Nature is the art of God.
—Thomas Browne (English Author, Physician)
I think in our own heads we’re never all that confident. I’m not.
—Tom Wilson (American Cartoonist)
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.
—Edwin Percy Whipple (American Literary Critic)
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
—Zadie Smith (English Novelist, Essayist)
One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.
—Wendell Berry (American Author, Environmentalist)
Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable…the art of the next best.
—Otto von Bismarck (Prusso-German Statesman)
If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
—Octavio Paz (Mexican Poet, Diplomat)
I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
—Philip Pullman (English Children’s Author, Dramatist)
The big problem is not the haves and the have-nots—it’s the give-nots.
—Arnold Glasow (American Businessman)
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
—Henry Miller (American Novelist)
Nature yields her most profound secrets to the person who is determined to uncover them.
—Napoleon Hill (American Author)
The myths have always condemned those who “looked back.” Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.
—Dag Hammarskjold (Swedish Statesman)
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
—Werner Herzog (German Film Director)
Bombs and pistols do not make a revolution. The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas.
—Bhagat Singh (Indian Revolutionary)