Quotes · Skopia

591 quotes

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

Ad Reinhardt

1957

★ 0.8

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

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

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

Letter

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

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

Psychological literature

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

William James

The Varieties of Religious Experience · 1902

★ 1.0

Summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Henry James

1916

★ 1.0

Political literature

The world stood like a playing card on edge... One looked at the buildings one passed and wondered if one was to see them again.

Norman Mailer

1963

★ 1.0

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Dissenting opinion · Legal writing

Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf.

Antonin Scalia

Morrison v. Olsen · 1988

★ 1.0

Speech · Political speech

The perpetuity of our institutions depends upon ourselves...if we maintain the principles on which they were established they are destined to confer their benefits on countless generations yet to come.

Martin Van Buren

Inaugural Address of Martin van Buren · 1837

★ 1.1

Letter

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

Henry James

1872

★ 1.1

Essay · Magazine

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

Henry James

1884

★ 1.1

Speech

I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is.

Theodore Roosevelt

1903

★ 1.1

Poem

The cow is of the bovine ilk; One end is moo, the other, milk.

Ogden Nash

1931

★ 1.1

Speech

I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.

Lou Gehrig

1939

★ 1.1

Essay

The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

Audre Lorde

1977

★ 1.1

Speech · Political speech

In all the attributes of a great, happy, and flourishing people we stand without a parallel in the world.

Martin Van Buren

Inaugural Address of Martin van Buren · 1837

★ 1.2

Novel

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick.

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale · 1851

★ 1.2

Novel

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale · 1851

★ 1.2

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