How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object.
—Charles Lamb, 1833
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Quotes
Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.
—Italo Calvino, 1957Being thus arrived in good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stale earth, their proper element.
—William Bradford, 1630Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, c. 1884God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
—John Lennon, 1970There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1600It 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, 1958When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight.
—Chinua Achebe, 1960The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.
—Alexander of Tralles, c. 600Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.
—Book of Job, c. 600 BC