I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.
—Lord Byron, 1817
Archive
Quotes
To 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. 1872Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.
There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.
—Homer, c. 750 BCKnowledge itself is power.
—Francis Bacon, 1597There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.
—Anthony Trollope, 1862Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
—Miguel de Unamuno, 1913The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.
—André Gide, 1927If the people be the governors, who shall be governed?
—John Cotton, c. 1636Colonialism has meant selling our ore and being left with the holes.
—Samora Moisés Machel, c. 1976He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1786Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1923I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”
—Michel Serres, 1982