Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.
—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC
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Quotes
It would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading.
—Virginia Woolf, 1924Friendship is not possible between two women, one of whom is very well dressed.
—Laurie Colwin, 1978Casting lots causes contentions to cease, and keeps the mighty apart.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCHome is wherever I go.
—Indira Gandhi, 1955Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.
—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820Power is so apt to be insolent, and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good terms.
—George Savile, c. 1690All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.
—Blaise Pascal, c. 1655What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.
—Erasmus, 1515In life our absent friend is far away: / But death may bring our friend exceeding near.
—Christina Rossetti, 1881The sea is mother-death, and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.
—Anne Sexton, 1971Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
—Hermann Hesse, 1950