuclear weapons by the thousands is an incontrovertible sign of human insanity.
—Isaac Asimov, 1988The mind of man is capable of anything.
—Guy de Maupassant, 1884The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—André Breton, 1937