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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Love121 quotes
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the end of Being and ideal Grace. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1850My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep. The more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite. — William Shakespeare · 1597My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red...
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound. — William Shakespeare · 1609Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all. — Alfred Tennyson · 1850Experience shows us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery · 1939All you need is love. — The Beatles · 1967All 121 quotes →Politics65 quotes
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. — W.B. Yeats · 1920Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. — Winston Churchill · 1947Where-ever Law ends, Tyranny begins. — John Locke · 1690A state without some means of change is without the means of its own conservation. — Edmund Burke · 1790An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. — George Eliot · 1866Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. — George Orwell · 1946All 65 quotes →The human condition62 quotes
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals-And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? — William Shakespeare · 1616To be born is to be wrecked on an island. — J.M. Barrie · 1913There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries. — William Shakespeare · 1599Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea. — John Stuart Mill · 1873The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. — Marcel Proust · 1922All 62 quotes →Political theory55 quotes
Where-ever Law ends, Tyranny begins. — John Locke · 1690When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. — Thomas Paine · 1776All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. — Edmund Burke · 1775They are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. — Margaret Thatcher · 1987My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub. — Grover Norquist · 2001Liberty consists in doing what one desires. — John Stuart Mill · 1859All 55 quotes →Human nature51 quotes
Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. — Charles Darwin · 1871How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! — Lord Byron · 1824It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals. They seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. — Anne Frank · 1944What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals-And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? — William Shakespeare · 1616The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them. — Emily Bronte · 1847For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. — Francis Bacon · 1620All 51 quotes →Men and women49 quotes
Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd. — William Congreve · 1697I can't get no satisfaction,
I can't get no girl reaction. — The Rolling Stones · 1965It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. — Jane Austen · 1813Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never. — William Shakespeare · 1600Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. — Oscar Wilde · 1890Why are women…so much more interesting to men than men are to women? — Virginia Woolf · 1929All 49 quotes →Art46 quotes
Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy. — Pablo Picasso · 1945In a burning building...I would save a cat before a Rembrandt. — Alberto GiacomettiPainting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. — Pablo Picasso · 1964Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance. — Marcel Proust · 1922It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of Art. — Oscar Wilde · 1891No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. — Oscar Wilde · 1891All 46 quotes →Life46 quotes
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? — Vincent van Gogh · 1881Everything that lives,
Lives not alone, nor for itself. — William Blake · 1789They lived und laughed ant loved end left. — James Joyce · 1939Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. — Anais Nin · 1941What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare? — W.H. Davies · 1911Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. — William Shakespeare · 1616All 46 quotes →Death44 quotes
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once. — William Shakespeare · 1599Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. — Francis Bacon · 1625But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. — John Maynard Keynes · 1924Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. — Dylan Thomas · 1951To die will be an awfully big adventure. — J.M. Barrie · 1904Death in itself is nothing, but we fear
To be we know not what, we know not where. — John Dryden · 1675All 44 quotes →Freedom44 quotes
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762I am condemned to be free. — Jean-Paul Sartre · 1943A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for...is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free. — John Stuart Mill · 1862If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. — George Orwell · 1944The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. — Edmund Burke · 1784Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. — William Pitt, Earl of Chatham · 1783All 44 quotes →Marriage41 quotes
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. — Oscar Wilde · 1890It happens as with the cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out. — Michel de Montaigne · 1580There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. — Diana, Princess of Wales · 1995Marriage must ceaselessly combat a monster that devours everything: habit. — Honore de Balzac · 1829Reader, I married him. — Charlotte Bronte · 1847Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and, however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. — Jane Austen · 1813All 41 quotes →Women39 quotes
Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd. — William Congreve · 1697O fairest of Creation, last and best
Of all God's works. — John Milton · 1667Frailty, thy name is woman! — William Shakespeare · 1616Woman's at best a contradiction still. — Alexander Pope · 1735To tell the truth, one is not born a genius: one becomes a genius. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792All 39 quotes →Progress36 quotes
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. — Isaac Newton · 1676We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size. — Bernard of Chartres · 1159There can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself. — Charles Baudelaire · 1867We cannot reform our forefathers. — George Eliot · 1859To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration. — George Orwell · 1946Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation. — Oscar Wilde · 1893All 36 quotes →War35 quotes
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. — Wilfred Owen · 1918If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. — Wilfred Owen · 1920For what can war, but endless war still breed? — John Milton · 1674God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots. — Voltaire · 1750Let me have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night. It's sprightly waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible. — William Shakespeare · 1616When the rich wage war it's the poor who die. — Jean-Paul Sartre · 1951All 35 quotes →Law34 quotes
Where-ever Law ends, Tyranny begins. — John Locke · 1690The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science. — Charles Macklin · 1759Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him. — John Selden · 1689Whoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written, or spoken laws; it is He, who is truly the Law-giver to all intents and purposes, and not the Person who first wrote, or spoke them. — Benjamin Hoadly · 1717Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind. — Edward Gibbon · 1776The majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. — Anatole France · 1894All 34 quotes →Nature32 quotes
