Sourced and curated.

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

Scripture · Religious literature

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

Jesus

Matthew 19:6 · 60

★ 0.9

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

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

Lecture

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

Nature writing

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.

John Burroughs

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.

James Bryce

The American Commonwealth · 1888

★ 0.9

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

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.

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

Alfred Adler

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.

Carl Jung

1933

★ 0.9

Novel

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."

Jean Rhys

1934

★ 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

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.

Arthur Harris

1945

★ 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

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

William Osler

1950

★ 0.9

Short story

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

James Thurber

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.

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

Speech

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.

Archibald Cox

1973

★ 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

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

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

Dale Russell

1989

★ 0.9

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.

Charles Kuralt

1990

★ 0.9

Interview

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

Chris Burden

1993

★ 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

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.

Tommy Franks

2003

★ 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

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

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.

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

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

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."

John Wesley

1788

★ 1.0

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

Antoine Lavoisier

1789

★ 1.0

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

Religious literature · Philosophical literature

Maximilien Robespierre was nothing but the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the bloody hand that drew from the womb of time the body whose soul Rousseau had created.

Heinrich Heine

1834

★ 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

Speech · Political speech

Let woman then go on-not asking favors, but claiming as a right the removal of all hindrances to her elevation in the scale of being-let her receive encouragement for the proper cultivation of all her powers, so that she may enter profitably into the active business of life... Then in the marriage union, the independence of the husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.

Lucretia Mott

Discourse on Woman · 1849

★ 1.0

Novel

Trembled to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

Herman Melville

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities · 1852

★ 1.0

The costume of woman... Should conduce at once to her health, comfort, and usefulness... While it should not fail also to conduce to her personal adornment, it should make that end of secondary importance.

Amelia Jenks Bloomer

1857

★ 1.0

The word "freedom" means for me not a point of departure but a genuine point of arrival. The point of departure is defined by the word "order." Freedom cannot exist without the concept of order.

Prince Metternich

1859

★ 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

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was a business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by business, business is war!

Christian Nestell Bovee

1862

★ 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

Speech · Political speech

Though the President is Commander-in-chief, Congress is his commander; and, God willing, he shall obey. He and his minions shall learn that this is not a Government of kings and satraps, but a Government of the people, and that Congress is the people.

Thaddeus Stevens

1867

★ 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