'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'

'All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.'

- "The Lord of the Rings" author JRR Tolkien (1892-1973)

'Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.'

- Author James Joyce (1882 -1941)

'Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.'

- Pablo Picasso

'Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.'

- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in "Elenora"

'Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.'

-Author Arthur Miller (1915-2005) in "Death of a Salesman"

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

'Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.'

- Maya Angelou

'I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.'

- American novelist Eudora Welty (1909-2001)

Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that 'Hell is—other people'

The line appears toward the end of the play "No Exit." One character, realizing that he's confined to live out the rest of his days with the play's other two characters, exclaims, "There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!"

'I've come to the conclusion that life is for the taking and just too short to dwell on the negative.'

- Cranberries lead singer Dolores O'Riordan (1971-2018)

'There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.'

- Writer Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.'

- Author James Baldwin (1924–1987)

A quote from Robin Williams

"There’s no shame in failing. The only shame is not giving things your best shot."

There are several theories for how the Oscar got its name

Several different people claim to have bestowed the famous nickname, including a librarian who thought the knight resembled her uncle Oscar and a gossip columnist who was poking fun at a local theater owner.

A theory about Pink Floyd and 'The Wizard of Oz' was popularized by a 19-year-old

Pink Floyd’s seminal album “Dark Side of the Moon” eerily synchronizes with “The Wizard of Oz,” offering a psychedelic soundtrack for the movie. Journalist Charlie Savage popularized the phenomenon when he was 19. He’d go on to write for the Boston Globe and New York Times winning a Pulitzer Prize.

'Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog' is an iconic romantic artwork

Caspar David Friedrich’s painting portrays man’s fascination with the natural world and emphasizes his smallness in the midst of its grandeur, epitomizing Edmund Burke's concept of "the sublime."

A theater group staged 'Waiting for Godot' at San Quentin prison in 1957

The play, about being stuck, resonated with inmates. Critics noted that the incarcerated audience empathized with its hopeless characters much more than those at the show's North American premiere in Miami, who'd walked out in disgust.

In 'Life of a Showgirl,' Taylor Swift nods to Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddal

Born in 1829, Siddal was an artist and poet who would become immortalized when she modeled for John Everett Millais' 1852 painting 'Ophelia,' depicting the suicidal lover from Shakespeare's 'Hamlet.' For years, Swift has alluded to Siddal as an exemplar of the sidelined female artist.

The best Shakespeare plays, ranked

The Guardian worked through the Bard's plays, from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to "The Winter's Tale," evaluating what distinguishes the mediocre from the truly excellent.

'Too often we participate in the globalization of indifference. May we strive instead to live global solidarity.'

- Pope Francis (1936 - 2025)

Eugene O'Neill is the lone American playwright to win the Nobel Prize

The writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, with the prize committee noting "the power, honesty, and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy."

Despite his sometimes caustic satire, Dickens was ultimately an optimist

Michael Slater, a professor of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College, notes that Dickens' anger at Parliament and social injustice never got in the way of his optimism. "There is a constant allegiance to the lives of ordinary people and their pleasures," he said in a 2001 interview with "In Our Time."

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

English playwright Christopher Marlowe's violent and mysterious death

According to an official coroner’s report, in 1593 a heated argument over payment for supper escalated into a physical struggle, during which Marlowe wounded a man named Ingram Frizer, who then fatally stabbed Marlowe above the right eye. Though we still don't have a definitive explanation for why Marlowe was killed, the true motive continues to be debated, with suspicions surrounding the official account. Read more here.

Broadway's 10 biggest flops

For every "Carousel" or "Cabaret," there's a "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark"—a show that never found its footing, sometimes in a public and disastrous way. Here are 10 Broadway musicals the producers and stars would probably rather we forget. Some, like "The Rocky Horror Show" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's," were eventually revived and relatively well received. Others, like "Into the Light"—which involved mimes, metaphysics, and the legend of the Shroud of Turin—have rightfully stayed buried.

A reading of ancient Rome's best graffiti

Graffiti has been surprisingly common throughout history, and even the grandeur of ancient Rome's walls wasn't spared. This clever and funny video reads through some of the more notable messages relayed via graffiti in ancient Rome, from tidbits of wisdom like "A small problem gets larger if you ignore it" to more unsavory observations of lovers, friends, and enemies.

Hear Carl Sagan reflect on the smallness of humanity

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Dorothy's famous entrance into Oz in 'The Wizard of Oz' relied on analog tricks, including a body double and sepia-toned paint, as much as it did on technology

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

See 33 images that became central to huge scandals, including a young Charles and Camilla, Michael Jackson's baby on a hotel balcony, and Hugh Grant's mugshot.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

Shooting stars, or meteors, are fragments of asteroids and comets that burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere, creating streaks in the sky called meteor showers.

All rainbows are 'raincircles' caused by water droplets separating white sunlight into a spectrum of colors, but Earth's surface blocks the bottom half of the circle from our line of sight.

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, but became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

In preparation for this weekend's Eurovision finale, which is something like the World Cup of pop music, here's a young Céline Dion performing (for Switzerland?) at the 1988 competition.

The hormonal disorder PCOS was renamed PMOS in 2026, a move designed to improve care and research by shifting the focus to the hormonal causes of this condition that affects 1 in 8 women.

Explore chaos in this simulation of two double pendulums, where small differences in the release angles produce wildly different outcomes.