Archive

Quotes

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

—Thomas Paine, 1803

Man is merely a more perfect animal than the rest. He reasons better.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1816

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

—Barbara Kingsolver, 1990

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

—Samuel Johnson, 1771

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.

—B.F. Skinner, 1969

There be beasts that, at a year old, observe more, and pursue that which is for their good more prudently, than a child can do at ten.

—Thomas Hobbes, 1651

An ugly sight, a man who’s afraid. 

—Jean Anouilh, 1944

To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

—William Hazlitt, 1823

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

—Virginia Woolf, 1921

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

—William Blake, c. 1803

If I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.

—John Donne, 1623

A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832

The fear of war is worse than war itself.

—Seneca, c. 50