Archive

Quotes

The future...something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

—C.S. Lewis, 1941

“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

—Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1480

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

—Walter Pater, 1873

It costs a lot of money to be rich.

—Peter Boyle, 2002

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

—Samuel Johnson, 1759

Ashore it’s wine, women, and song; aboard it’s rum, bum, and concertina.

—British naval saying, c. 1800

Night affords the most convenient shade for works of darkness.

—John Taylor, 1750

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

—Lord Byron, 1812

What will not attract a man’s stare at sea?—a gull, a turtle, a flying fish!

—Richard Burton, 1883

Exchange is no robbery.

—German proverb

I have always been of the mind that in a democracy, manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie knife.

—James Russell Lowell, 1873