The Quotes canon
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn1 quote
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 · 1973Blaise Pascal1 quote
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. — Blaise Pascal · 1670George Steiner1 quote
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. — George Steiner · 1967Herman Melville1 quote
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 · 1852Mark Twain1 quote
Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. — Mark Twain · 1897Michel de Montaigne1 quote
I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice. — Michel de Montaigne · 1580Miguel de Cervantes1 quote
He's a muddle-headed fool, with frequent lucid intervals. — Miguel de Cervantes · 1615Robert Burton1 quote
Every man hath a good and bad angel attending on him in particular, all his life long. — Robert Burton · 1621Robert Louis Stevenson1 quote
All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886Sir John Davies1 quote
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 · 1599Thomas Jefferson1 quote
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 · 1786Virginia Woolf1 quote
The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. — Virginia Woolf · 1929William Shakespeare1 quote
Virtue is choked with foul ambition. — William Shakespeare · 1594