The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.
—Horace, c. 25 BC
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Quotes
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
—Albert Camus, c. 1940Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
—George Eliot, 1866Everyone 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, 1944Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and, looking at each other with grief and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.
—Blaise Pascal, 1669The root of the kingdom is in the State. The root of the State is in the family. The root of the family is in the person of its Head.
—Mencius, c. 270 BCThe sole business of a seaman onshore who has to go to sea again is to take as much pleasure as he can.
—Leigh Hunt, 1820Nobody, sir, dies willingly.
—Antiphanes, c. 370 BCMadness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough.
—R.D. Laing, 1967It is very foolish to attack one’s enemy openly if one can injure him in secret.
—Giambattista Giraldi, 1543The sea serves the pirate as well as the trader.
—Prudentius, c. 405It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1790