Archive

Quotes

If you have any soul worth expressing, it will show itself in your singing.

—John Ruskin, 1865

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1735

There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.

—Booth Tarkington, 1914

I have often been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire.

—Thucydides, c. 404 BC

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

—Sigmund Freud, 1930

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

—Iris Murdoch, 1974

As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.

—David Sedaris, 1997

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.

—Pablo Picasso, 1929

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

—Herodotus, 440 BC

The envious die not once, but as often as the envied win applause.

—Baltasar Gracián, 1647

Men are able to assist fortune but not to thwart her. They can weave her designs, but they cannot destroy them.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, 1531

Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

—Martin Oppenheimer, 1969

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live.

—Anatole Broyard, 1989