“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.” — John Ruskin

“Sleep is death enjoyed.” — Friedrich Hebbel

“The whole scheme of things is turned wrong end to. Life should begin with age & its privileges and accumulations, & end with youth & its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages. As things are now, when in youth a dollar would bring a hundred pleasures, you can’t have it. When you are old, you get it & there is nothing worth buying with it then. It’s an epitome of life. The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.”

— Mark Twain, letter to Edward Dimmitt, July 19, 1901

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because it pleases him, and it pleases him because it is beautiful. Were nature not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, life would not be worth living.” — Henri Poincaré

“Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.” — Gertrude Stein

“When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.” — George Bernard Shaw

“History is all explained by geography.” — Robert Penn Warren