What a torture to talk to filled heads that allow nothing from the outside to enter them.
—Joseph Joubert, 1807
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Quotes
Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1843Idolatry is the mother of all games.
—Novatian, c. 255My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.
—Benito Mussolini, 1929Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.
—Matsuo Basho, c. 1685As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
—Abraham Lincoln, c. 1858I am sure of this: that if everybody was to drink their bottle a day, there would not be half the disorders in the world there are now.
—Jane Austen, c. 1798If you steal, do not steal too much at a time. You may be arrested. Steal cleverly, little by little.
—Mobutu Sese Seko, 1991Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it—have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.
—James Russell Lowell, 1884No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.
—Emma Goldman, 1917A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
—Stendhal, 1822None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
—Pearl S. Buck, 1943Though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.
—Bion of Smyrna, c. 100 BC