Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1942
Archive
Quotes
Civilization, a much-abused word, stands for a high matter quite apart from telephones and electric lights.
—Edith Hamilton, 1930Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveler just returned from abroad.
—Jonathan Swift, c. 1730If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1843Do we want laurels for ourselves most, / Or most that no one else shall have any?
—Amy Lowell, 1922Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1758The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
—John Updike, 1963I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
—Michelangelo Antonioni, 1967We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
—Marcel Proust, c. 1922When the root lives on, the new leaves come back.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BCIt’s only the futility of the first flood that prevents God from sending a second.
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, c. 1794The Mughal’s nature is such that they demand miracles, but if a miracle were to be performed by some upright follower of our religion, they would say that it had been brought about by magic and sorcery. They would strike him down with spears or would stone him to death.
—Fr. Antonio Monserrate, 1590I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917