Archive

Quotes

The money we have is the means to liberty; that which we pursue is the means to slavery.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, c. 1770

Though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.

—Bion of Smyrna, c. 100 BC

There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1665

Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrities when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves.

—Sarah Bernhardt, 1904

Resorting to the law to resolve a dispute is a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.

—Quentin Crisp, 1984

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.

—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955

There’s plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water.

—Sylvia Alice Earle, 1995

Those who are awake have a world that is one and common, but each of those who are asleep turns aside into his own particular world.

—Heraclitus, c. 500 BC

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939

A person who sees only fashion in fashion is a fool.

—Honoré de Balzac, 1830

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

—Pearl S. Buck, 1943

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.

—Elias Canetti, 1960