Archive

Quotes

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

—Herodotus, 440 BC

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. 

—Zora Neale Hurston, 1942

The march of the human mind is slow.

—Edmund Burke, 1775

The mind of man is capable of anything.

—Guy de Maupassant, 1884

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent.

—Marcel Proust, 1919

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.

—Eugene V. Debs, 1918

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880

Hoping for new friendship from old enemies is / Like expecting to find a rose in a furnace.

—Muhammad Baqir Najm-i Sani, 1612

Death keeps no calendar.

—George Herbert, 1640

Fate leads the willing and drags along those who hang back.

—Cleanthes, c. 250 BC

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

—Robertson Davies, 1985

We need strength, we need energy, we need quickness, and we need brain in this country to turn it around.

—Donald Trump, 2015

If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

—Henry James, 1884