After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams.
—E.M. Cioran, 1949
Archive
Quotes
Imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
—Henry Ward Beecher, 1887What is outside my mind means nothing to it.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170Your body is the church where nature asks to be reverenced.
—Marquis de Sade, 1797Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.
—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.
—Thomas Hughes, 1857Some men never recover from education.
—Oliver St. John Gogarty, 1954Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.
—Blaise Pascal, c. 1640Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?
—Alfred Hitchcock, 1962Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.
—Henry George, 1879The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.
—Herodotus, c. 440 BC