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.
Amiri Baraka1 quote
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning. — Amiri Baraka · 1963Benjamin Disraeli1 quote
The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons. — Benjamin Disraeli · 1831Danny Witwer1 quote
Science has stolen most of our miracles. — Danny Witwer · 2002Douglas Adams1 quote
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? — Douglas Adams · 1979Edmund Burke1 quote
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. — Edmund Burke · 1790Fyodor Dostoevsky1 quote
If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once, be dried up. — Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1879George Eliot1 quote
He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination. — George Eliot · 1872Hans Morgenthau1 quote
Little do they know that they meet under an empty sky from which the gods have departed. — Hans Morgenthau · 1948Henry Adams1 quote
All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. — Henry Adams · 1907James Beattie1 quote
In the deep windings of the grove, no more
The hag obscene, and the grisly phantom dwell;
Nor in the fall of mountain-stream, or roar
Of winds is heard the angry spirit's yell. — James Beattie · 1774John Keats1 quote
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings. — John Keats · 1820Mark Twain1 quote
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter. — Mark Twain · 1880Matthew Arnold1 quote
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. — Matthew Arnold · 1867Roberto Calasso1 quote
A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won't be any stories. — Roberto Calasso · 1988Ronald Reagan1 quote
Those who say that we're in a time when there are not heroes, they just don't know where to look. — Ronald Reagan · 1981T.S. Eliot1 quote
And the wind shall say:
"Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls." — T.S. Eliot · 1934Thomas Carlyle1 quote
Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men! — Thomas Carlyle · 1840Thomas Hardy1 quote
Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power. — Thomas Hardy · 1891