Is this dying? Is this all? Is this all that I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this! I can bear it!
—Cotton Mather, 1728
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Quotes
What hath night to do with sleep?
—John Milton, 1637Do we want laurels for ourselves most, / Or most that no one else shall have any?
—Amy Lowell, 1922I have always found it in mine own experience an easier matter to devise many and profitable inventions than to dispose of one of them to the good of the author himself.
—Hugh Plat, 1595A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.
—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.
—Zadie Smith, 2000It raineth every day, and the weather represents our tearful despair on a large scale.
—Mary Boykin Chesnut, 1865Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that Indolence—indefeasible Indolence—is the true state of man.
—Charles Lamb, 1805My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.
—Frederick the Great, c. 1770The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and, secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.
—Robert G. Ingersoll, 1879We do not suffer by accident.
—Jane Austen, 1813As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
—Abraham Lincoln, c. 1858Thought depends absolutely on the stomach, but in spite of that, those who have the best stomachs are not the best thinkers.
—Voltaire, 1770