Sourced and curated.

A man who entertains in his mind any political doctrine, except as a means of improving the condition of his fellows, I regard as a political intriguer, a charlatan, and a conjuror.

Anthony Trollope

1883

★ 0.9

Words have weight, sound, and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

W. Somerset Maugham

1948

★ 0.9

Sculpture should walk on the tips of its toes, unostentatious, unpretentious, and light as the spoor of an animal in snow.

Jean Arp

★ 0.9

It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.

Edward Gibbon

1794

★ 1.0

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

The Education of Henry Adams · 1907

★ 1.0

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

Frank Lloyd Wright

1932

★ 1.0

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking · 2005

★ 1.0

Autobiography and memoir · Religious literature

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant Religion.

Sir Thomas Browne

Religio Medici · 1643

★ 1.1

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

The Education of Henry Adams · 1907

★ 1.1

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

1907

★ 1.1

We are here not because we are law-breakers. We are here in our efforts to become law-makers.

Emmeline Pankhurst

1914

★ 1.1

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while.

Aleister Crowley

1929

★ 1.1

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations... The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

Winston Churchill

1930

★ 1.1

I was told that desire for learning in women was against the will of God.

Mary Butts

1937

★ 1.1

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo-obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Angela Davis

1974

★ 1.1

Justice and judgment lie often a world apart.

Emmeline Pankhurst

1914

★ 1.2

Wise people... Are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations.

Henry Ford

1922

★ 1.2

It's easy to be independent when you've got money. But to be independent when you haven't got a thing-that's the Lord's test.

Mahalia Jackson

1966

★ 1.2

In love, the only safety lies in flight.

Napoleon Bonaparte

1820

★ 1.3

Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 1.4

I have had a good many more uplifting thoughts, creative and expansive visions-while soaking in comfortable baths or drying myself after bracing showers-in well-equipped American bathrooms than I have ever had in any cathedral.

Edmund Wilson

1956

★ 1.7

Nature writing · Autobiography and memoir

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.

Henry Beston

1928

★ 1.8

You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry. Don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.

Walter Hagen

1956

★ 1.8

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

Jim Bouton

1970

★ 1.8

My feelings are too intense. I hate bitterly, I love too exaltingly, I pity to extravagantly, I hurt too painfully. We American blacks call that "soul."

Chester Himes

1972

★ 1.8

Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don’t know how awful it is till you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die.

Roald Dahl

1984

★ 1.8

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may-light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

John Constable

★ 1.8

One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

The Education of Henry Adams · 1907

★ 1.9

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Man's Search for Meaning · 1946

★ 1.9

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

Man's Search for Meaning · 1946

★ 1.9

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.

Man's Search for Meaning · 1946

★ 1.9

A good plan violenty executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

General George S. Patton

1947

★ 1.9

Cocaine habit-forming? Of course not. I ought to know. I've been using it for years.

Tallulah Bankhead

1952

★ 1.9

Huey P. Newton

1973

★ 1.9

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Maxine Hong Kingston

1976

★ 1.9

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

John Updike

1989

★ 1.9

Being alone and liking it is, for a woman, an act of treachery, and infidelity far more threatening than adultery.

Molly Haskell

1999

★ 1.9

There seems to be a general overall pattern in most lives, that nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden everything happens.

Fay Weldon

2002

★ 1.9

You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then when you have the chance to do it better refuse to go near it.

Vaclav Havel

2007

★ 1.9

Autobiography and memoir · Religious literature

All things are artificiall, for nature is the Art of God.

Sir Thomas Browne

1643

★ 1.9

The abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.

Edward Gibbon

1794

★ 1.9

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1817

★ 1.9

Moments of crisis produce in man a redoubling of life.

Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand

1850

★ 1.9

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

The Education of Henry Adams · 1907

★ 1.9

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

The Education of Henry Adams · 1907

★ 1.9

Rob him of his illusions, and man would perish of very weariness and despair.

Anatole France

1922

★ 1.9

There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians.

Robert Graves

Goodbye to All That · 1929

★ 1.9

It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.

Leon Trotsky

1930

★ 1.9

It is by crawling on the face of it that one learns a country.

Evelyn Waugh

1934

★ 1.9

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader.

Albert Einstein

1943

★ 1.9

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.

Man's Search for Meaning · 1946

★ 1.9

When we are no longer able to change a situation... We are challenged to change ourselves.

Man's Search for Meaning · 1946

★ 1.9

The test of civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Pearl S. Buck

1954

★ 1.9

The Marshall Plan will go down in history as one of America's greatest contributions to the peace of the world.

Harry Truman

1955

★ 1.9

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Carl Jung

1962

★ 1.9

The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

Wole Soyinka

1972

★ 1.9

People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television—you don't feel anything.

Andy Warhol

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) · 1975

★ 1.9

A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.

Akio Morita

1986

★ 1.9