Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
—Iris Murdoch, 1974
Archive
Quotes
Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or racial hatred. To me all men are equal; there are flatheads everywhere and I despise them all equally.
—Karl Kraus, 1909Journalists belong in the gutter, because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.
—Gerald Priestland, 1988Like a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BCSo many men, so many opinions.
—Terence, 161 BCDeath and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Imagine 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 first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
—Euripides, c. 415 BCI have often been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire.
—Thucydides, c. 404 BCThe human working stock is of interest only insofar as it is profitable.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1970If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
—Aldous Huxley, 1926Our entire history is merely the history of the waking life of man; nobody has yet considered the history of his sleeping life.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, c. 1780There is no small pleasure in sweet water.
—Ovid, c. 10