How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do.
—William James, 1902
Archive
Quotes
The history of the land has been written very largely in water.
—John Hodgdon Bradley Jr., 1935If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.
—Samuel Johnson, 1777You can steal a lot more with a computer than with a gun.
—Gina Smith, 1997One must love people a good deal whom one takes pains to convince or instruct.
—Mary de la Riviere Manley, 1720In the society of men, the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
—R.D. Laing, 1967We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849But look, our seas are what we make of them, full of fish or not, opaque or transparent, red or black, high or smooth, narrow or bankless—and we are ourselves sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves.
—Hélène Cixous, 1976The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957Moderation in all things.
—Terence, 166 BCNo man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
—Samuel Johnson, 1776I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
—Maxine Hong Kingston, 1976