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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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.

G.K. Chesterton

1914

★ 3.6