Where shall I, of wandering weary, find my resting place at last?
—Heinrich Heine, 1827
Archive
Quotes
Death renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395Style is the image of character.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1789Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1942Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
—William Saroyan, 1943The past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—Zadie Smith, 2000Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1843It is more blessed to give than to receive.
—Acts of the Apostles, c. 80To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
—Roald Dahl, 1990Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.
—Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1897Music today is nothing more than the art of performing difficult pieces.
—Voltaire, 1759Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849