I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.
—Thomas Paine, 1803
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Quotes
The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—André Breton, 1937Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the grand climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
—Jean Baudrillard, 1987The less a man knows about the past and the present, the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.
—Sigmund Freud, 1927Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
—John F. Kennedy, 1962The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.
—Lester Bangs, 1971There is no blindness more insidious, more fatal, than this race for profit.
—Helen Keller, 1928Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
—Martin Heidegger, 1949Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.
—James Joyce, 1922What one man can invent another can discover.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1905There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.
—John Locke, 1689The legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872