- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony.
Please feel free to browse and borrow.
Quote Search
- 19,544 quotes and counting ...
Authors
Author Cloud
Adams, John • Aristotle • Asimov, Isaac • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterfield (Lord) • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Cicero, Marcus Tullius • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Homer • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • Jefferson, Thomas • 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 • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Sophocles • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
Most Quoted Authors
Topic Cloud
action age America author beauty belief change character courage death democracy education ego error evil faith fear freedom future God government happiness history human nature humanity integrity liberty life love morality perspective politics power progress reality religion science society success truth virtue war wealth wisdom writing- I've been adding topics since 2014, so not all quotes have been given one. Full topic list.
Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (9,877)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (6,641)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (6,246)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (5,609)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,965)
- “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981) (4,788)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (4,630)
- Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907) (4,620)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (4,145)
- “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980) (4,130)
Recent Feedback
- Feds Skewer Ex-Trump | Chamblee54 on Letter to Edward Dowse (19 Apr 1803)
- Snyder, Timothy - On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) | WIST on “Notes on Nationalism” (1945)
- Dave on Notice to email subscribers
- Nina on Notice to email subscribers
- ~~Admin - Notice to email subscribers | WIST on Subscribe/Feeds
- France, Anatole - (Spurious) | WIST on A Writer’s Notebook (1949)
- Dave on The Odyssey [Ὀδύσσεια], Book 6, l. 180ff (6.180) [Odysseus to Nausicaa] (c. 700 BC) [tr. Rieu (1946)]
- Marcus Aurelius - (Spurious) | WIST on Meditations, Book 2, #11 [tr. Gill (2014)]
- Elizabeth II - Address to the Nation (5 Apr 2020) | WIST on “We’ll Meet Again” (1939) [with Hughie Charles]
- Pratchett, Terry - The Last Hero (2001) | WIST on Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, #3366 (1732)
Quotations about defensiveness
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
It is easy when you’ve been hurt by love to give it up as a bad job and make independence your new god, taking the love you had to give and turning it in upon yourself. And most of us have had to protect ourselves so much at times that we’ve given up the high road and taken the low. But independence carried to the furthest extreme is just loneliness and death, nothing more than another defense, and there is no growth in it, only a safe harbor for a while. The answer doesn’t lie in learning how to protect ourselves from life — it lies in learning how to become strong enough to let a bit more of it in.
Merle Shain (1935-1989) Canadian journalist and author
When Lovers Are Friends, ch. 1 (1978)
(Source)
They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) Anglo-Irish statesman, orator, philosopher
Speech on Economical Reform, House of Commons (11 Feb 1780)
(Source)
Failure isn’t about a lack of “natural intelligence,” whatever that is. Instead, failure is born from a messy combination of bad circumstances: high anxiety, low motivation, gaps in background knowledge. Most of all, we fail because, when the moment comes to confront our shortcomings and open ourselves up to teachers and peers, we panic and deploy our defenses instead.
Ben Orlin (b. c. 1988) American math teacher, author
“What It Feels Like to Be Bad at Math,” Slate (29 Apr 2013)
(Source)
Originally posted on his blog: What It Feels Like to Be Bad at Math – Math with Bad Drawings.
Have I ever heard a skeptic wax superior and contemptuous? Certainly. I’ve even sometimes heard, to my retrospective dismay, that unpleasant tone in my own voice. There are human imperfections on both sides of this issue. Even when it’s applied sensitively, scientific skepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic, heartless and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held beliefs of others. And, it must be said, some scientists and dedicated skeptics apply this tool as a blunt instrument, with little finesse. Sometimes it looks as if the skeptical conclusion came first, that contentions were dismissed before, not after, the evidence was examined. All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well based — or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven’t thought of, or demonstrates that we’ve swept key underlying assumptions under the rug — it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.
Carl Sagan (1934-1996) American scientist and writer
The Demon-Haunted World, ch. 17 (1995)
(Source)