My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.
—John Quincy Adams, 1844
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Quotes
It costs a lot of money to be rich.
—Peter Boyle, 2002All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.
—Epictetus, c. 110We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774Now there is fame! Of all—hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public—fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation by God of the artist. It is sad. It is true.
—Pablo Picasso, c. 1961The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.
—Francis Bacon, 1605Trade is a social act.
—John Stuart Mill, 1859Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
—Edmund Burke, 1765Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.
—Horace Walpole, 1745As matron and mistress will differ in temper and tone, so will the friend be distinct from the faithless parasite.
—Horace, c. 20 BCTime is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.
—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.
—Henry James, 1884