My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1967
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Quotes
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCWithout virtue, both riches and honor, to me, seem like the passing cloud.
—Confucius, c. 350 BCI sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
—Albert Camus, 1957The boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage.
—Plato, c. 348 BCA dissolute and intemperate youth hands down the body to old age in a worn-out state.
—Cicero, 44 BCThe thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.
—George Gershwin, 1933It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
—Victor Hugo, 1862The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.
—Carl Sandburg, 1934I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.
—Leonard Cohen, 1970