The pleasure we hold in esteem for the course of our lives ought to have a greater share of our time dedicated to it; we should refuse no occasion nor omit any opportunity of drinking, and always have it in our minds.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580
Archive
Quotes
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
—Elias Canetti, 1960Perish the universe, provided I have my revenge.
—Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, 1654The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
—Euripides, c. 415 BCIf you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
—Dorothy ParkerThis country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1861There never was a good war or a bad peace.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1773Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
—Anacharsis, c. 550 BCNewspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb, 1833The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent.
—Marcel Proust, 1919All the married heiresses I have known have shipwrecked.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880All the daughters of music shall be brought low.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 400 BCAny city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.
—Plato, c. 378 BC