The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself.
—Anna Jameson, 1846
Archive
Quotes
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. 1922Language is the archives of history.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844In my dreams I sleep with everybody.
—Anaïs Nin, 1933Some 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, 2008I 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, 1877Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
—George Santayana, c. 1905Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.
—Epictetus, c. 100All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.
—Virginia Woolf, 1931Water is the first principle of everything.
—Thales of Miletus, c. 600 BCRefrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.
—Czesław Miłosz, 1960