Read quote“You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.”
The collection
Explore quotes
Discover memorable words, remarkable voices, and the ideas that connect them.
Browse published quotes
Read quote“Hitherto I had never known what hunger really meant.”
Read quote“You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools.”
Read quote“The brain is at work without its required food, and the most fantastic notions fill the mind.”
Read quote“As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.”
Read quote“I go — as others already crucified have gone.”
Read quote“Let them respect my convictions, and I will respect theirs!”
Read quote“For we must be crucified by larger and yet larger men, between greater earths and greater heavens.”
Read quote“Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.”
Read quote“I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.”
Read quote“Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.”
Read quote“Never be afraid of the moments—thus sings the voice of the everlasting.”
Read quote“They have founded the whole structure of their happiness on these very illusions, which ought to be combated and dissipated by the light of knowledge, and they would think they were paying too dearly for a truth which begins by robbing them of all that has value in their sight.”
Read quote“We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.”
Read quote“It would be necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom: a truth that was felt at once by him to whom philosophy owes its name.”
Read quote“Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.”
Read quote“It is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.”
Read quote“Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God's dust is greater than your idol.”
Read quote“The fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing, But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.”
Read quote“That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.”
