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.
H.L. Mencken3 quotes
Puritanism—The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. — H.L. Mencken · 1949Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. — H.L. Mencken · 1916Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. — H.L. Mencken · 1922Baruch Spinoza2 quotes
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. — Baruch Spinoza · 1677Pride is therefore pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself. — Baruch Spinoza · 1677Vladimir Lenin2 quotes
Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. — Vladimir Lenin · 1917Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. — Vladimir Lenin · 1920Albert Camus1 quote
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question. — Albert Camus · 1956Aldo Leopold1 quote
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. — Aldo Leopold · 1949Allen Saunders1 quote
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans. — Allen Saunders · 1957Anton Chekhov1 quote
When a man spends the least possible number of movements over one definite action, that is grace. — Anton Chekhov · 1899Ayn Rand1 quote
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. — Ayn Rand · 1943Bessie Head1 quote
Love is two people mutually feeding each other, not one living on the soul of the other like a ghoul. — Bessie Head · 1973Bill Miller1 quote
Politics is show business for ugly people. — Bill Miller · 1991Charles Lamb1 quote
A pistol let off at the ear, not a feather to tickle the intellect. — Charles Lamb · 1833Cicero1 quote
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity. — Cicero · 55 BCClement Greenberg1 quote
Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations... Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. — Clement Greenberg · 1939Dave Beck1 quote
I define a recession as when your neighbor loses his job, but a depression is when you lose your own. — Dave Beck · 1954Don Marquis1 quote
Procrastination is the
art of keeping
up with yesterday. — Don Marquis · 1927E.B. White1 quote
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. — E.B. White · 1944Emma Goldman1 quote
Crime is naught but misdirected energy. — Emma Goldman · 1910Erica Jong1 quote
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had. — Erica Jong · 1977Ernest Hemingway1 quote
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. — Ernest Hemingway · 1942Friedrich Nietzsche1 quote
What I understand by "philosopher": a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1908Fyodor Dostoevsky1 quote
Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him. — Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1860George Peele1 quote
Love is a thing.
It is a prick, it is a sting,
It is a pretty, pretty thing;
It is a fire, it is a coal
Whose flame creeps in at every hole. — George Peele · 1591Guy de Maupassant1 quote
Conversation... Is the art of never appearing a bore, of knowing how to say everything interestingly, to entertain with no matter what, to be charming with nothing at all. — Guy de Maupassant · 1876Henri Poincare1 quote
Discovery is discernment, selection. — Henri Poincare · 1908Iris Murdoch1 quote
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. — Iris Murdoch · 1959Isaac Goldberg1 quote
Diplomacy is to do and say
The nastiest thing in the nicest way. — Isaac Goldberg · 1927Ivan Turgenev1 quote
Death is like a fisherman, who, having caught a fish in his net, leaves it in the water for a time; the fish continues to swim about, but all the while the net is round it, and the fisherman will snatch it out in his own good time. — Ivan Turgenev · 1860James Boswell1 quote
My definition of Man is, "a Cooking Animal." The beasts have memory, judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook... Man alone can dress a good dish; and every man whatever is more or less a cook, in seasoning what he himself eats. — James Boswell · 1773James George Frazer1 quote
By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. — James George Frazer · 1922Joseph Campbell1 quote
Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhautible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. — Joseph Campbell · 1949