Alas! We are ridiculous animals.
—Horace Walpole, 1777
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Quotes
Just to fill the hour—that is happiness.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844Gambling is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.
—George Washington, 1783Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
—Anthony Burgess, 1972Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175The march of the human mind is slow.
—Edmund Burke, 1775Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1942The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
—B.F. Skinner, 1969Many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is down there that the sea folk live.
—Hans Christian Andersen, 1837The most may err as grossly as the few.
—John Dryden, 1681Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?
—Aristophanes, 423 BC