“In fine, it is impossible to prevent, and only great simplicity can hope to prevent, human nature doing what it has once set its mind upon, by force of law or by any other deterrent force whatsoever.”
— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (trans. Richard Crawley)
“The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.”
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“Do not think velocity, or passage-playing, your highest aim. Try to produce such an impression with a piece of music as was intended by the composer; all further exertions are caricatures.”
— Robert Schumann, Advice to Young Musicians / Musikalische Haus- und Lebensregeln (trans. Henry Hugo Pierson, 1860) (1848)
“I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.”
— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841)
“The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.”
— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (trans. Richard Crawley)
“For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series — Compensation (1841)
“The artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men.”
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
“So all life is but a continual alternation between grim truth and fleeting dreams of happiness. There is no haven. The waves drive us hither and thither, until the sea engulfs us.”
— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, ed. Modeste Tchaikovsky (trans. Rosa Newmarch, 1906) (1878)
“Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”
— Aristotle, Poetics (trans. S. H. Butcher)
“It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second is something besides, for it is likewise art.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing, and only one, philosophy.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Every quote in this collection was verified
against its original public-domain source — the letter, journal, poem or treatise it
truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
Start free to bring these voices into your daily practice.