Quotes · Skopia

3,276 quotes

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.

Max Beerbohm

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

Poem

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

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.

Nick Hornby

Fever Pitch · 1992

★ 0.8

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

Travel writing

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.

Mark Pattison

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

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.

James Bryce

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.

Henri Poincare

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

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.

Piet Mondrian

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.

Aldous Huxley

1925

★ 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.

Carl Jung

1933

★ 0.9

Historical literature

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

G.M. Trevelyan

1942

★ 0.9

Letter

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

Arthur Harris

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

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.

Paul Klee

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

Newspaper

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

Bill Shankly

1973

★ 0.9

Newspaper

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.

Ian McEwan

2001

★ 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.

Jean Arp

★ 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.

Tacita Dean

★ 0.9

Poem · Epic poem

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

Edmund Spenser

1596

★ 1.0

History (play)

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

Treatise

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.

Izaak Walton

The Compleat Angler · 1653

★ 1.0

Epigram

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

1678

★ 1.0

Epigram

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

Letter

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

Horace Walpole

1764

★ 1.0

Lecture

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

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."

John Wesley

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.

Edward Gibbon

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

Essay

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

Economic literature

Labour, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labor is that price which is necessary to enable the laborers, one with another, to subsist and perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.

David Ricardo

1817

★ 1.0

I used to say of him that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men.

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

1831

★ 1.0

Political literature

Surely of all 'rights of man,' this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.

Thomas Carlyle

1840

★ 1.0

Essay

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

John Ruskin

Unto This Last · 1860

★ 1.0

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

John Ruskin

Sesame and Lilies · 1864

★ 1.0

For the creation of a master-work of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

Matthew Arnold

1865

★ 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.

Matthew Arnold

1869

★ 1.0

Novel

Work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

George MacDonald

Wilfrid Cumbermede · 1872

★ 1.0

Lecture

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

1883

★ 1.0

Poem

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Requiem · 1887

★ 1.0

Letter

A hint-don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! Study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God-to create like our Divine Master.

Paul Gauguin

1888

★ 1.0

Play

A large nose is in fact the sign of an affable man, good, courteous, witty, liberal, courageous, such as I am.

Edmond Rostand

1897

★ 1.0

Play · Drama (play)

Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

George Bernard Shaw

1905

★ 1.0

Interview

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of trouble and depressing subject matter. An art which might be for every mental worker, be he businessman or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.

Henri Matisse

1908

★ 1.0

Interview

I obey Nature, and never do I dare give orders to it. My only ambition is servile fidelity to it.

Auguste Rodin

1910

★ 1.0

Short story · Magazine · Detective fiction

We are dealing with an exceptionally astute and dangerous man...one of the most unscrupulous rascals that Australia has ever evolved—and for a young country it has turned out some very finished types.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax · 1911

★ 1.0

Personal journal

Great God! this is an awful place.

Robert Falcon Scott

1912

★ 1.0

I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards any one.

Edith Cavell

1915

★ 1.0

Essay

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

A.A. Milne

The Record Lie · 1920

★ 1.0

Novel

The whole effect of Christianity was to transfer the drama onto the moral plane.

Andre Gide

The Counterfeiters · 1925

★ 1.0

Speech · Scientific literature

The science of Pure Mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Alfred North Whitehead

1925

★ 1.0

Novel

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship.

Colette

1932

★ 1.0

Newspaper

The world is becoming like a lunatic asylum run by lunatics.

David Lloyd George

Observer · 1933

★ 1.0

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