Quotes

Joan of Arc photo

“One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it, and then it's gone. But to surrender what you are, and live without belief - that's more terrible than dying - more terrible than dying young.”

Joan of Arc (1412–1431) French folk heroine and Roman Catholic saint

Quote is often seen as attributed to Joan of Arc. However, the quote is actually a line from a script for the 1946 Broadway play entitled Joan of Lorraine by Maxwell Anderson which later become a movie in 1948 entitled Joan of Arc directed by Victor Fleming and starring Ingrid Bergman. The line is spoken by Joan of Arc to Bishop Pierre Cauchon in Act II, Scene III of the play. ( Script http://books.google.com/books?id=bOe6kHHbSiEC) <br class="br">Misattributed

Theresa May photo
V.S. Naipaul photo

“We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at the merest touch of a foreign power. There was no institution, there was no creative nation, no university, no printing press, there was nothing but personal power. …. How do you ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it. You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and conquests. So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are in ruin. They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why Bhubaneswar was desecrated. So history has to be studied, it is very painful history. But it is not more painful than most countries have had. …It isn't India alone that has had a rough time, that has to be understood. But the rough time has to be faced and it cannot be glossed over. There are tools for us to understand the rough time. We can read a man like Ibn Battuta who will tell you what it was like to be there in the midst of the fourteenth century, terrible times. An apologist of the invaders would like to gloss that over. But it would be wrong to gloss that over, that has to be understood. …But I would like to see this past recovered and not dodged.”

V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry

V.S. Naipaul, Interview, with URMI GOSWAMI, JANUARY 14, 2003 0 &#x27;How do you ignore history?&#x27; https://web.archive.org/web/20070106194746/http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/comp/articleshow?artid=34295982

Diane Ackerman photo
Owen Lovejoy photo

“Sir, than robbery, than piracy, than polygamy, slaveholding is worse. More criminal, more injurious to man, and consequently more offensive to God. Slaveholding has been justly designated as the sum of all villainy. Put every crime perpetuated among men into a moral crucible, and dissolve and combine them all, and the resultant amalgam is slaveholding. It has the violence of robbery.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother&#x27;s Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838&amp;ndash;64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&amp;pg=PA192 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, pp. 192&amp;ndash;193 <br class="br">1860s, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives (April 1860)

Samuel Smiles photo
Henri Barbusse photo

“More than attacks that are like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting strife, War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth. It is befouled faces and tattered flesh, it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the ravenous earth.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn
Context: Waking, Paradis and I look at each other, and remember. We return to life and daylight as in a nightmare. In front of us the calamitous plain is resurrected, where hummocks vaguely appear from their immersion, the steel-like plain that is rusty in places and shines with lines and pools of water, while bodies are strewn here and there in the vastness like foul rubbish, prone bodies that breathe or rot.
Paradis says to me, "That's war."
"Yes, that's it," he repeats in a far-away voice, "that's war. It's not anything else."
He means — and I am with him in his meaning — "More than attacks that are like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting strife, War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth. It is befouled faces and tattered flesh, it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the ravenous earth. It is that, that endless monotony of misery, broken, by poignant tragedies; it is that, and not the bayonet glittering like silver, nor the bugle's chanticleer call to the sun!"
Paradis was so full of this thought that he ruminated a memory, and growled, "D'you remember the woman in the town where we went about a bit not so very long ago? She talked some drivel about attacks, and said, 'How beautiful they must be to see!'"
A chasseur who was full length on his belly, flattened out like a cloak, raised his bead out of the filthy background in which it was sunk, and cried, 'Beautiful? Oh, hell! It's just as if an ox were to say, 'What a fine sight it must be, all those droves of cattle driven forward to the slaughter-house!'

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José Baroja photo
Hiro Mashima photo

“… for some of us, one mile can be more to walk than thirty.”

Francine Rivers (1947) American writer

Source: Redeeming Love

David Bowie photo

“I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Milan Kundera photo

“Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Source: Life is Elsewhere

Jane Austen photo

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Persuasion (1817)
Works, Persuasion
Source: Pride and Prejudice

Paulo Coelho photo
George Eliot photo

“It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator