I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860
Archive
Quotes
I think we are inexterminable, like flies and bedbugs.
—Robert Frost, 1959Man is merely a more perfect animal than the rest. He reasons better.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1816The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.
—Lewis Strauss, 1954We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969Most vegetarians I ever saw looked enough like their food to be classed as cannibals.
—Finley Peter Dunne, 1900Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.
—André Gide, 1897Life is the art of being well deceived.
—William Hazlitt, c. 1817Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
—Saint Augustine, c. 400It is easy to distinguish between the joking that reflects good breeding and that which is coarse—the one, if aired at an apposite moment of mental relaxation, is becoming in the most serious of men, whereas the other is unworthy of any free person, if the content is indecent or the expression obscene.
—Cicero, c. 44 BC“I think, therefore I am” is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
—Milan Kundera, 1990I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.
—Xenocrates, c. 350 BC