There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714
Archive
Quotes
An honest man is all right even if he’s an idiot…but a crook must have brains.
—Maxim Gorky, 1902I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
—Gore Vidal, 1973Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1890In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580I have loved war too well.
—Louis XIV, 1715The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
—Bertrand Russell, 1938Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable desire to seek the truth.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BCThe transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.
—William James, 1902Friends are fictions founded on some single momentary experience.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1864Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things—but each according to its nature—and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1821