My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968
Archive
Quotes
Is all our fire of shipwreck wood?
—Robert Browning, 1862Man 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. 217The money market is to a commercial nation what the heart is to man.
—William Pitt, 1805At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
—Søren Kierkegaard, 1850A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
—Arthur Miller, 1961It is very foolish to attack one’s enemy openly if one can injure him in secret.
—Giambattista Giraldi, 1543To 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. 1872More 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, 1943The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
—Steve Biko, 1971He who would be happy should stay at home.
—Greek proverbThe 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, 1870Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling.
—Philip Sidney, 1582