“The American lives in a land of wonders, in which everything seems to be in constant flux, and every change seems to mark an advance. Hence the idea of the new is coupled in his mind with the idea of the better. Nowhere does he perceive the limits that nature may have imposed on man’s efforts. In his eyes, that which does not exist is that which has not yet been attempted.”

― Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America

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“Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.”

― Lord Byron

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“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”

― George Bernard Shaw

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“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”

― C.S. Lewis

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“The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.”

― Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

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“What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.”

― Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial; or Hydriotaphia

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“It is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall flow in inexhaustible streams…Through it, God will spread His Word. A spring of truth shall flow from it: like a new star it shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light heretofore unknown to shine amongst men”

― Johannes Gutenberg

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“My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”

― Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

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“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.”

― Anaïs Nin

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“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition…always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”

― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

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“In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others of which we could have no idea before, so that we cannot solve one doubt without creating several new ones.”

― Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air

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“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

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“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

― Susan Sontag, On Photography

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“As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine.”

― Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

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“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

― Saint Augustine

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"If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend."

― Doug Larson

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“Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball.”

-Jim Murray

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"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method."

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

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"Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace."

― Paul Theroux in The London Observer (1989)

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"Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both. But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz."

― Louis Armstrong

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"Jewelry takes people's minds off your wrinkles."

― Sonja Henie, Norwegian Olympic figure skater and film star

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"The golden rule for reading a menu is, if you cannot pronounce it, you cannot afford it."

― Attributed to English comedy writer and raconteur Frank Muir

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"Si vis pacem, para bellum. (If you want peace, prepare for war.)"

—Vegetius, De Re Militari, Book 3

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