The Quotes canon
Sourced and curated.
Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
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.
Detective fiction18 quotes
There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers. — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1893How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1890It is cocaine...a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it? — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1890You see, but you do not observe. — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1891It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes. — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1891It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1891All 18 quotes →Political literature13 quotes
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. — Hannah Arendt · 1963To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority. — Oscar Wilde · 1891The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution. — Hannah Arendt · 1970A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. — Leon Trotsky · 1938The newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people most people read. It is the only book they read every day. — Walter Lippmann · 1920All 13 quotes →Modernist literature7 quotes
He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. — James Joyce · 1915His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or reverie, he had heard their tale before. — James Joyce · 1915Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. — James Joyce · 1915It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. — James Joyce · 1915I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning. — James Joyce · 1915When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. — James Joyce · 1915All 7 quotes →Scientific literature5 quotes
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds-and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. — Benjamin Lee Whorf · 1940Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science. — Edwin Hubble · 1929Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. — Bertrand Russell · 1907Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which only the actual world, but every possible world, must conform. — Bertrand Russell · 1907It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. — Francis Crick · 1953Autobiography and memoir2 quotes
Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium. — Thomas De Quincey · 1821A duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London. — Thomas De Quincey · 1821Historical literature1 quote
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. — Hannah Arendt · 1963Nature writing1 quote
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. — John Muir · 1898Philosophical literature1 quote
Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance—these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. — Isaiah Berlin · 1950