And to our age’s drowsy blood / Still shouts the inspiring sea.
—James Russell Lowell, 1848
Archive
Quotes
The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.
—Lester Bangs, 1971Go 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. 1685The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
—George Santayana, 1905Your piping-hot lie is the best of lies.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCThis is Year Zero.
—Pol Pot, 1975It is far, far better and much safer to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
—Agnes Repplier, 1916And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
—Walt Whitman, 1855He who laugheth too much, hath the nature of a fool; he that laugheth not at all, hath the nature of an old cat.
—Thomas Fuller, 1732A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
—Stendhal, 1822Friends are ourselves.
—John Donne, 1603The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
—Maya Angelou, 1986