Archive

Quotes

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

—Alexander Pope, 1709

There are people whom one loves immediately and forever. Even to know they are alive in the world with one is quite enough.

—Nancy Spain, 1956

Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.

—Robert Benchley, 1935

The young always have the same problem—how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their elders and copying one another.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

—Francis Bacon, 1605

The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.

—Paul Johnson, 1989

Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856

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

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

—L.P. Hartley, 1953

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

—Marianne Moore, 1935

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780

We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.

—Anna Sewell, 1877