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.
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds, and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man's critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character. — George Eliot · 1859
Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. — J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur · 1782
John Locke1 quote
Virtue is harder to be got, than a Knowledge of the World; and, if lost in a young Man, is seldom recover'd. — John Locke · 1693
The easy, gentle and sloping path…is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road. — Michel de Montaigne · 1580
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! — Oliver Wendell Holmes · 1858
Men are what their mothers made them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1860
The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. — Ruth Benedict · 1934
There is no road or ready way to vertue. — Sir Thomas Browne · 1643
Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and someday, you will be a real boy. — The Blue Fairy · 1940
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar... Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. — William James · 1890
They say best men are molded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad. — William Shakespeare · 1616