Quotes · Skopia

10,075 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

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

Religious literature

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

James George Frazer

1922

★ 0.8

I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it walks; I wish I liked the way it talks; And when I'm introduced to one I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

Walter Alexander Raleigh

1923

★ 0.8

Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature-subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today... The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.

1925

★ 0.8

Fine art can only be defined as exclusive, negative, absolute and timeless. It is not practical, useful, related, applicable, or subservient to anything else.

1957

★ 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

Personal journal

Usually the people who are the most generous are the people who have the least to give. I learned this first hand as a newspaper carrier when I was 12 years old. The biggest tips came from the poorest people.

1986

★ 0.8

Autobiography and memoir

There must be many fathers around the country who have experienced the cruellest, most crushing rejection of all: their children have ended up supporting the wrong team.

Fever Pitch · 1992

★ 0.8

Scripture · Religious literature

What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

Matthew 19:6 · 60

★ 0.9

Scientific literature

Man alone consumes and engulfs more flesh than all other animals put together. He is, then, the greatest destroyer, and he is so more by abuse than by necessity.

Georges Louis Leclerc

1753

★ 0.9

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey, but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.

William Hazlitt

On Going on a Journey · 1822

★ 0.9

The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of the essential construction of the building. The neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time.

Augustus Welby Pugin

1841

★ 0.9

In research the horizon recedes as we advance, and is no nearer at sixty than it was at twenty. As the power of endurance weakens with age, the urgency of the pursuit grows more intense... And research is always incomplete.

1875

★ 0.9

Autobiography and memoir

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

The Forgotten Man... Delving away in patient industry, supporting his family, paying his taxes, casting his vote, supporting the church and the school... But he is the only one for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide. Such is the Forgotten Man. He works, he votes, generally he prays-but his chief business in life is to pay... Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?

William Graham Sumner

1883

★ 0.9

One goes to Nature only for hints and half truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.

1886

★ 0.9

Political literature

Europeans often ask, and Americans do not always explain, how it happens that this great office, the greatest in the world, unless we except the Papacy, to which any man can rise by his own merits, is not more frequently filled by great and striking men.

The American Commonwealth · 1888

★ 0.9

Scientific literature

Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

1901

★ 0.9

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

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle... Mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle.

Peter Kropotkin

1902

★ 0.9

In order to approach the spiritual in art, one employs reality as little as possible... This explains logically why primary forms are employed. Since these forms are abstract, an abstract art comes into being.

1914

★ 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

Psychological literature

The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even murder with truth.

1929

★ 0.9

Psychological literature

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.

1933

★ 0.9

The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. Like when they say "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."

1934

★ 0.9

Historical literature

[Education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

1942

★ 0.9

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.

Franklin P. Adams

1944

★ 0.9

I would not regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

1945

★ 0.9

Autobiography and memoir

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

The young physician starts life with twenty drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for twenty diseases.

1950

★ 0.9

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

1953

★ 0.9

Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever.. .Color and I are one. I am a painter.

1959

★ 0.9

Speech · Political speech

The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

Harold Macmillan

1960

★ 0.9

The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.

Edward Steichen

1972

★ 0.9

Political literature

Whether ours shall continue to be a Government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.

1973

★ 0.9

Some people think football is a matter of life and death... I can assure them it is much more serious than that.

1973

★ 0.9

We need spring. We need it desperately and, usually, we need it before God is willing to give it to us.

Peter John Gzowski

1979

★ 0.9

Scientific literature

Dinosaurs are a touchstone that separates the mentality of children from that of adults.

1989

★ 0.9

Scientific literature

Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

Stephen Jay Gould

1989

★ 0.9

Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.

1990

★ 0.9

To trust your intuition is exactly the opposite of any sort of formal education.

1993

★ 0.9

I love you... That is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.

2001

★ 0.9

Press conference

This will be a campaign unlike any other in history. A campaign characterized by shock, by surprise, by flexibility, by the employment of precise munitions on a scale never before seen, and by the application of overwhelming force.

2003

★ 0.9

Autobiography and memoir

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

★ 0.9

Learning that color is a fiction of light is one of the primary shocks of growing up: that this hitherto deeply physical thing is just a reflection and that nothing can keep its color under the cover of darkness, are monstrous things to understand, even for my adult mind.

★ 0.9

Wisdom literature

Do justice, that you may live long upon earth. Calm the weeper, do not oppress the widow, do not oust a man from his father's property, do not degrade magnates from their seats. Beware of punishing wrongfully; do not kill, for it will not profit you.

The Teaching for Merikare

2025 BC

★ 1.0

Religious literature

The thread on which the different good qualities of human beings are strung as pearls, is the fear of God. When the fastenings of this fear are unloosed, the pearls roll in all directions, and are lost one by one.

Orchot Tzaddikim

1499

★ 1.0

Poem · Epic poem

The gentle mind by gentle deeds is known. For a man by nothing is so well exposed, as by his manners.

1596

★ 1.0

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

William Shakespeare

1597

★ 1.0

Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

Sir Walter Raleigh

1618

★ 1.0

You will find angling to be like the virtue of humility, which has a calmness of spirit, and a world of other blessings attending upon it.

The Compleat Angler · 1653

★ 1.0

Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

1678

★ 1.0

There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or feign it where it does not.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

1678

★ 1.0

One of the greatest geniuses that ever existed, Shakespeare, undoubtedly wanted taste.

1764

★ 1.0

If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.

Joshua Reynolds

1769

★ 1.0

To put it in one word: I believe that Judaism knows nothing of revealed religion, in the sense in which this is understood by Christians. The Israelites possess divine legislation.

Moses Mendelssohn

1783

★ 1.0

Sermon · Speech

Slovenliness is no part of religion; that neither this, nor any text of Scripture, condemns neatness of apparel. Certainly this a duty, not a sin. "Cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness."

1788

★ 1.0

Scientific literature

We must trust to nothing but facts: these are presented to us by nature and cannot deceive.

Antoine Lavoisier

1789

★ 1.0

Autobiography and memoir

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.

1794

★ 1.0

Philosophical literature

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

Nicolas Chamfort

1796

★ 1.0

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