“A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” — Daniel Dennett

“Man is a biped without feathers.” — Plato

“Only man has ears that do not move.” — Pliny the Elder

“Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love all year round, madam; that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals.” — Pierre Beaumarchais

“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.” — Samuel Butler

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.” — William Hazlitt

“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.” — Joyce Carol Oates

“The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.” — Lewis Carroll

“Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.” — Flaubert

“Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.” — Lewis Carroll

“Madam, it is the hardest thing in the world to be in love, and yet attend to business. A gentleman asked me this morning, ‘What news from Lisbon?’ and I answered, ‘She is exquisitely handsome.'” — Richard Steele

“I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.” — Thoreau

“It is equally pointless to weep because we won’t be alive a hundred years from now as that we were not here a hundred years ago.” — Montaigne

“People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.” — George Santayana