1910s

The Egoist · 1915

★ 7.1

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

T.S. Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock · 1915

★ 7.1

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Marthe Troly-Curtin

Phrynette Married · 1912

★ 6.9

Truth is the first casualty in war.

Ethel Snowden

Women and War · 1915

★ 6.9

Novel · Magazine · Modernist literature

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or reverie, he had heard their tale before.

The Egoist · 1915

★ 6.9

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce et Decorum Est · 1918

★ 6.9

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?

W.H. Davies

1911

★ 6.9

It's what we learn after we think we know it all that counts.

Frank McKinney Hubbard

1913

★ 6.9

To be born is to be wrecked on an island.

J.M. Barrie

1913

★ 6.9

Essay · Magazine

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.

Louis Brandeis

1913

★ 6.9

I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.

Jack London

1916

★ 6.9

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Jack London

1916

★ 6.7

Lecture · Psychological literature

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Sigmund Freud

Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis · 1917

★ 6.3

Speech · Autobiography and memoir

Life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head.

I want a girl just like the girl That married dear old dad.

Mark Twain's Autobiography · 1910

★ 6.2

Song

William Dillon

1911

★ 6.0

My center is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.

Ferdinand Foch

1914

★ 6.0

Sociology

God at bottom is nothing but an exalted father.

Sigmund Freud

Totem and Taboo · 1913

★ 5.5

Autobiography and memoir · Autobiography and memoir

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain · 1910

★ 5.5

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

O Pioneers! · 1913

★ 5.5

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky.

T.S. Eliot

1915

★ 5.5

My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

Araby · 1914

★ 5.4

I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man · 1915

★ 5.4

The world must be made safe for democracy.

Political literature · Historical literature

1917

★ 5.4

Freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Rosa Luxemburg

The Russian Revolution · 1919

★ 5.4

My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.

1910

★ 5.3

Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.

Joseph Conrad

Under Western Eyes · 1911

★ 5.3

Speech

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

1911

★ 5.3

Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me... Immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1913

★ 5.3

Psychological literature

If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success with it.

Sigmund Freud

1917

★ 5.3

Railway termini... Are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

E.M. Forster

Howards End · 1910

★ 5.2

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

Robert Frost

1914

★ 5.2

I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.

Sherwood Anderson

1919

★ 5.2

Poem · War poetry

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.

Rupert Brooke

The Soldier · 1914

★ 5.1

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

Sir Edward Grey

1914

★ 5.1

I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air.

Alan Seeger

1916

★ 5.1

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

Rupert Brooke

1916

★ 5.1

Courtroom speech · Speech

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, while there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Eugene Debs

1918

★ 5.1

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.

Hugh Keough

1919

★ 5.1

The only freedom the gods grant us Is this: to submit Of our own free will to their sovereignty We should do just that, Since only in the illusion of freedom Does freedom exist.

Fernando Pessoa

1914

★ 5.0

Our whole duty, for the present, at any rate, is summed up in this motto, "America first."

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

1915

★ 4.5

Essay · Philosophical literature

George Santayana

Introduction to Spinoza's Ethics · 1910

★ 4.4

If you want work well done, select a busy man.

Elbert Hubbard

1916

★ 4.4

To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life · 1912

★ 4.3

He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life's feast.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

Dubliners · 1914

★ 4.3

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

Towne v. Eisner · 1918

★ 4.3

When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis · 1915

★ 3.8

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1919

★ 3.8

The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

The various admirable movements in which I have been engaged have always developed among their members a large lunatic fringe.

1911

★ 3.7

Letter

1913

★ 3.7

We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it-for a little while.

O Pioneers! · 1913

★ 3.7

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

O Pioneers! · 1913

★ 3.7

Novel · Magazine · Modernist literature

The Egoist · 1915

★ 3.7

There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.

W. Somerset Maugham

Of Human Bondage · 1915

★ 3.7

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

The Song of the Lark · 1915

★ 3.7

No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.

1915

★ 3.7

America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.

Revolution do not stand still.

1916

★ 3.7

Rosa Luxemburg

1918

★ 3.7

There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

My Antonia · 1918

★ 3.7

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

My Antonia · 1918

★ 3.7

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

My Antonia · 1918

★ 3.7

If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.

1919

★ 3.7

O, who could have foretold That the heart grows old?

W.B. Yeats

1919

★ 3.7

Treatise

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

George Bernard Shaw

1910

★ 3.6

Essay · Philosophical literature

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

George Santayana

Introduction to Spinoza's Ethics · 1910

★ 3.6

Essay · Philosophical literature

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

George Santayana

Introduction to Spinoza's Ethics · 1910

★ 3.6

God made man, without man's consent, and made his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can't get around that fact. There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

1910

★ 3.6

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

The Mysterious Stranger · 1910

★ 3.6

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same.

If · 1910

★ 3.6

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!

If · 1910

★ 3.6

I that have not your faith, how shall I know That in the blinding light beyond the grave We’ll find so good a thing as that we have lost?

W.B. Yeats

1910

★ 3.6

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming.

1910

★ 3.6

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.

1910

★ 3.6

Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct.

