Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.
—Willem de Kooning, 1949
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Quotes
I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.
—Groucho Marx, 1959What water gives, water takes away.
—Portuguese proverbWe wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.
—Joseph Addison, 1711Men take diseases, one of another. Therefore let men take heed of their company.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1600I 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, 1860The deed is everything, the glory naught.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
—Edmund Burke, 1765Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
—Herman Melville, 1849Thought depends absolutely on the stomach, but in spite of that, those who have the best stomachs are not the best thinkers.
—Voltaire, 1770A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
—Amiri Baraka, 1962Is all our fire of shipwreck wood?
—Robert Browning, 1862