Quotes from classic authors
451 quotes from 137 authors, including Victor Hugo, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Leo Tolstoy. Each one is given as it appears in a public-domain text, with its author, its work, the exact passage and a link to the source.
These are the quotes Selfia offers in its “Quotes” theme. Before being kept, each line was found word for word in the original text or in a published public-domain translation. When a quote is a translation, the translator is named.
By theme
- Love 53
- Friendship 22
- Happiness and joy 50
- Time 33
- Courage and hope 19
- Nature 58
- Freedom 11
- Wisdom 10
- Work and perseverance 33
- Solitude and silence 11
- Youth and age 25
- Kindness and gratitude 26
- Beauty 21
- Truth 16
- The sea and the sky 49
- Life 76
By author
- Victor Hugo 14
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 11
- Leo Tolstoy 11
- William Shakespeare 11
- Friedrich Nietzsche 10
- Blaise Pascal 8
- Confucius 8
- Dante Alighieri 8
- Jean de La Bruyère 8
- Michel de Montaigne 8
- Miguel de Cervantes 8
- Rabindranath Tagore 8
- Fyodor Dostoevsky 7
- Hans Christian Andersen 7
- Marcus Aurelius 7
- Charles Dickens 6
- François de La Rochefoucauld 6
- Henry David Thoreau 6
- Jean Paul 6
- Mark Twain 6
- Robert Louis Stevenson 6
- Arthur Schopenhauer 5
- Charlotte Brontë 5
- Ivan Turgenev 5
- Jane Austen 5
- Okakura Kakuzō 5
- Omar Khayyam 5
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 5
- Saadi 5
- Selma Lagerlöf 5
- Walt Whitman 5
- Epictetus 4
- Friedrich Schiller 4
- Lewis Carroll 4
- Li Bai 4
- Oscar Wilde 4
- Petrarch 4
- Plato 4
- Aesop 3
- Alexis de Tocqueville 3
- Alfred Tennyson 3
- Anton Chekhov 3
- Aristotle 3
- Baruch Spinoza 3
- Carlo Collodi 3
- Charles Darwin 3
- Christina Rossetti 3
- Cicero 3
- Epicurus 3
- G. K. Chesterton 3
- Henri-Frédéric Amiel 3
- Horace 3
- Jean-Henri Fabre 3
- John Keats 3
- John Muir 3
- Jules Michelet 3
- Khalil Gibran 3
- Kobayashi Issa 3
- Marie Curie 3
- Matsuo Bashō 3
- Mencius 3
- Nitobe Inazō 3
- Ovid 3
- Pliny the Younger 3
- Plutarch 3
- Robert Browning 3
- Tacitus 3
- Terence 3
- Virgil 3
- William Blake 3
- William James 3
- William Wordsworth 3
65 more authors, quoted once or twice, are gathered in Other authors (101 quotes).
To begin with
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“A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.”
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“The fairest lives, in my opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model without miracle, without extravagance.”
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“No one is vexed at not seeing everything. But we do not like to be mistaken.”
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“However deceitful hope may be, yet she carries us on pleasantly to the end of life.”
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“No way is too tedious for him who travels slowly and without being in a hurry; no advantages are too remote for those who have patience.”
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“We have not to seek to make ourselves like our progenitors, but to strive to work out that species of greatness and happiness which is our own.”