Reality is always the foe of famous names.
—Petrarch, 1337
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Quotes
I curse the night, yet doth from day me hide.
—William Drummond, 1616A woman’s greatest glory is to be little talked about by men, whether for good or ill.
—Pericles, c. 450 BCLet us have peace, but let us have liberty, law, and justice first.
—Frederick Douglass, 1878When I do a show, the whole show revolves around me, and if I don’t show up, they can just forget it.
—Ethel Merman, c. 1955The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972A sick child is always the mother’s property; her own feelings generally make it so.
—Jane Austen, 1816Punishment is a sort of medicine.
—Aristotle, c. 340 BCThe brightest light burns the quickest.
—Olive Beatrice Muir, 1900The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.
—Ferdinand Magellan, c. 1510They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
—Francis Bacon, 1605Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
—E.B. White, 1944Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
—Simone Weil, 1947