A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
Thomas Carlyle 1795 - 1881
1795 - 1881
Entire Collection
Nature consists of facts and of regularities, and is in itself neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in this way introduce morals into the natural world, in spite the fact that we are part of this world. We are products of nature, but nature has made us together with our power of altering the world, of foreseeing and of planning for the future, and of making far-reaching decisions for which we are morally responsible. Yet, responsibility, decisions, enter the world of nature only with us.
Karl Popper 1902 - 1994
1902 - 1994
The knowledge of all things is possible.
Leonardo da Vinci 1452 - 1519
1452 - 1519
I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
Thomas Hobbes 1588 - 1679
1588 - 1679
Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.
J. M. Barrie 1860 - 1937
1860 - 1937
You can only predict things after they have happened.
Eugène Ionesco 1909 - 1994
1909 - 1994
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke 1729 - 1797
1729 - 1797
My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
1564 - 1642
Letter to Johannes Kepler (1610)
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Edmund Burke 1729 - 1797
1729 - 1797
I keep thinking someone's gonna show up and say, 'There's been a big mistake. The guy next door is supposed to be drawing the cartoon. Here's your shovel.'
Gary Larson born 1950
born 1950
The truth is that men are tired of liberty.
Benito Mussolini 1883 - 1945
1883 - 1945
Love is only one of many passions.
Samuel Johnson 1709 - 1784
1709 - 1784
People don’t resent having nothing nearly as much as too little.
Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884 - 1969
1884 - 1969
I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.
Douglas Adams 1952 - 2001
1952 - 2001
To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.
Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
Robert Browning 1812 - 1889
1812 - 1889
Art is vice. You don’t marry it legitimately, you rape it.
Edgar Degas 1834 - 1917
1834 - 1917
Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other ‘higher’ ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.
Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 - 1881
1821 - 1881
Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.
1911 - 1995
A Short History of Decay (1949)
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Winston Churchill 1874 - 1965
1874 - 1965
The horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior people.
Arthur Hugh Clough 1819 - 1861
1819 - 1861
Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us.
1881 - 1973
Reported by Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (1964)
Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.
1903 - 1950
As I Please (1943–1947)
Man with all his noble qualities...still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882
1809 - 1882
That learning belongs not to the female character, and that the female mind is not capable of a degree of improvement equal to that of the other sex, are narrow and unphilosophical prejudices.
Vicesimus Knox 1752 - 1821
1752 - 1821