Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817
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Quotes
There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580It would be madness, and inconsistency, to suppose that things which have never yet been performed can be performed without employing some hitherto untried means.
—Francis Bacon, 1620There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1790Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.
—Richard Krause, 1982You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
—Joseph Conrad, 1900Everyone lives by selling something.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1892It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1790To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714Shame on the soul, to falter on the road of life while the body still perseveres.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
—William Hazlitt, 1823Just to fill the hour—that is happiness.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844