Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
—Miguel de Unamuno, 1913
Archive
Quotes
Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.
—Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1897God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
—J.M. Barrie, 1922Some to the common pulpits, and cry out / “Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!”
—William Shakespeare, c. 1599All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
—Havelock Ellis, 1921What is life but organized energy?
—Arthur C. Clarke, 1958If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706In tampering with the earth, we tamper with a mystery.
—Jonathan Schell, 2000What a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1852The atavistic urge toward danger persists and its satisfaction is called adventure.
—John Steinbeck, 1941The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.
—Ira Berkow, 1987I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
—Gustave Flaubert, 1871