Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
—Roald Dahl, 1990
Archive
Quotes
There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
—Jonathan Swift, 1738A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
—Amiri Baraka, 1962“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.
—Basho, c. 1690It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.
—Francis Bacon, 1625Man’s great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes.
—Lewis Mumford, 1962Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
—Mark Twain, 1876Abstainer, n. A weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Your piping-hot lie is the best of lies.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCSic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.
—John Wilkes Booth, 1865