To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.
—John Buchan, 1940
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Quotes
Men were born to lie, and women to believe them.
—John Gay, 1728Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.
—Jean Cocteau, 1947No poems can please long, nor live, that are written by water drinkers.
—Horace, 35 BCA fair complexion is unbecoming to a sailor: he ought to be swarthy from the waters of the sea and the rays of the sun.
—Ovid, c. 1 BCThe god of music dwelleth out of doors.
—Edith M. Thomas, 1887It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1790The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
—John Updike, 1963A friend in power is a friend lost.
—Henry Adams, 1905Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.
—Juvenal, c. 121A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
—Jane Austen, 1815For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
—Charles Baudelaire, c. 1865Travelers, poets, and liars are three words all of one significance.
—Richard Brathwaite, 1631