Category: Thought

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

Winston Churchill, speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943, in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999), p. 215.

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position, and be bruised in a new place.

Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveler (1824), Preface, p. 7.

Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.

Edgar Allan Poe, “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. IV: The Raven Edition.

Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time; otherwise, the creative powers of genius would overstock the world, and the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless mazes of literature. 

Washington Irving, “The Mutabilities of Literature” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-20).

C’est véritablement utile puisque c’est joli.

It is truly useful since it is beautiful.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (1943), 14th chapter.

Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress: Vol.II, Reason in Society (1905).

It is so difficult to mix with artists! You must choose business men to talk to, because artists only talk of money.

Jean Sibelius, as quoted by Bengt de Törne in Sibelius: A Close-Up (1937), p. 94.

Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on; le malheur
est qu’il soit un maître inhumain qui tue ses élèves.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Hector Berlioz, letter written in November 1856, published in Pierre Citron (ed.) Correspondance générale (1989), vol. 5, p. 390; as quoted by Paul Davies in About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (1996), p. 214.

If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.

Jean Sibelius, as quoted in Henry Thomas & Dana Lee Thomas, Living Biographies of Great Composers (1946) p. 309.

Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais
rien toutes seules, et c’est fatigant, pour les enfants,
de toujours et toujours leur donner des explications.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (1943), first chapter.