essay

🇿🇦David Hume

Philosophy

Empiricism

1796–1864

"Hume Society: An international scholarly society."

🇬🇧Virginia Woolf

Literature

Bloomsbury Group

1882–1941

"The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace."

Michel de Montaigne

Philosophy

1533–1592

"I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it."

🇫🇷Simone de Beauvoir

Philosophy

Existentialism

1908–1986

"If I had amnesia, I'd be almost like other men. Perhaps I'd even be able to love you."

🇺🇸Sylvia Plath

Literature

1932–1963

"I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live."

🇺🇸Maya Angelou

Literature

1928–2014

"Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."

🇺🇸Thomas Mann

Literature

"Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature."

Annie Besant

Politics

freethought

1847–1933

"Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act."

🇩🇪Herta Müller

Literature

b. 1953

"The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse."

🇺🇸Agnes Repplier

Literature

1855–1950

"Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the Earth peopled as ever by the inept."

🇺🇸Sheri S. Tepper

Literature

1929–2016

"The only thing rarer than louts who think is louts who read."

🇨🇭Helen Keller

Literature

"Who shall dare let his incapacity for hope or goodness cast a shadow upon the courage of those who bear their burdens as if they were privileges?"

🇺🇸Gloria Steinem

Politics

feminism

1934–2026

"As the little boy said when asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, "Oh no, that's women's work." Logic has nothing to do with oppression."

Matthew Arnold

Literature

1822–1888

"Style…is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it."

Harriet Martineau

Literature

1802–1876

"If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power."

🇫🇷Jean Genet

Literature

1910–1986

"The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side."

🇬🇧Rachel Cusk

Literature

b. 1967

"I worry I don’t see things the way everyone else does."

🇺🇸Rachel Carson

Literature

1907–1964

"RachelCarson.org The life and legacy of Rachel Carson"

"…The resistance to English, the fear of English, has made us bad readers of English literature, because of our fear of contaminating the Spanish language, of losing it in the avalanche of North American influence…"

🇺🇸Florence King

Literature

1936–2016

"The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her."

🇺🇸Fanny Fern

Journalism

1811–1872

"Chambers Dictionary of Quotations, Chambers Publications, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, 2005"

🇬🇧Martin Amis

Literature

1949–2023

"The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating."

🇺🇸Mary Eberstadt

Literature

"Family and faith are the invisible double helix of society—two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another."

Dinah Craik

Literature

1826–1887

"It is not the smallest use to try to make people good, unless you try at the same time — and they feel that you are trying — to make them happy. And you rarely can make another happy, unless you are happy yourself."

🇺🇸Annie Dillard

Literature

1945–2026

"NPR: Excerpt: The Maytrees, read by Annie Dillard"

🇺🇸Jamaica Kincaid

Literature

b. 1949

"I don’t like to hear people speaking in my work. I like reading it, and I marvel at people who can do it well. And there’s something when you see it done well. It’s just so terrific. But I’m not able to do it."

🇺🇸John Burroughs

Science

1907–1978

"Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred."

🇺🇸Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Psychology

1926–2004

"Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death."

🇺🇸Alice Walker

Literature

b. 1944

"The little I knew about my own self wouldn’t have filled a thimble!"

🇺🇸Chuck Klosterman

Literature

b. 1972

"If you meet someone who has the same first name as this person, you immediately like them less."

🇺🇸Ocean Vuong

Literature

b. 1988

"I think that might not have been enough, were it not for me being my family ’s only hope. Because they were also dying, in a different way: financially, mentally. And I thought, I can’t die. Literally I can’t die."

Frances Burney

Literature

1752–1840

"Essays by Fanny Burney at Quotidiana.org"

🇺🇸Sloane Crosley

Literature

b. 1979

"Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there."

🇺🇸Voltairine de Cleyre

essay

1866–1912

"No one can hate petitions worse than I, and no one has less faith in them than I. But for my champion I am willing to try any means that invades no other's right, even though I have little hope in it."

🇺🇸June Jordan

Literature

1936–2002

"June Jordan profile at the Poetry Foundation"

🇮🇪Colm Tóibín

Literature

b. 1955

"Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abruptly."