The righteous know the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 500 BC
Archive
Quotes
God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.
—Maxim Gorky, 1913Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 63 BCA win always seems shallow: it is the loss that is so profound and suggests nasty infinities.
—E.M. Forster, 1919The sole business of a seaman onshore who has to go to sea again is to take as much pleasure as he can.
—Leigh Hunt, 1820The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.
—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1858The brain is an unreliable organ, it is monstrously great, monstrously developed. Swollen, like a goiter.
—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.
—William Faulkner, 1958In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
—Colette, 1944Power is so apt to be insolent, and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good terms.
—George Savile, c. 1690There’s folks ’ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
—George Eliot, 1859Men worry over the great number of diseases, while doctors worry over the scarcity of effective remedies.
—Bian Qiao, c. 500 BC