"In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence."

Robert Louis Stevenson Literature See all quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson →

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“I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way.”

“For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.”

“Nothing like a little judicious levity.”

“To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.”

“The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.”

“Sanity itself is a kind of convention.”

Resonant Thoughts

"In the beginning I tried to accommodate everything there that was somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away. After a while, some sheets in the …"

— Gerhard Richter

Art1932

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"All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda."

— Upton Sinclair

Politics1878–1968

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"Excellent attitude of the socialists, even of the revolutionaries and of the CGT...We have not had arrested any of the individuals registered in the Carnet B, apart from a few rare exceptions, when th…"

— Raymond Poincaré

Politics1860–1934

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"The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological…"

— Northrop Frye

Literature1912–1991

#nature