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And I quote...

• The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done. -George MacDonald
• Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion - all in one. -John Ruskin
• Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wished to foresee the future might consult the past. -Niccolo Machiavelli
• Fortunately for us, Japan is opening its first business school in the near future. This is likely to produce a measurable drop in Japanese productivity. -Felix Rohatyn
• The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort. -Confucius
• The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn. -Alvin Toffler
• The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on Nor all your piety nor wit, Shall lure it back to cancel half a line. -The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
• Money is always there, but the pockets change; it is not in the same pocket after a change, and that is all there is to say about money. -Gertrude Stein
• The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. -Winston Churchill
• He who is only just is cruel. Who on earth could live were all judged justly? -Byron
• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us, and you are the only one who can use your ability. -Emerson
• It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. -Oscar Wilde
• There is one theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is a second theory which states that this has already happened. -Douglas Adams
• After dark all cats are leopards. -Zuni Proverb
• Behind an able man there are always other able men. -Chinese Proverb
• After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. -Aldous Huxley
• The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. -Henry David Thoreau
• Man can't help hoping even if he is a scientist. He can only hope more accurately. -Karl Menninger
• Do not praise yourself, not slander others: There are still many days to go and anything could happen. -Kabir
• Be slow in choosing a friend, but slower in changing him. -Scottish Proverb
• Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared. -Eddie Rickenbacker
• Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The difference between optimism and pessimism resides in memory. The pessimist aptly recalls the hurts and failures of yesterday, but cannot remember the plentiful possibilities of a new tomorrow. The optimist has a hopeful future already memorized. -anon
• The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create. -Leonard I. Sweet
• Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good. -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
• A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs. -Bernard Baruch
• The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. -Warren Bennis
• Long-range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions. -Peter Drucker
• By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future. -Zelda Fitzgerald
• The most decisive actions of our life - I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future-are, more often than not, unconsidered. -Andre Gide
• Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. -John F. Kennedy
• They gave each other a smile with a future in it. -Ring Lardner
• Business more than any other occupation is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight. -Henry Luce
• Each moment is a place you've never been. -Mark Strand
• The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. -Mark Twain
• That which goes contrary to the prevailing taste is, for me, the most precious of things. Whatever is scorned, despised, or not understood by the society in which one lives has prospects for the future. -Andre Masson
• No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future. -Ian Wilson
• Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. -Jorge Luis Borges
• Water floats ships. Water sinks ships. - Chinese proverb
• The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being. -Albert Einstein
• Only the paradox comes anywhere near to the comprehending fullness of life. - Carl Jung
• We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future. -Max Planck
• Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future. -Antoine Rivarol
• Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future. - Sivananda
• When we yield to discouragement it is usually because we give too much thought to the past and to the future. - St. Therese of Lisieux
• Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock. -Alvin Toffler
• The danger of the past was that men become slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. -Erich Fromm
• The future is purchased by the present. -Samuel Johnson
• Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. -Lewis Mumford
• Life ain't in holdin' a good hand, but in playin' a pore hand well. -The Cowboy Humor of Alfred Henry Lewis
• The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. -Edmund Burke
• Only the mediocre are always at their best. -Jean Giradoux
• Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. -Theodore Roosevelt
• I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends... They're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights! -Warren Harding
• After I am dead, I would rather have them ask why Cato has no monument than why he has one. -Cato the Elder
• If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working. -Ford Prefect
• Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire. -Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld
• The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The man of wood sings, the woman of stone gets up and dances. This cannot be done by passion or learning, it cannot be done by reasoning. - Tung Shan.
• If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. -Albert Einstein
• If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time. -Edith Wharton
• Strange that creatures without backbones have the hardest shells. -Kahlil Gibran
• You never find happiness until you stop looking for it. -Chuang-Tzu
• How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these. -George Washington Carver
• The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances. -Martha Washington
• The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter. -Mark Twain
• If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time'. -Rebecca West
• Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. - Nelson Mandela
• Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril. -Sun Tzu
• Each of us has a spark of life inside us, and our highest endeavor ought to be to set off that spark in one another. -Kenny Ausubel
• They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee, on being consigned to a mental institution, circa 17th c.
• Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. -Oscar Wilde
• To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well mannered. -Voltaire
• Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again. -Andre Gide
• We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• All that we pass on to our children is the conviction that nothing is true, final or enduring, including the culture from which they sprang. -Appleyard
• It doesn't matter whom you are paired against; your opponent is always yourself. -Nakamura
• That writer does the most, who gives his reader the most knowledge, and takes from him the least time. -Coulton
• It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us. -Peter DeVries
• An example from the monkey: the higher it climbs, the more you see of its behind. -St. Bonaventure
• He doth like the ape, that the higher he clymbes the more he shows his ars. -Sir Francis Bacon
• In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. -Oscar Wilde
• Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them. -Alan Watts
• The acts of life have neither beginning nor end. - Tristan Tzara
• When the Gods wish to punish they answer our prayers. -Oscar Wilde
• Granting our wishes is one of Fate's saddest jokes. -James Russell Lowell
• The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly. -Nietzsche
• Access to power must be confined to those who are not in love with it. -Plato
• Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. -Ernest Hemingway
• We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. -Alan Watts
• Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. - Spanish Proverb
• Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy. -F. Scott Fitzgerald
• You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. - Navajo Proverb
• You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was. -Irish Proverb
• The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself. -Andre Malraux
• Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides. -Andre Malraux
• Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral. -John Burroughs
• Talk doesn't cook rice. -Chinese proverb
• Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. -Jonathan Kozol
• Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• When there's more sick ones than well ones, by golly the sick ones will lock the well ones up. -Eric F. Goldman
• One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say. -Andre Malraux
• Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it. -Andre Malraux
• The longer the title, the less important the job. -George McGovern
• Be careful, - with quotations you can damn anything. -Andre Malraux
• An answer is always a form of death - John Fowles
• America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top. - Charlie King
• The Universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. -Eden Phillpotts
• I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art. -Mary Baker Eddy
• It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. -Edmund Hillary
• It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves. -Zelda Fitzgerald
• In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom... Make no mistake; all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S. - William Burroughs
• I will go anywhere, as long as it be forward. -David Livingstone
• What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -John Lubbock
• It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. - Emiliano Zapata
• It is better to live on your feet than to die on your knees. - Roberto Gini
• If I look confused it's because I'm thinking. -Samuel Goldwyn
• I learn by going where I have to go. - Theodore Roethke
• The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward. -Arthur Koestler
• Ironically, those people that complain of boredom tend to be incredibly boring people. - Mark Twain
• If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all. -David Livingstone
• In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. -Frantz Fannon
• Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. -Pablo Picasso
• It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor. -Eric Hoffer
• Always take your work seriously. Never take yourself seriously. -Dame Margot Fonteyn
• What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. - Soren Kierkegaard
• The angels know that too many practical men eat their bread with the sweat of the dreamer's brow. -Kahlil Gibran
• It is better to be roughly right than to be precisely wrong. -J. M. Keynes
• The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. -Henrik Ibsen
• If your subordinates are not making an occasional mistake or two, it is a sure sign they are playing it too safe. -Anon.
• A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake, as by never repeating it. -John Christian Bovee
• All discarded lovers should be given a second chance, but with somebody else. -Mae West
• Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear. -Donald E. Westlake
• The person who knows how will always have a job, but the person who knows why will be the boss. -Carl Wood
• The person who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance. -Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so you apologize for truth. -Benjamin Disraeli
• If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it. -Marcus Aurelius
• In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are. -Gamaliel Bradford
• True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance. -Henry David Thoreau
• The greatest homage to truth is to use it. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently. -St. Augustine
• The open-minded see the truth in different things: the narrow-minded see only the differences. -Unknown
• The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. - Flannery O'Connor
• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -Aldous Huxley
• If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it. - Isadora Duncan
• In original nature there is not this and that. The Great Round Mirror has not likes or dislikes. -Seung Sahn
• The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself. -Karl Barth
• Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite. - Jean Kerr
• Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent. -Jean Kerr
• Silence is argument carried on by other means. -Che Guevara
• Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them. -Jean Kerr
• The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which bridge to burn.
• Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house. -Jean Kerr
• Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. -Hebrew proverb
• A poor person who is unhappy is in a better person than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money will help. -Jean Kerr
• Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. -John Adams
• How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. -Abraham Lincoln
• Truth can be a dangerous thing. It is quite patient and relentless. -R. Scott Richards
• It takes two to speak truth; one to speak, and another to hear. -Henry David Thoreau
• Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails. -Clarence Darrow
• The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• A blank page is God's way of showing you how hard it is to be God. -anon
• A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life. -Hal Borland
• A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it.
• A man is known by the company he avoids.
• A steady salary is an invitation to mediocrity.
• I have discovered that all of man's unhappiness derives from only one source - not being able to sit quietly in a room. - Blaise Pascal
• I can't go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. -Lewis Carroll
• After all is said and done, more is said than done.
• All men are self-made, but only the successful will admit it.
• Always put off until tomorrow the things you shouldn't do at all.
• In this world, you must be a bit too kind to be kind enough. -Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
• An excuse is often substituted for reason.
• As you grow older, you stand for more and fall for less.
• As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. -G. B. Shaw
• Better aim at a star than shoot down a well; you'll hit higher.
• Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.
• Try not. Do or do not. There is no try. - Yoda
• You can beat any rap except death, and you might even be able to beat that if you write well. Ernest Hemingway
• Don't worry too much about what people think, because they seldom do.
• Education is learning a lot about how little you know.
• Education should include knowledge of what to do with it.
• Restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• Every person in the world is either a missionary or a mission field.
• Every survival kit should include a sense of humor.
• And the fox said to the little prince: men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Climb mountains to see lowlands. -Chinese Proverb
• Few blame themselves until they have exhausted all other possibilities.
• Foresight is knowing when to shut your mouth before someone suggests it.
• Go as far as you can see, and when you get there, you will see farther.
• When you seek revenge, start by digging two graves. - Anon
• Hear the other side.
• After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box. -Italian proverb
• We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects. -Alexis de Tocqueville
• Hyperpolysyllabicomania is a fondness for big words.
• If one is not to die of thirst among men, one must learn to drink from many cups. -Nietzsche
• Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true. -Honore de Balzac
• If people said what they thought, most conversations would be very brief.
• If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.
• A person's true character is revealed by what he does when no one is watching. -Anonymous
• The first step to wisdom is silence; the second is listening. -Anonymous
• Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. -Shakespeare, King Lear
• The beginning is the most important part of the work. - Plato
• Only those will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. - T.S. Eliot
• Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person. -Mother Teresa
• The distance is nothing; it's only the first step that is difficult. Mme. du Deffand
• I exist as I am, that is enough. -Walt Whitman
• Don't listen to what they say. Go see. - Chinese Proverb
• You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -Mohandas Gandhi
• There is nothing left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh. - Zen Master
• You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself. - Ethel Barrymore
• A great number of people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -William James
• A man does not have to be an angel in order to be saint. -Albert Schweitzer
• If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.
• The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. -William James
• People are far more interesting and successful when they are less concerned about being normal, and more concerned on being natural. - Michael Nolan
• The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. Elbert Hubbard
• If you want a place in the sun, you've got to expect a few blisters.
• In a negotiation, he who cares less wins.
• It makes no difference whether you win or lose until you lose.
• Always hold your head up, but be careful to keep your nose at a friendly level. -L. Forman
• Most people know how to keep silent but few of us know when.
• Never let your studies interfere with your education.
• Never mistake endurance for hospitality.
• Patton's Law: A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
• People will believe anything if you whisper it.
• Reforms come from the bottom. No man with four aces requests a new deal.
• Science opens to us the book of nature; comedy, the book of human nature.
• The best way to bluff is to keep your mouth shut.
