The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.
—Édouard Manet, c. 1860
Archive
Quotes
One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580Attend to earth,
for it is to earth that kings are truly wedded.
Money is mourned with deeper sorrow than friends or kindred.
—Juvenal, 128Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.
—Gertrude Stein, 1914It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1790There is nothing sillier than a silly laugh.
—Catullus, c. 60 BCGreat inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions, as it were, by the way, in the course of their everyday life.
—Elizabeth Charles, 1862Just to fill the hour—that is happiness.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that Indolence—indefeasible Indolence—is the true state of man.
—Charles Lamb, 1805The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.
—Hunter S. Thompson, 1971I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.
—Diane Arbus, c. 1950Whoever expects to walk peacefully in the world must be money’s guest.
—Norman O. Brown, 1959