Recreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.
—Thomas Gouge, 1672
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Quotes
The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
—Agnes Repplier, 1929Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
—Jean Genet, 1986’Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables?
—Thomas Browne, 1642Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1940The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.
—Yves Saint Laurent, 1978One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580Governments are not overthrown by the poor, who have no power, but by the rich—when they are insulted by their inferiors and cannot obtain justice.
—Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BCIn settling an island, the first building erected by a Spaniard will be a church, by a Frenchman a fort, by a Dutchman a warehouse, and by an Englishman an alehouse.
—Francis Grose, 1787You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
—Joseph Conrad, 1900What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830Some memories are like lucky charms, talismans, one shouldn’t tell about them or they’ll lose their power.
—Iris Murdoch, 1985Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
—Jane Austen, 1811