The Quotes canon
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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.
Love155 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 · 1850Absence makes the heart grow fonder. — Sextus Propertius · 24 BCLove conquers all things; let us too surrender to love. — Virgil · 37 BCMy 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 · 1597O happy race of mortals, if your hearts are ruled, as is the universe, by Love! — Boethius · 523My 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 · 1609All 155 quotes →Politics96 quotes
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. — Karl Marx · 1848Things 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 · 1947From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs! — Karl Marx · 1883Man is by nature a political animal. — Aristotle · 350 BCDemocracy passes into despotism. — Socrates · 375 BCAll 96 quotes →The human condition86 quotes
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762Between us and excellence, the gods have placed the sweat of our brows. — Hesiod · 700 BCWhat 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 · 1913Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1883There 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 · 1599All 86 quotes →Political theory85 quotes
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs! — Karl Marx · 1883Democracy passes into despotism. — Socrates · 375 BCNo tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other. — Aristotle · 350 BCWhat I say is that "just" or "right" means nothing but what is to the interest of the stronger party. — Thrasymachus · 375 BCWhere-ever Law ends, Tyranny begins. — John Locke · 1690The State is not "abolished", it withers away. — Friedrich Engels · 1878All 85 quotes →Human nature78 quotes
God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882All men by nature desire to know. — Aristotle · 322 BCMan is by nature a political animal. — Aristotle · 350 BCMan 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 · 1871All men have need of the Gods. — Homer · 700 BCHow little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! — Lord Byron · 1824All 78 quotes →Art70 quotes
I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze. — Horace · 23 BCThe most perfect of all works of art is true political freedom. — Friedrich Schiller · 1794The greatness of art, like poetry or music, is that it is totally unnecessary. — Christo · 2011Painting 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 · 1964All 70 quotes →Death64 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 · 1951I should rather labor as another's serf, in the home of a man without fortune, one whose livelihood was meager, than rule over all the departed dead. — Homer · 700 BCTo die will be an awfully big adventure. — J.M. Barrie · 1904All 64 quotes →Freedom62 quotes
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762I am condemned to be free. — Jean-Paul Sartre · 1943The basis of a democratic state is liberty. — Aristotle · 350 BCHappiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous. — Pericles · 430 BCAnxiety is the dizziness of freedom. — Soren Kierkegaard · 1844A 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 · 1862All 62 quotes →Men and women57 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 · 1600The great question that has never been answered…is what does a woman want? — Sigmund Freud · 1925In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1886All 57 quotes →Life56 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 56 quotes →War52 quotes
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. — Wilfred Owen · 1918War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. — Karl Von Clausewitz · 1833If the Persians hide the sun, the battle will be in shade rather than sunlight. — Herodotus · 430 BCCarthage must be destroyed. — Cato the Elder · 149 BCWar alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to face it. — Benito Mussolini · 1932If 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 · 1920All 52 quotes →Marriage50 quotes
The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1808Men 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 · 1847All 50 quotes →Man and animals46 quotes
There are many wonderful things, and nothing is more wonderful than man. — Sophocles · 441 BCWe 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 prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1532Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings. — Konrad Lorenz · 1965Of all wild creatures, the child is the most intractable. — Plato · 346 BCA dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor. — Bertrand Russell · 1948All 46 quotes →Progress46 quotes
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. — Isaac Newton · 1676The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. — Karl Marx · 1845We 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 · 1946All 46 quotes →God45 quotes
God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882All men have need of the Gods. — Homer · 700 BCFor the one thing even God cannot do is change the past. — AgathonTherefore it is necessary to arrive at a prime mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. — St. Thomas Aquinas · 1265"Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him,—you and I! We are all his murderers!" — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. — Voltaire · 1768All 45 quotes →Time45 quotes
Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity. — Marcus Aurelius · 180Time, the devourer of all things. — Ovid · 8Time 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 · 1602The strongest of all warriors are these two-Time and Patience. — Leo Tolstoy · 1869All 45 quotes →Truth45 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 · 1651The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth. — Leo Tolstoy · 1855Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1878While you live, tell truth and shame the devil! — William Shakespeare · 1597All 45 quotes →Women44 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 · 1616God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment-but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God's second mistake. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1895Woman'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 · 1949All 44 quotes →Happiness42 quotes
Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous. — Pericles · 430 BCHe was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. — James Joyce · 1915To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright. — Walter Benjamin · 1979Man was made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go. — William Blake · 1805How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea... All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart. — Nikos Kazantzakis · 1946Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness; money is not an infantile wish. — Sigmund Freud · 1898All 42 quotes →Law41 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 · 1689Laws are silent in time of war. — Cicero · 52 BCThe chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1532Whoever 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 · 1717All 41 quotes →Nature41 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 · 1818The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning — Zbigniew Herbert · 1966In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous. — Aristotle · 350 BCAll 41 quotes →Moral theory38 quotes
What I say is that "just" or "right" means nothing but what is to the interest of the stronger party. — Thrasymachus · 375 BCWhat's not forbidden to do make bold. — Friedrich Schiller · 1798All inequality that has no special utility to justify it is injustice. — Jeremy Bentham · 1795There is... Only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. — Immanuel Kant · 1785The 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 · 1941All 38 quotes →Beauty37 quotes
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. — Margaret Wolfe Hungerford · 1878Beauty can pierce one like a pain. — Thomas Mann · 1901Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man. — Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880Beauty will save the world. — Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1869The 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 · 2011All 37 quotes →God and man36 quotes
All men have need of the Gods. — Homer · 700 BCZeus does not bring all men's plans to fulfillment. — Homer · 700 BCGod creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners. — Soren Kierkegaard · 1838If cows and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and make things as men can, horses would have drawn horse-like gods, cows cow-like gods, and each species would have made the gods' bodies just like their own. — XenophanesSo, loath to suffer mute,
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear. — Matthew Arnold · 1852For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. — Apostle Paul · 62All 36 quotes →History36 quotes
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. — Karl Marx · 1848History is written by the winners. — George Orwell · 1944Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. — Karl Marx · 1852Who built the Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?...
Where, the evening that the wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? — Bertolt Brecht · 1936The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words-that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people, appears to be impossible. — Leo Tolstoy · 1869The history of the world is but the biography of great men. — Thomas Carlyle · 1840All 36 quotes →Wisdom36 quotes
The unexamined life is not worth living. — Socrates · 399 BCKnow thyself. — ThalesOld to grow, but ever learning. — Solon · 119The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. — William Blake · 1793Knowledge can be communicated but not wisdom. — Hermann Hesse · 1922Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. — Alfred Tennyson · 1842All 36 quotes →Nature of love35 quotes
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. — Sextus Propertius · 24 BCThis is hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1883Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. — Apostle Paul · 55Experience 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 · 1834All 35 quotes →Morality33 quotes
What I say is that "just" or "right" means nothing but what is to the interest of the stronger party. — Thrasymachus · 375 BCThe masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1887Censorship 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 · 1941Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little. — Edmund Burke · 1790All 33 quotes →Travel33 quotes
The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face. — JuvenalSee 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 · 1879All 33 quotes →Personal growth32 quotes
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. — Marcus Aurelius · 180There can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself. — Charles Baudelaire · 1867Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit. — Aristotle · 322 BCThe good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy. — Aristotle · 322 BCThe childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day. — John Milton · 1671They say best men are molded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad. — William Shakespeare · 1616All 32 quotes →