Quotidiana
(kwo•ti•de•A•na)
N. 1. The land of everyday, commonplace things; 2. The online compendium of 325 public-domain essays.
Featuring
Joseph Addison
(1672–1719) / 4 essays
Wit and humor, as have a tendency to expose vice and folly, furnish useful diversions.
Francis Bacon
(1561–1626) / 6 essays
There be so many false points of praise, that a man may justly hold it a suspect.
W. N. P. Barbellion
(1889–1919) / 3 essays
My life [is a] struggle with ill-health and ambition, and I have mastered neither.
Hilaire Belloc
(1870–1953) / 1 essays
Time can take only what is ripe, but Death comes always too soon.
Isabella Bird
(1831–1904) / 1 essays
I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one’s life and sigh.
Thomas Browne
(1605–1682) / 5 essays
Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.
Margaret Cavendish
(1623–1673) / 1 essays
If tranquility lives in an honest mind the mind dwells in peace.
Mary Chudleigh
(1656–1710) / 1 essays
The fear of death is the occasional cause of the greatest part of…mean dishonorable actions.
Elizabeth Clinton
(1575–1638) / 1 essays
The mothers then that refuse to nurse their owne children, doe they not despise God’s providence?
William Cornwallis
(1579–1614) / 2 essays
It is easier to think well than to do well; and no trial to have handsome dapper conceits run invisibly in a brain.
William Cowper
(1731–1800) / 4 essays
Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.
Thomas Culpeper
(1626–1697) / 1 essays
Though [essays] may gather some honey from the best flowers of wit and learning, they have a limitation from none.
Thomas De Quincey
(1785–1859) / 8 essays
All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight towards death.
Maria Edgeworth
(1767–1849) / 0 essays
Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.
T. S. Eliot
(1888–1965) / 1 essays
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
Owen Felltham
(1602–1668) / 2 essays
We begin to be miserable, when we are totally bent on some one temporal object.
Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939) / 1 essays
My main object is to collect everyday material and utilize it scientifically.
Margaret Fuller
(1810–1850) / 1 essays
None can sympathize with thoughts like mine, who are permanently ensnared in the meshes of sect or party.
Oliver Goldsmith
(1735–1774) / 3 essays
From the highest to the lowest, this people seem fond of sights and monsters.
Louise Imogen Guiney
(1861–1920) / 9 essays
It is diverting to study…how many indispensables man can live without.
Gail Hamilton
(1838–1896) / 5 essays
Manhood discovers what childhood can never divine,—that the sorrows of life are superficial, and the happiness…structural.
Jane Ellen Harrison
(1850–1928) / 2 essays
Anyone who cares passionately for abstract discussion, be his hair never so gray,…is in spirit young.
Eliza Haywood
(1693–1756) / 3 essays
To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning.
William Hazlitt
(1778–1830) / 28 essays
In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason.
James Howell
(1594–1666) / 2 essays
Excuse me that I trouble you thus with these rambling meditations.
William Dean Howells
(1837–1920) / 1 essays
The soul… is the supernal criticism of the deeds done in the body.
David Hume
(1711–1776) / 1 essays
Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World.
Leigh Hunt
(1784–1859) / 11 essays
The test of seeing and hearing… is in the ideas we realize, and the pleasure we derive.
Edward Hyde
(1609–1674) / 1 essays
There is nothing worthier of an honest man than to have contention with nobody.
L. P. Jacks
(1860–1955) / 1 essays
The richest and most significant experiences of man…are the least patient of verbal reproduction.
Samuel Johnson
(1709–1784) / 5 essays
Every diversity of art or nature…may supply matter to him whose only rule is to avoid uniformity.
Yoshida Kenko
(1283–1350) / 1 essays
It is a fine thing when a man who thoroughly understands a subject is unwilling to open his mouth.
Charles Lamb
(1775–1834) / 18 essays
The mighty future is as nothing, being every thing! The past is every thing, being nothing.
Walter Savage Landor
(1775–1864) / 1 essays
A man’s vanity tells him what is honor, a man’s conscience what is justice.
Vernon Lee
(1856–1935) / 10 essays
I know few things more odious than the chilly, draughty, emptiness of a place without a history.
Don Marquis
(1878–1937) / 1 essays
The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it.
Edward Sanford Martin
(1856–1939) / 1 essays
It does a comfortable sufferer good to get his head out of his conveniences sometimes and complain.
Harriet Martineau
(1802–1876) / 5 essays
My chief object in life shall be the cultivation of my intellectual powers, with a view to the instruction of others.
Alice Meynell
(1847–1922) / 17 essays
More candid is the author who has no world, but turns that appeal inwards to his own heart.
A. A. Milne
(1882–1956) / 12 essays
There is a crispness about celery that is of the essence of October.
Michel de Montaigne
(1533–1592) / 50 essays
I seek out change indiscriminately and tumultuously. My style and my mind alike go roaming.
Hannah More
(1745–1833) / 4 essays
If all accomplishments could be bought at the price of a single virtue, the purchase would be infinitely dear.
Christopher Morley
(1890–1957) / 3 essays
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
William Osler
(1849–1919) / 1 essays
The strength of a student of men is…to study men, their habits…their vices, virtues, and peculiarities.
Ann Plato
(1820–?) / 6 essays
The graves before me…are thickly deposited. The marble that speak the names, bid us prepare for Death.
Agnes Repplier
(1855–1950) / 7 essays
It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(4–65) / 4 essays
That which was bitter to bear is pleasant to have borne; it is natural to rejoice at the ending of one’s ills.
Alexander Smith
(1830–1867) / 15 essays
In my book there is little more life than there is in the market-place on the days when there is no market.
Richard Steele
(1672–1729) / 2 essays
When a man has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass.
Robert Lewis Stevenson
(1850–1894) / 6 essays
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note.
Jonathan Swift
(1667–1745) / 4 essays
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
William Temple
(1628–1699) / 4 essays
The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.
H. M. Tomlinson
(1873–1958) / 6 essays
It is better to obey the mysterious direction … when it points to a new road, however strange that road may be.
Mark Twain
(1835–1910) / 2 essays
The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck of threadbare burial-witticisms.
Mary Wollstonecraft
(1759–1797) / 5 essays
We must have an object to refer our reflections to, or they will seldom go below the surface.
Zitkala-Ša
(1876–1938) / 1 essays
To my innermost consciousness the phenomenal universe is a royal mantle, vibrating with His divine breath.