Nature abhors a vacuum. — Baruch Spinoza · 1677No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings. — William Blake · 1793Great things are done when men and mountains meet. — William Blake · 1807There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the Lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I Love not Man the Less, but Nature more. — Lord Byron · 1818Nature to be commanded must be obeyed. — Francis Bacon · 1620Over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths. — Thomas Cole · 1836All 32 quotes →Man and animals31 quotes
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form. — William Ralph Inge · 1920A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor. — Bertrand Russell · 1948Animals whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. — Charles Darwin · 1838The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster. — David Hume · 1776It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1798All 31 quotes →Truth31 quotes
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? — Arthur Conan Doyle · 1890We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart. — Blaise Pascal · 1670Such truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome. — Thomas Hobbes · 1651While you live, tell truth and shame the devil! — William Shakespeare · 1597Tis strange,—but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction. — Lord Byron · 1823Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. — George Orwell · 1949All 31 quotes →Nature of love29 quotes
Experience shows us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery · 1939Love comforteth like sunshine after rain. — William Shakespeare · 1593No human creature can give orders to love. — George Sand · 1834Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair. — William Blake · 1794Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are. — John Dryden · 1669Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages. — Marcel Proust · 1921All 29 quotes →Beauty28 quotes
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. — Margaret Wolfe Hungerford · 1878The curves of your lips rewrite history. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter. — Roger Scruton · 2011Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O, that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace! — William Shakespeare · 1597Genius lasts longer than Beauty. — Oscar Wilde · 1890Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them. — David Hume · 1758All 28 quotes →Time27 quotes
Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. — Hector Berlioz · 1856Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying. — Robert Herrick · 1648The whirligig of time brings in his revenges. — William Shakespeare · 1602Time’s the king of men.
He’s both their parent, and he is their grave,
And gives them what he will, not what they crave. — William Shakespeare · 1608All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. — J.R.R. Tolkien · 1954Time is the great physician. — Benjamin Disraeli · 1837All 27 quotes →Travel27 quotes
See many skies and seas. — Gustave Flaubert · 1857The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. — Marcel Proust · 1922There are no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1883Happy is he who, like Ulysses, has made a glorious voyage. — Joachim du Bellay · 1558We are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world....and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1879Railway termini... Are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. — E.M. Forster · 1910All 27 quotes →Moral theory26 quotes
All inequality that has no special utility to justify it is injustice. — Jeremy Bentham · 1795The end must justify the means. — Matthew Prior · 1700What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike. — Alfred North Whitehead · 1941Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. — Adam Smith · 1759Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery. — Edward Gibbon · 1781Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities. — Honore de Balzac · 1842All 26 quotes →God24 quotes
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. — Voltaire · 1768God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?... If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. — Blaise Pascal · 1662God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood. God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil. For as long as men bow before altars, mankind will remain damned, the slaves of kings and priests. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon · 1846There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness. — Henry Vaughan · 1655I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go. — John Stuart Mill · 1865This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being... This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont, to be called Lord God παντοκρατωρ or Universal Ruler. — Isaac Newton · 1713All 24 quotes →Happiness24 quotes
He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. — James Joyce · 1915Man was made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go. — William Blake · 1805I would always rather be happy than dignified. — Charlotte Bronte · 1847The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. — George Orwell · 1949My crown is in my heart, not on my head;
Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones,
Nor to be seen. My crown is called content;
A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy. — William Shakespeare · 1595There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved. — George Sand · 1862All 24 quotes →World War II24 quotes
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. — Winston Churchill · 1940In war: resolution. In defeat: defiance. In victory: magnanimity. In peace: goodwill. — Winston ChurchillNever in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. — Winston Churchill · 1940This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. — Winston Churchill · 1942Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.' — Winston Churchill · 1940We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. — Winston Churchill · 1940All 24 quotes →Youth24 quotes
Ancient times were the youth of the world. — Francis Bacon · 1605The deepest definition of Youth is, Life as yet untouched by tragedy. — Alfred North Whitehead · 1933Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying. — Robert Herrick · 1648My salad days,
When I was green in judgment. — William Shakespeare · 1607I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free. — Emily Bronte · 1847The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. — Oscar Wilde · 1890All 24 quotes →Books23 quotes
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are. — John Milton · 1644The reading of good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries-in fact like a prepared conversation, in which they reveal only the best of their thoughts. — Rene Descartes · 1637Age, that Age appeared
to be best in four things: Old
Wood best to burn, Old Wine to drink, Old
Friends to trust, and old Authors to read. — Francis Bacon · 1625God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. — William Ellery Channing · 1838There is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — Jane Austen · 1813All 23 quotes →Morality23 quotes
Censorship is crucial for preserving morals but useless for restoring them. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike. — Alfred North Whitehead · 1941By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little. — Edmund Burke · 1790Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery. — Edward Gibbon · 1781Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities. — Honore de Balzac · 1842The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. — Oscar Wilde · 1891All 23 quotes →Reason23 quotes
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. — Blaise Pascal · 1662Sure He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. — William Shakespeare · 1616Ask me no reason why I love you, for though
Love use Reason for his precisian, he admits him not for his counselor. — William Shakespeare · 1602The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. — Blaise Pascal · 1662Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. — David Hume · 1739The sleep of reason produces monsters. — Francisco de Goya · 1799All 23 quotes →