Born this week
Sunday July 19th, 2026
Ernest Hemingway
July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century ...
Eric Hoffer
July 25, 1902 – May 21, 1983
Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.
Eric Hoffer was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom ...
Marshall McLuhan
July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian philosopher of communication theory and a public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the ...
Edward Hopper
July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was ...
Raymond Chandler
July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Chandler decided to become a detective ...
Gustav Heinemann
July 23, 1899 – July 7, 1976
Beyond peace, there is no longer any existence possible.
Gustav Walter Heinemann was a German politician. He was Mayor of the city of Essen from 1946 to 1949, West German Minister of the Interior ...
Elias Canetti
July 25, 1905 – August 14, 1994
He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.
Elias Canetti was a German language author, born in Bulgaria, and later a British citizen. He was a modernist novelist, playwright, ...
Oswald Chambers
July 24, 1874 – November 15, 1917
You will never cease to be the most amazed person on earth at what God has done for you on the inside.
Oswald Chambers was an early twentieth-century Scottish Baptist and Holiness Movement evangelist and teacher, best known for the devotional ...
Natalie Wood
July 20, 1938 – November 29, 1981
I couldn't even go to the bathroom alone. My mother or a social worker always went with me.
Natalie Wood was an American film and television actress best known for her screen roles in Miracle on 34th Street, Splendor in the Grass, ...
Robert Graves
July 24, 1895 – December 7, 1985
What we now call 'finance' is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
Robert von Ranke Graves was an English poet, novelist, critic, and classicist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works. ...
Edgar Degas
July 19, 1834 – September 27, 1917
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas; born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas; was a French artist famous for his paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. He is ...
Petrarch
July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
Francesco Petrarca, commonly anglicized as Petrarch, was an Aretine scholar and poet in Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest ...
Karl A. Menninger
July 22, 1893 – July 18, 1990
Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.
Karl Augustus Menninger was an American psychiatrist and a member of the Menninger family of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger ...
Arthur Balfour
July 25, 1848 – March 19, 1930
He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC, DL was a British Conservative politician who was the Prime Minister of the United ...
Stephen Vincent Benet
July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943
Dreaming men are haunted men.
Stephen Vincent Benét was an American author, poet, short story writer, and novelist. Benét is best known for his book-length narrative ...
Alexander Calder
July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976
I paint with shapes.
Alexander Calder was an American sculptor known as the originator of the mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture made with delicately balanced ...
Matthew Prior
July 21, 1664 – September 18, 1721
For, when with beauty we can virtue join, We paint the semblance of a form divine.
Matthew Prior was an English poet and diplomat. He is also known as a contributor to The Examiner.
Alexander Jackson Davis
July 24, 1803 – January 14, 1892
I am but an architectural composer.
Alexander Jackson Davis, or A. J. Davis, was one of the most successful and influential American architects of his generation, known ...
Junichiro Tanizaki
July 24, 1886 – July 30, 1965
Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.
Jun'ichirÅ Tanizaki was a Japanese author, one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, and perhaps the most popular Japanese ...