All those who suffer in the world do so because of their desire for their own happiness.
—Shantideva, c. 750
Archive
Quotes
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, 1726The law is not the same at morning and at night.
—George Herbert, c. 1633The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
—Theodor Adorno, 1951It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.
—Oliver Cromwell, 1658Emigration is easy, but immigration is something else. To flee, yes; but to be accepted?
—Victoria Wolff, 1943Abstainer, n. A weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906How gloriously legible are the constellations of the heavens!
—Anthony Trollope, 1859Everyone 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, 1944I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
—Anaïs Nin, 1950Courage and grace is a formidable mixture. The only place to see it is in the bullring.
—Marlene Dietrich, 1962Exchange is no robbery.
—German proverbAn old man is twice a child, and so is a drunken man.
—Plato, c. 360 BC