I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.
—Antonio Porchia, 1943
Archive
Quotes
A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
—Victor Hugo, 1862All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.
—Jack London, 1912Men were born to lie, and women to believe them.
—John Gay, 1728In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.
—Sammy Davis Jr., 1965It belongs to a nobleman to weep in an hour of disaster.
—Euripides, 412 BCEvery individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
—William James, 1902I had rather be in a state of misery and envied for my supposed happiness than in a state of happiness and pitied for my supposed misery.
—Elizabeth Inchbald, 1793If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
—Margaret Atwood, 2005Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.
—E.M. Forster, 1910We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.
—Karl Marx, 1847Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.
—Fanny Burney, 1782