Born Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

GALILEO: Truth is born of the times, not of authority. Our ignorance is limitless: let us lop one cubic millimeter off it. Why try to be clever now that we at last have a chance of being just a little less stupid?

"All men are born equal and free" is not Nature's law in the literal sense.

Then, England's ground, farewell; sweet soil, adieu,
My mother, and my nurse, that bears me yet!
Where e'er I wander, boast of this I can:
Though banished, yet a true-born Englishman.

William Shakespeare

There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!

Henry David Thoreau

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

Any one who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory. Good culture is born of a good disposition; and since the cause is more to be praised than the effect, I will rather praise a good disposition without culture, than good culture without the disposition.

Leonardo da Vinci

States that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them.

Niccolò Machiavelli

The American Constitution declares 'All men are born equal.' The British Socialist Party add: 'All men must be kept equal'.

Winston Churchill

What are we? What is the future? What is the past? What magic fluid envelops us and hides from us the things it is most important for us to know? We are born, we live, and we die in the midst of the marvelous.

Napoleon I of France

When God chooses to let himself be born in lowliness, when he who holds all possibilities in his hand takes upon himself the form of a lowly servant, when he goes about defenseless and lets people do with him what they will, he surely must know well enough what he is doing and why he wills it; but for all that it is he who has people in his power and not they who have power over him-so history ought not play Mr. Malapert by this wanting to make manifest who he was.

Søren Kierkegaard

After wars peace, after peace, another war. Every day men are born and others die.

Simone de Beauvoir

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.

John F. Kennedy

Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

Miguel de Cervantes

The next tide will erase the way through the mudflats,
and everything will be again equal on all sides;
but the small, far-out island already has its
eyes closed; bewildered, the dike draws a circle
around its inhabitants who were born
into a sleep in which many worlds
are silently confused, for they rarely speak,
and every phrase is like an epitaph.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work" because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

We have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, gegeneis, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they.

Henry David Thoreau

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start —
No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.

To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection.

To what gulfs A single deviation from the track Of human duties leads even those who claim The homage of mankind as their born due, And find it, till they forfeit it themselves!

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

In bed we laugh, in bed we cry, and born in bed, in bed we die; the near approach a bed may show of human bliss to human woe.

You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry