An old man is twice a child, and so is a drunken man.
—Plato, c. 360 BC
Archive
Quotes
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
—Rebecca West, 1939The mind is not, I know, a highway but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.
—Margaret Fuller, 1844The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 43 BCThe power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870Nature never jests.
—Albrecht von Haller, 1751I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.
—Virginia Woolf, 1931Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Luck is believing you’re lucky.
—William Carlos Williams, 1947The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature—and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
—Jane Austen, 1815Hunting is all that’s worth living for—all time is lost what is not spent in hunting—it is like the air we breathe—if we have it not we die—it’s the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt.
—Robert Smith Surtees, 1843Secrecy lies at the very core of power.
—Elias Canetti, 1960