Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body, to try the manners of different nations, to hear the chimes at midnight.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881
Archive
Quotes
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
—Chinese proverbAll the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933I count myself in nothing else so happy / As in a soul remembering my good friends.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1595To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
—Walter Pater, 1873I’ve dreamed enough to have a drink.
—François Rabelais, 1546We are as near to heaven by sea as by land!
—Humphrey Gilbert, 1583Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
—Susan Sontag, 1963The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.
—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955Are we not ourselves nature, nature without end?
—Stanisław Lem, 1961Man is a troublesome animal and therefore is not very manageable.
—Plato, c. 349 BCTelevision has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.
—Oliver Cromwell, 1658