Archive

Quotes

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

—Novatian, c. 255

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.

—Bhartrihari, c. 400

He who would have clear water should go to the fountainhead.

—Italian proverb

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

—Jane Austen, 1818

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971

War to the castles; peace to the cottages.

—Nicolas Chamfort, 1790

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

—Willa Cather, 1918

Better no law than no law enforced.

—Danish proverb

Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.

—Karl Kraus, 1912

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

The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.

—Théophile Gautier, c. 1835