quotes of day Saturday, August 1, 2026

“It is the savor of bread broken with comrades that makes us accept the values of war.”

“On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.”

“I ate 'umble pie with an appetite.”

“If ye would go up high, then use your own legs! Do not get yourselves carried aloft; do not seat yourselves on other people's backs and heads!”

“Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true.”

“Friendship embraces innumerable ends; turn where you will it is ever at your side; no barrier shuts it out; it is never untimely and never in the way.”

“In politics, an absurdity in public business is going into it.”

“None can cure their harms by wailing them.”

“No wise man has called a change of opinion in constancy.”

“Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.”

“It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.”

“Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.”

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”