I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.
—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900
Archive
Quotes
Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.
—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
—Edmund Burke, 1765Those 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 BCI wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am.
—Alice James, 1889Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833As the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.
—Chinua Achebe, 1958Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him.
—Book of Revelations, c. 90Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905What 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, 1621A friend who is very near and dear may in time become as useless as a relative.
—George Ade, 1902