Quotes · Skopia

13 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Duality of man✕clear

Epigram · Philosophical literature

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earth-worn, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

Pensees · 1670

★ 7.0

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment... Inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

Thomas Jefferson

1786

★ 6.2

Political literature · Historical literature

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago · 1973

★ 6.0

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.

Michel de Montaigne

Essays · 1580

★ 5.5

We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

1967

★ 5.0

He's a muddle-headed fool, with frequent lucid intervals.

Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote · 1615

★ 4.0

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

Novella · Science fiction

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde · 1886

★ 3.8

Essay · Feminist literature

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 3.8

Play · History (play)

Virtue is choked with foul ambition.

William Shakespeare

Henry VI, Part 2 · 1594

★ 3.6

Philosophical literature

Every man hath a good and bad angel attending on him in particular, all his life long.

The Anatomy of Melancholy · 1621

★ 1.9

I know my soul hath power to know all things, Yet is she blind and ignorant in all: I know I'm one of Nature's little kings, Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

Sir John Davies

Of Human Knowledge · 1599

★ 1.8

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