It is hard when nature does not respect your intentions, and she never does exactly respect them.
—Wendell Berry, 1985
Archive
Quotes
He who sings frightens away his ills.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605All the married heiresses I have known have shipwrecked.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.
—Juvenal, c. 125In a court of fowls, the cockroach never wins its case.
—Rwandan proverbEducation is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
—Joseph Stalin, 1934Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
—P.D. James, 1992All men recognize the right of revolution, that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1942Gambling is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.
—George Washington, 1783What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.
—Robert Burton, 1621Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it, and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1790