quotes from classic

Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who led the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach.

more quotes from Victor Marie Hugo

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

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A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

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You punch me, I punch back. I do not believe it's good for ones self-respect to be a punching bag.

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Man would be otherwise. That is the essence of the specifically human.

more quotes from Antonio Machado

Under all that we think, lives all we believe, like the ultimate veil of our spirits.

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Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.

more quotes from Arthur Machen

Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen.

more quotes from Compton Mackenzie

Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.... Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

Ambassador Puser the ambassador Reminds himself in French, felicitous tongue,...

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night -- brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women: I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair....

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost Or a dead man's voice but a distant and vain affirmation Like dream words most)

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

Nor now the long light on the sea— And here face downward in the sun...

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We are as great as our belief in human liberty -- no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

And crossed the dark defile at last, and found At Roncevaux upon the darkening plain...

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. For the American citadel is a man. Not man in general. Not man in the abstract. Not the majority of men. But man. That man. His worth. His uniqueness.

more quotes from Archibald MacLeish