I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860
Archive
Quotes
What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
—William Law, 1728Your mind’s got to eat, too.
—Dambudzo Marechera, 1978There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.
—Veronica Wedgwood, 1946Appearances often are deceiving.
—Aesop, c. 550 BCMisfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
—George Eliot, 1876The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
—Erich Fromm, 1941There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
—Elias Canetti, 1960Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.
—Robert A. Heinlein, 1984Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school.
—Che Guevara, 1965A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1732