I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1855
Archive
Quotes
It’s the end of the world every day, for someone.
—Margaret Atwood, 2000If law and justice do not attain their ends, the people will be unable to move hand or foot.
—Confucius, c. 500God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.
—Maxim Gorky, 1913If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1513The fear of the Lord is true wisdom, and he who hath it not can in no way penetrate the true secrets of magic.
—Abraham the Jew, c. 1400There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BCSome memories are like lucky charms, talismans, one shouldn’t tell about them or they’ll lose their power.
—Iris Murdoch, 1985Wherever commerce prevails there will be an inequality of wealth, and wherever the latter does a simplicity of manners must decline.
—James Madison, 1783You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
—Joseph Conrad, 1900Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.
—Germaine Greer, 1970A great step toward independence is a good-humored stomach, one that is willing to endure rough treatment.
—Seneca the Younger, c. 60Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790