The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Autobiography and memoir215 quotes
Give me chastity and continency—but not yet! — St. Augustine · 398Our heart is restless until it rests in you. — St. Augustine · 400Our life is frittered away by detail…. Simplify, simplify. — Henry David Thoreau · 1854The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. — Henry David Thoreau · 1854If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. — Henry David Thoreau · 1854I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. — Henry David Thoreau · 1854All 215 quotes →Religious literature9 quotes
Our heart is restless until it rests in you. — St. Augustine · 400There is no road or ready way to vertue. — Sir Thomas Browne · 1643Obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good. — Sir Thomas Browne · 1643But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to our selves? — Sir Thomas Browne · 1643There is surely a peece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun. — Sir Thomas Browne · 1643A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet bee forced to surrender. — Sir Thomas Browne · 1643All 9 quotes →Travel writing4 quotes
There are no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1883We are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world....and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1879On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dark-times neither day nor night-the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they cast a mysterious shadow of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself. — William Least Heat-Moon · 1982Every one lives by selling something. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1892Historical literature3 quotes
Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish. — Julius Caesar · 49 BCGaul as a whole is divided into three parts. — Julius Caesar · 49 BCLoneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun. — N. Scott Momaday · 1967Nature writing2 quotes
The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. — Henry Beston · 1928The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. — Henry Beston · 1928Philosophical literature1 quote
What I understand by "philosopher": a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1908Political literature1 quote
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. — Adolf Hitler · 1925Slave narrative1 quote
I entered the world a slave-in the midst of a country whose most honoured writings declare that all men have a right to liberty. — Henry Box Brown · 1849