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Quotes

Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

—T.S. Eliot, 1911

When poets don’t know what to say and have completely given up on the play, just like a finger, they lift the machine and the spectators are satisfied.

—Antiphanes, c. 350 BC

Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.

—Horace Walpole, 1745

The noblest kind of retribution is not to become like your enemy.

—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175

In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of wisdom and should not be done.

—Confucius, c. 500 BC

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

We never are definitely right; we can only be sure we are wrong.

—Richard P. Feynman, 1965

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1938

Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

—Winston Churchill, 1943

One’s friends are divided into two classes, those one knows because one must and those one knows because one mustn’t.

—Sybil Taylor, 1922

The civilized man has built a coach but has lost the use of his feet.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

As usual, what we call “progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

—Havelock Ellis, 1914