I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1902
Archive
Quotes
There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BCI wants to make your flesh creep.
—Charles Dickens, 1837I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
—Susan Sontag, 1977Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.
—Robert P. Hudson, 1983Alcohol is the monarch of liquids.
—Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1825The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.
—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
—Herbert Hoover, 1936Of all objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea or ocean. A troubled ocean, to a man who sails upon it, is, I think, the biggest object that he can see in motion, and consequently gives his imagination one of the highest kinds of pleasure that can arise from greatness.
—Joseph Addison, 1712A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
—Arthur Miller, 1961Every house: temple, empire, school.
—Joseph Joubert, 1800On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, “I would stay here and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”
—Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, 1989