D.H. Lawrence

1911

★ 3.6

A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Joseph Conrad

Under Western Eyes · 1911

★ 3.6

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

O Pioneers! · 1913

★ 3.6

To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

1914

★ 3.6

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

1914

★ 3.6

It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

W. Somerset Maugham

Of Human Bondage · 1915

★ 3.6

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again-but it finds a tougher surface.

Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.

The Song of the Lark · 1915

★ 3.6

Rabindranath Tagore

1916

★ 3.6

Call no man foe, but never love a stranger.

Stella Benson

This is the End · 1917

★ 3.6

We realize that the greatest things that remain to be done must be done with the whole world for stage and in cooperation with the wide and universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for those things.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Second Inaugural Address of Woodrow Wilson · 1917

★ 3.6

Play

George Bernard Shaw

1918

★ 3.6

Song · Great American songbook

A pretty girl is like a melody That haunts you night and day.

Irving Berlin

A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody · 1919

★ 3.6

Of all means to regeneration Remorse is surely the most wasteful. It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil.

E.M. Forster

Howards End · 1910

★ 3.5

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

1910

★ 3.5

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

Joseph Conrad

Under Western Eyes · 1911

★ 3.5

When a just cause reaches its flood-tide... Whatever stands in the way must fall before its overwhelming power.

Carrie Chapman Catt

1911

★ 3.5

Philosophical literature

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason.

Bertrand Russell

1912

★ 3.5

Psychological literature

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung

The Psychology of the Unconscious · 1912

★ 3.5

I drank the silence of God from a spring in the woods.

Georg Trakl

1912

★ 3.5

And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Thomas Hardy

1912

★ 3.5

There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that.

1912

★ 3.5

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

Miguel de Unamuno

1913

★ 3.5

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

Miguel de Unamuno

1913

★ 3.5

Speech

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.

1913

★ 3.5

These be Three silent things: The falling snow... The hour Before the dawn... The mouth of one Just dead.

Adelaide Crapsey

1915

★ 3.5

The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea.

James Elroy Flecker

1915

★ 3.5

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H.L. Mencken

1916

★ 3.5

Beauty for some provides escape, Who gain a happiness in eyeing The gorgeous buttocks of the ape Or autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

Aldous Huxley

1917

★ 3.5

Out where the handclasp's a little stronger, Out where the smile dwells a little longer, That's where the West begins.

Arthur Chapman

Out Where the West Begins · 1917

★ 3.5

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

When a man wanted to make a machine that would walk, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.

1917

★ 3.5

Play

Guillaume Apollinaire

1917

★ 3.5

A general association of nations must be formed... For the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

1918

★ 3.5

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

Demian · 1919

★ 3.5

One never reaches home... But wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.

Demian · 1919

★ 3.5

But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than nature and fate, if only for a few hours. And we can draw close to one another in times of need, understand and love one another, and live to comfort each other. And sometimes, when the black depths are silent, we can do even more. We can then be gods for moments, stretch out a commanding hand and create things which were not there before and which, when they are created, continue to live without us.

Gertrude · 1910

★ 3.5

If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.

Gertrude · 1910

★ 3.5

Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.

Cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use.

Gertrude · 1910

★ 3.5

Lecture

Adolf Loos

1910

★ 3.5

Scientific literature

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle-they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Alfred North Whitehead

An Introduction to Mathematics · 1911

★ 3.5

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Elbert Hubbard

1911

★ 3.5

Letter

Is there not a casual connection between the development of these huge, indomitable trusts and the horrible crimes now under investigation?... Is it not irony to speak of the equality of opportunity in a country cursed with their bigness?

Louis Brandeis

1911

★ 3.5

Among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

1912

★ 3.5

Nature writing

John Burroughs

1912

★ 3.5

Just have one more try-it's dead easy to die, It's the keeping-on-living that's hard.

Robert W. Service

1912

★ 3.5

Newspaper

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

Rebecca West

1913

★ 3.5

I gave my life for freedom-This I know: For those who bade me fight had told me so.

William Norman Ewer

1914

★ 3.5

Pamphlet · Political literature

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

James Connolly

1915

★ 3.5

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.

John McCrae

In Flanders Fields · 1915

★ 3.5

The fog comes On little cat feet. It sits looking Over harbour and city On silent haunches And then moves on.

Carl Sandburg

1916

★ 3.5

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

George Moore

1916

★ 3.5

Christ of his gentleness Thirsting and hungering, Walked in the wilderness; Soft words of grace He spoke Unto lost desert-folk That listened wondering.

Robert Graves

1916

★ 3.5

Democracy is not tearing down; it is a building up. It is not denial of the divine right of Kings; it supplements that claim with the assertion of the divine right of all men. It does not destroy; it fulfills. It is the consummation of all theories of government, to the spirit of which all the nations of the Earth must yield. It is the great constructive course of the ages.

Calvin Coolidge

1916

★ 3.5

I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way.

Edward Thomas

1917

★ 3.5

Newspaper

The power of the press is very great, but not so great as the power of suppress.

Alfred Harmsworth

1918

★ 3.5

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all.

Carl Sandburg

1918

★ 3.5

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.

Jean Cocteau

1918

★ 3.5

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.

Demian · 1919

★ 3.5

Love must not entreat... Or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.

Demian · 1919

★ 3.5

I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

Demian · 1919

★ 3.5

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing