Archive

Quotes

The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself.

—Anna Jameson, 1846

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

—Marcel Proust, c. 1922

Language is the archives of history.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

In my dreams I sleep with everybody.

—Anaïs Nin, 1933

Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying.

—Barbara Ehrenreich, 2008

I never yet could make out why men are so fond of hunting; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields—and all for a hare or a fox or a stag that they could get more easily some other way.

—Anna Sewell, 1877

Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

—George Santayana, c. 1905

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

—Epictetus, c. 100

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

—Al Smith, 1933

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838

I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.

—Virginia Woolf, 1931

Water is the first principle of everything.

—Thales of Miletus, c. 600 BC

Refrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.

—Czesław Miłosz, 1960