Is all our fire of shipwreck wood?
—Robert Browning, 1862
Archive
Quotes
If not us, who? If not now, when?
—Czech slogan, 1989’Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables?
—Thomas Browne, 1642He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
—Francis Bacon, 1625We are to go to law never to revenge, but only to repair.
—Samuel Pepys, 1661An ape will be an ape, though clad in purple.
—Erasmus, 1511We get a deal o’ useless things about us, only because we’ve got the money to spend.
—George Eliot, 1860When you drink water, think of its source.
—Chinese proverbCan you take your country with you on the soles of your shoes?
—Georg Büchner, 1835To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.
—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957We 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. 1922Friends are ourselves.
—John Donne, 1603