Archive

Quotes

It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for a while their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

—Maya Angelou, 2011

Dread attends the unknown.

—Nadine Gordimer, 1998

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

—Anthony Burgess, 1964

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

—François Rabelais, 1533

Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 45 BC

The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.

—Molière, 1670

Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

—Miguel de Unamuno, 1913

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

—Ernest Hemingway, 1929

Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887

A crowded police court docket is the surest sign that trade is brisk and money plenty.

—Mark Twain, 1872

We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.

—Winston Churchill, 1948

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

—Sigmund Freud, 1930