Archive

Quotes

A good dog, sir, deserves a good bone.

—Ben Jonson, 1633

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

—W.H. Auden, 1947

Just to fill the hour—that is happiness.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

Who lives in fear will never be a free man.

—Horace, 19 BC

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

—William Empson, 1928

A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

—Jonathan Swift, 1726

Life’s no resting, but a moving.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1795

The god of music dwelleth out of doors.

—Edith M. Thomas, 1887

Cows are among the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them—and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.

—Thomas De Quincey, 1821

For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

—Jane Austen, 1813

That which the sober man keeps in his breast, the drunken man lets out at the lips. Astute people, when they want to ascertain a man’s true character, make him drunk.

—Martin Luther, 1569