People we keep on the record.
Each figure's page holds verbatim lines, dated and linked to their sources. Historical and public-domain figures come first; every entry carries a citation, and any reader can challenge one.
The reference corpus
Authors indexed from Bartlett's 1905 and Wikiquote — cited reference lines, distinct from the curated registry. Curated figures above carry their corpus lines too.
Ali ibn Abi Talib
Cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, fourth caliph, and first Shia imam. The sermons and sayings gathered under his name — most famously in Nahj al-Balagha — remain a cornerstone of Arabic moral rhetoric.
Read the lines →Rumi
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, thirteenth-century Persian poet, jurist, and Sufi mystic. Eight centuries on he is among the best-selling poets in the English-speaking world — usually in loose translation, which is why cited renderings matter.
Read the lines →Every figure entry uses the exact words as reported by a citable source. We don't paraphrase, condense, or invent. If an entry is wrong or there's a better source, open the figure's page and use the correction form — every change is logged in public.