The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870
Archive
Quotes
Traveling is like gambling: it is ever connected with winning and losing, and generally where least expected we receive more or less than we hoped for.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1797Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
—Aleister Crowley, 1904Secrecy lies at the very core of power.
—Elias Canetti, 1960Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000Everyone 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, 1944Credulity forges more miracles than trickery could invent.
—Joseph Joubert, 1811The brightest light burns the quickest.
—Olive Beatrice Muir, 1900Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.
—Aphra Behn, 1677When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”
—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911Alcohol is the monarch of liquids.
—Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1825We should always presume the disease to be curable until its own nature proves it otherwise.
—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845