Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
—George Santayana, c. 1905
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Quotes
The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.
—François Guizot, 1830Diseases, at least many of them, are like human beings. They are born, they flourish, and they die.
—David Riesman, 1937The purest joy is to live without disguise, unconstrained by the ties of a grave reputation.
—Al-Hariri, c. 1108All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCThe more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.
—Alexander Hamilton, 1787Our entire history is merely the history of the waking life of man; nobody has yet considered the history of his sleeping life.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, c. 1780Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one.
—Simone Weil, 1943The true art of memory is the art of attention.
—Samuel Johnson, 1759Like a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BC