Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
—George Santayana, c. 1905
Archive
Quotes
The life of a sailor is very unhealthy.
—Francis Galton, 1883There are times when reality becomes too complex for oral communication. But legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.
—Jean-Luc Godard, 1965For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.
—Herman Melville, 1851Great inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions, as it were, by the way, in the course of their everyday life.
—Elizabeth Charles, 1862The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.
—P.G. Wodehouse, 1929People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
—Francis Bacon, 1625Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938Doing research on the web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
—Roger Ebert, 1998At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896Peace is a natural effect of trade.
—Montesquieu, 1748The brain is an unreliable organ, it is monstrously great, monstrously developed. Swollen, like a goiter.
—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920