To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891
Archive
Quotes
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty, and death of public opinion.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1902Style is the image of character.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1789Childhood has no forebodings—but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
—George Eliot, 1860Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1962The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.
—Robert Burton, 1621Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1940Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1758If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.
—John Wilkes Booth, 1865The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851