The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1911
Archive
Quotes
A merchant may, perhaps, be a man of an enlarged mind, but there is nothing in trade connected with an enlarged mind.
—Samuel Johnson, 1773The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1929I never practice, I always play.
—Wanda Landowska, 1953Soldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer.
—William Cecil, Lord Burghley, c. 1555A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.
—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
—Willa Cather, 1918An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1746Everyone lives by selling something.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1892Water its living strength first shows, / When obstacles its course oppose.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1815Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCThe world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1776