Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
—Anthony Burgess, 1964
Archive
Quotes
If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
—Raymond Chandler, 1945I imagined it was more difficult to die.
—Louis XIV, 1715In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.
—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BCWhen a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.
—Francis Bacon, 1625History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.
—Epictetus, c. 110I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
—Maxine Hong Kingston, 1976There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction which inclines every man first to hope and then to believe that nature has given him something peculiar to himself.
—Samuel Johnson, 1763When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
—Chinese proverbEvery man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851