Many who court death have no desire to wed her. —Willaim H. Gass, 1972
The liar has many friends and leads an existence of great loneliness.
—Adrienne Rich, 1977
The line between being lonely and being surrounded is porous, and the states are often simultaneous. —Leslie Jamison, 2019
Educating yourself in public is painful, but the lessons stick.
—Peter Schjeldahl, 2019
History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. —Martin Luther King, 1963
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. —Martin Luther King, 1963
What the whole community comes to believe grasps the individual as in a vice.
—William James
Religion is not a safeguard against fear, but a parasite on it. [Summary of Hobbes’ views] —H. R. Trevor-Roper, 1945
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. —Lewis Thomas, 1979
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. —George Orwell, 1949
Sorry. I don’t understand the word sorry. —Computer error message.
The ditch itself will pace our labors. —Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo, 1988, p. 3
Plans are worthless, planning is invaluable. —Dwight Eisenhower
The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1928
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. —G. K. Chesterton, 1901
We are invariably well prepared to fight the previous war.
—Lewis Namier, 1941
Much of what we dread is really due to the indistinctiveness of outline.
—Mark Rutherford, 1900
The devil is a citizen of every country, but only in our own are we in constant peril of an introduction to him. —Ambrose Bierce, 1902
There is nothing so cruel as panic. —Robert Louis Stevenson, 1878
I think the breaking wave of the present tense is always accompanied by the whitecap of panic.
– Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, p 22, 2005
We take the hue of passion of those who are about us, or, it may be, the complementary color. —T. H. Huxley, 1894
The greater part of mankind are gay or serious by infection, and follow without resistance the attraction of example. —Samuel Johnson, 1751
The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination. —John Henry Newman
Nothing keeps so well as a decoction of spleen.
—William Hazlitt, 1826
Most people complain of fortune, few of nature; and the kinder they think the latter has been to them, the more they murmur at what they call the injustice of the former. —Lord Chesterfield, 1755
Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal. —William Hazlitt, 1826
Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action.
—William Hazlitt, 1826
Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men. —William Hazlitt, 1826
There is nothing so mysterious as a fact clearly described. —Gary Winogrand
“[The paranoid] style has much more to do with how things are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. —Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 1964
It is the small inability to handicap odds which is family to the romantic, the desperate and the insane.
– Norman Mailer, An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, p 322, 1962
Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives. —Thomas Browne, 1650
It may prove more easy to dream of giants than pygmies. —Thomas Browne, 1650
A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a tempest. —Thomas Browne, 1650
Vanity often cooperates with curiosity. —Samuel Johnson, 1751
We are a haunted race, fleeing from silence and great spaces, feeling safe only when surrounded by warm comprehensible, chattering humanity like ourselves.
—Rose Macaulay 1926
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