Archive

Quotes

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

Is all our fire of shipwreck wood?

—Robert Browning, 1862

Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.

—Tertullian, c. 217

The money market is to a commercial nation what the heart is to man.

—William Pitt, 1805

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

—Søren Kierkegaard, 1850

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

—Arthur Miller, 1961

It is very foolish to attack one’s enemy openly if one can injure him in secret.

—Giambattista Giraldi, 1543

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

—George Eliot, c. 1872

More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling—it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.

—Gertrude Stein, 1943

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

—Steve Biko, 1971

He who would be happy should stay at home.

—Greek proverb

The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870

Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling.

—Philip Sidney, 1582