Quotes · Skopia

610 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Medium·Essay✕clear

Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

1920

★ 0.8

Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.

1981

★ 0.8

Essay · Biography

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of "touching" a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

G.K. Chesterton

1902

★ 0.9

Essay · Travel writing

It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.

1925

★ 0.9

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1805

★ 1.0

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

Unto This Last · 1860

★ 1.0

Essay · Philosophical literature

As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian rock.

1869

★ 1.0

A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself.

The Record Lie · 1920

★ 1.0

Essay · Satire

The critical period in matrimony is breakfast-time.

1935

★ 1.0

Essay · Philosophical literature

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

1937

★ 1.0

Essay · Philosophical literature

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

Bertrand Russell

1970

★ 1.0

Small is beautiful.

E.F. Schumacher

1973

★ 1.0

In reality there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

David Foster Wallace

2000

★ 1.0

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

2001

★ 1.0

Essay · Magazine

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?

2001

★ 1.0

Prosperity is not without many Feares and Distastes; and Adversity is not without Comforts and Hopes.

Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral · 1625

★ 1.1

Essay · Travel writing

Light (God's eldest daughter), is a principal beauty in a building.

Thomas Fuller (churchman)

The Holy State and the Profane State · 1642

★ 1.1

Essay · Economic literature

Nothing contributes so much to the prosperity and happiness of a country as high profits.

1822

★ 1.1

Essay · Magazine

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

1884

★ 1.1

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.

1920

★ 1.1

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