- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony.
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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (7,877)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (6,009)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,939)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (5,100)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,886)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (4,258)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,929)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,750)
- Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907) (3,563)
- “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980) (3,435)
Most Quoted Authors
Author Cloud
Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
Recent Feedback
- 8-Jan-21 - ***Dave Does the Blog on Speech to the electors of Bristol (3 Nov 1774).
- 4-Jan-21 - Doing the Numbers, 12/2020 | WIST on Republic, Book 1, 347c.
- 4-Jan-21 - Doing the Numbers, 12/2020 | WIST on “On The Conduct of Life” (1822).
- 4-Jan-21 - Doing the Numbers, 12/2020 | WIST on Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962).
- 4-Jan-21 - Doing the Numbers, 12/2020 | WIST on Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907).
- 4-Jan-21 - Doing the Numbers, 12/2020 | WIST on “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933).
This ideal University of Life … would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning — not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly “What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings.
Alain de Botton (b. 1969) Swiss-British author
“Reclaiming the Intellectual Life for Posterity,” Liberal Education (Spring 2009)
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