What reason weaves, by passion is undone.
—Alexander Pope, 1972
Archive
Quotes
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty, and death of public opinion.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1902The fox knows lots of tricks, the hedgehog only one—but it’s a winner.
—Archilochus, c. 650 BCSpring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.
—Rachel Carson, 1962Education—a debt due from present to future generations.
—George Peabody, 1852A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W.H. Auden, 1946Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.
—Simon Hoggart, 1990Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
—Susan Sontag, 1963Seafarers go to sleep in the evening not knowing whether they will find themselves at the bottom of the sea the next morning.
—Jean de Joinville, c. 1305The sea hath fish for every man.
—William Camden, 1605If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
—Francis Bacon, 1625Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.
—Joan Didion, 2005