Appearances are a glimpse of the obscure.
—Anaxagoras, c. 450 BC
Archive
Quotes
The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.
—Aldous Huxley, 1956A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
—Christina Stead, 1938Friend! It is a common word, often lightly used. Like other good and beautiful things, it may be tarnished by careless handling.
—Harriet Jacobs, 1861No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.
—W.H. Auden, 1962Man punishes the action, but God the intention.
—Thomas Fuller, 1732The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1776The highest result of education is tolerance.
—Helen Keller, 1903It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.
—Leslie Jamison, 2014Sooner or later if the activity of the mind is restricted anywhere, it will cease to function even where it is allowed to be free.
—Edith Hamilton, 1930A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W.H. Auden, 1946Man is a troublesome animal and therefore is not very manageable.
—Plato, c. 349 BC