Sourced and curated.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

1945

★ 8.9

Personal journal

Reinhold Niebuhr

1932

★ 8.8

Travel writing

Imagination labors best in distant fields.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

The Innocents Abroad · 1869

★ 7.8

Travel writing

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 7.7

Note

1897

★ 7.3

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock · 1915

★ 7.1

Speech

Birth, and copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

1884

★ 7.1

1932

★ 6.9

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people: Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls."

1934

★ 6.9

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

1934

★ 6.9

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

Burnt Norton · 1936

★ 6.9

Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

An armed society is a polite society.

1939

★ 6.9

Novel · Science fiction

Robert A. Heinlein

1942

★ 6.9

Speech · Autobiography and memoir

Life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head.

She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

Mark Twain's Autobiography · 1910

★ 6.2

Novel

Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections · 2001

★ 6.2

Feminist literature

Oppressed people are frequently very oppressive when first liberated. And why wouldn't they be? They know best two positions. Somebody's foot on their neck or their foot on somebody's neck.

Florynce Kennedy

1970

★ 6.0

What people say behind your back is your standing in the community in which you live.

Edgar W. Howe

1877

★ 6.0

Novel · Children's literature · Adventure novel

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

Autobiography and memoir · Autobiography and memoir

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · 1876

★ 5.5

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain · 1910

★ 5.5

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky.

If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.

1915

★ 5.5

Biography

Charlie Parker

Hear Me Talkin' to Ya · 1955

★ 5.4

Novel

For the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.

Kate Chopin

The Awakening · 1899

★ 5.2

Novel

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

Kate Chopin

1899

★ 5.2

Speech · Political speech

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima... The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

1945

★ 5.2

What is hell? Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination... After the racist statues are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.

1949

★ 5.2

Sociology · Political literature

Michael Harrington

The Other America · 1962

★ 5.1

Sociology · Political literature

For the middle class, the police protect property, give directions, and help old ladies. For the urban poor, the police are those who arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order.

Michael Harrington

The Other America · 1962

★ 5.1

Travel writing · Autobiography and memoir

On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dark-times neither day nor night-the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they cast a mysterious shadow of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.

William Least Heat-Moon

1982

★ 5.1

Essay

Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

Jonathan Franzen

1996

★ 5.1

Novel · Children's literature · Adventure novel

There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

Cheer up—the worst is yet to come.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 4.9

Letter

1894

★ 4.7

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

Burnt Norton · 1936

★ 4.5

Speech · Political speech

I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. That's the answer to that. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

1947

★ 4.4

Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth-but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three.

1974

★ 4.4

Novel · Science fiction

Robert A. Heinlein

Time Enough for Love · 1973

★ 4.3

It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a "thinking center" that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval... The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services.

J.C.R. Licklider

1960

★ 4.2

Novel · Science fiction

The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

Robert A. Heinlein

Time Enough for Love · 1973

★ 4.2

Novel · Children's literature · Adventure novel

All kings is mostly rapscallions.