Archive

Quotes

The brightest light burns the quickest.

—Olive Beatrice Muir, 1900

He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.

—E. R. Dodds, 1951

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1758

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.

—The Dhammapada, c. 400 BC

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

—Persius, c. 60

An old man is twice a child, and so is a drunken man.

—Plato, c. 360 BC

Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it. 

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1821

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

—Robert Wilson, 1991

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

Memory is the only
afterlife I can understand.

—Lisel Mueller, 1996

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

—George Eliot, 1876

There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.

—Rumi, c. 1250

Of all the creatures that breathe and creep on the surface of the earth, none is more to be pitied than man.

—Homer, c. 750 BC