Born this week
Sunday August 2nd, 2026
Percy Bysshe Shelley
August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by critics as amongst the finest lyric poets in the ...
Andy Warhol
August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987
An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.
Andy Warhol was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship ...
Lucille Ball
August 6, 1911 – April 26, 1989
The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
Lucille Désirée Ball was an American comedienne, model, film and television actress, and studio executive. She was star of the sitcoms I ...
Luc de Clapiers
August 6, 1715 – May 28, 1747
Patience is the art of hoping.
Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues was a minor French writer, a moralist. He died at age 31, in broken health, having published the ...
Sara Teasdale
August 8, 1884 – January 29, 1933
Beauty, more than bitterness, makes the heart break.
Sara Teasdale was an American lyric poet. She was born Sara Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri, and used the name Sara Teasdale ...
Irving Babbitt
August 2, 1865 – July 15, 1933
Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself.
Irving Babbitt was an American academic and literary critic, noted for his founding role in a movement that became known as the New ...
William Bernbach
August 3, 1911 – October 2, 1982
Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
William Bernbach was an American advertising creative director. He was one of the three founders in 1949 of the international advertising ...
Stanley Baldwin
August 3, 1867 – December 14, 1947
I am one of those who would rather sink with faith than swim without it.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG PC FRS was a British Conservative politician, who dominated the government in his country ...
Louis Armstrong
August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971
What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong, nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter, singer, and an influential figure in jazz music. Coming to ...
Guy de Maupassant
August 5, 1850 – July 6, 1893
It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the ...
Peter McWilliams
August 5, 1949 – June 14, 2000
Guilt is anger directed at ourselves - at what we did or did not do. Resentment is anger directed at others - at what they did or did not do.
Peter Alexander McWilliams was born in Allen Park, Michigan on August 5, 1949. Early on Peter developed a zest for creativity. In 1967, ...
James Baldwin
August 2, 1924 – December 1987
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native ...
Rupert Brooke
August 3, 1887 – April 23, 1915
The cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble and the rough male kiss of blankets.
Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially "The ...
Maggie Kuhn
August 3, 1905 – April 22, 1995
Old age is not a disease - it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.
Maggie Kuhn was an American activist known for founding the Gray Panthers movement in August 1970, after being forced into retirement by ...
Walter Pater
August 4, 1839 – July 30, 1894
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, literary and art critic, and writer of fiction.
Francois Fenelon
August 6, 1651 – January 7, 1715
Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half.
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, more commonly known as François Fénelon, was a French Roman Catholic archbishop, theologian, ...
Charles Edison
August 3, 1890 – July 31, 1969
Our democracy poses problems and these problems must and shall be solved by courageous leadership.
Charles Edison was a son of Thomas Edison and Mina Miller. He was a businessman, who became Assistant and then United States Secretary of ...
Knut Hamsun
August 4, 1859 – February 19, 1952
In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.
Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun's work spans more than 70 years and shows ...
Kenneth Scott Latourette
August 6, 1884 – December 26, 1968
In the third century after Christ the faith continued to spread.
Kenneth Scott Latourette was an American historian of China, Japan, and world Christianity. His formative experiences as Christian ...
Paul Dirac
August 8, 1902 – October 20, 1984
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac OM FRS was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both ...
Francis Hutcheson
August 8, 1694 – January 14, 1747
That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
The Rev. Francis Hutcheson was a Scottish-Irish philosopher born in Ireland to a family of Scottish Presbyterians who became known as ...
Alice James
August 7, 1848 – March 6, 1892
The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.
Alice James was an American diarist. The only daughter of Henry James, Sr. and sister of psychologist and philosopher William James and ...