Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
—D.H. Lawrence, 1920
Archive
Quotes
No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706Every ass thinks himself worthy to stand with the king’s horses.
—Gnomologia, 1732Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
—Pericles, c. 431 BCRecreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.
—Thomas Gouge, 1672I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860Death renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.
—Ferdinand Magellan, c. 1510Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
—Carl Sandburg, 1936The land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.
—The BibleHe who would be happy should stay at home.
—Greek proverb