Seek not water, only show you are thirsty, / That water may spring up all around you.
—Rumi, c. 1260
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Quotes
The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.
—Donald Barthelme, 1964It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for a while their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.
—Maya Angelou, 2011I can’t see (or feel) the conflict between love and religion. To me they’re the same thing.
—Elizabeth Bowen, c. 1970I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1816A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.
—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
—Margaret Atwood, 2005If 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, 1884The life of a sailor is very unhealthy.
—Francis Galton, 1883All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849The mere existence of nuclear weapons by the thousands is an incontrovertible sign of human insanity.
—Isaac Asimov, 1988Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
—E.M. Forster, 1951Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1938