Archive

Quotes

Childhood has no forebodings—but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

—George Eliot, 1860

It belongs to a nobleman to weep in an hour of disaster.

—Euripides, 412 BC

Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that Indolence—indefeasible Indolence—is the true state of man.

—Charles Lamb, 1805

Communities do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1863

One thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

—William Shakespeare, 1603

Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.

—Norman Douglas, 1917

Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.

—Italo Calvino, 1957

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

—Andrea Dworkin, 1983

It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.

—Thucydides, 410 BC

And then, sir, there is this consideration: that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up and, claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

—Samuel Johnson, 1791

A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

—Jane Austen, 1815

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

—Will Self, 1994