• Reach high, for the stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal. -Pamela Vaull Starr
• If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. -Marcel Proust
• Talking and eloquence are not the same thing: to speak, and to speak well, are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks. -Ben Johnson
• People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost. -H. Jackson Browne
• Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends. -Joseph Campbell
• Only learn to seize good fortune, for good fortune is always here. -Goethe
• He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed. -William James
• The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. -Robert Pirsig
• Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong. -Zen proverb
• Every man in the world is better than someone else. And not as good as someone else. -William Saroyan
• A philosopher being asked what was the first thing necessary to win the love of a woman, answered, 'Opportunity'. -Marianne Moore
• The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. -E. W. Dijkstra
• In every one of us there are two ruling and directing principles, whose guidance we follow wherever they may lead; the one being an innate desire of pleasure; the other, an acquired judgment which aspires after excellence. -Socrates
• A faith-holder puts himself below his faith and lets it guide his actions. The fanatic puts himself above it and uses it as an excuse for his actions. -Gordon Dickson
• Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. -Martin Luther King
• One of the hardest things in this world is to admit you are wrong. And nothing is more helpful in resolving a situation than its frank admission. -Benjamin Disraeli
• To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. -Claude Adrien Helvetius
• We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongues, at our peril, risk and hazard. -Voltaire
• Prejudice is an opinion without judgment. -Voltaire
• Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. -Samuel Butler
• When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. -Jacob Riis
• The imposition of stigma is the most common form of violence used in democratic societies. -R. A. Pinker
• Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood. -Carl Jung
• No man is free who is not master of himself. -Epictetus
• Man must be prepared for every event of life, for there is nothing that is durable. -Menander
• Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. -Helen Keller
• If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely meant us to stick it out. - Arthur Koestler
• I do not believe in fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in fate that falls on them unless they act. - G K Chesterton
• True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are ever united. - Humboldt
• Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. (Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow.) -Horace
• Beware the fury of a patient man. - Dryden
• The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories. - Thomas Szasz
• Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. - E.L. Doctorow
• Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. - Samuel Butler
• Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps. - Emo Phillips
• Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of other persons. -Mark Twain
• One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and petty ones to fear. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• For an idea that does not at first seem insane, there is no hope. - Albert Einstein
• A man desires praise that he may be reassured, that he may be quit of his doubting of himself; he is indifferent to applause when he is confident of success. -Alec Waugh
• People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay faithful to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day: and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see. -Nietzsche
• There's not one wise man among twenty will praise himself. -William Shakespeare
• To say, ìwell doneî to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge. -Phillips Brooks
• It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them. -Mark Twain
• A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. -Henry David Thoreau
• It were not best that we should all think alike; it is the difference of opinion that makes horse races. -Mark Twain
• The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. -John E E Dalberg, Lord Acton
• When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free. -Charles Evans Hughes
• If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. -Nelson Mandela
• A static hero is a public liability. Progress grows out of motion. -Richard Byrd
• It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. -Edmund Hillary
• I will go anywhere, as long as it be forward. -David Livingstone
• If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all. -David Livingstone
• Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. -Timothy Leary
• Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.' - Mary Doria Russell
• Men's minds are raised to the level of the women with whom they associate. -Alexandre Dumas
• Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep burning, unquenchable. -Henry Ward Beecher
• It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor. -Eric Hoffer
• If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing. -Miguel de Unamuno
• Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves. -Dale Carnegie
• The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poor house. -William G. Sumner
• We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting laundry. -E. B. White
• A successful man continues to look for work after he has found a job. -Anon.
• The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom. -William O. Douglas
• Music was invented to confirm human loneliness. -Lawrence Durrell
• Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. -John Kenneth Galbraith
• The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. -Henrik Ibsen
• They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -Carl Sagan
• Never judge a man's actions until you know his motives.
• Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels fastest who travels alone. -Kipling
• Seeing emptiness, have compassion. - Milarepa
• Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace? -Zelda Fitzgerald
• My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it. -Abraham Lincoln
• Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed. -Mao Tse-tung
• Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won't have time to make them all yourself. -Alfred Sheinwold
• If your subordinates are not making an occasional mistake or two, it is a sure sign they are playing it too safe.
• A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake, as by never repeating it. -John Christian Bovee
• Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear. -Donald E. Westlake
• I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown. -Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle
• The person who knows how will always have a job, but the person who knows why will be the boss. -Carl Wood
• Tell a man that there are 6 billion stars in the sky and he will believe you. Tell him that the paint on a park bench is wet and he has to touch it to find out.
• Rem tene, verba sequentur. (Grasp the subject and the words will follow.) -Cato the Elder
• We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality. -Iris Murdoch
• All the sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action. - James Russell Lowell
• All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. -Iris Murdoch
• Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. -Iris Murdoch
• Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. -Iris Murdoch
• A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia. -Iris Murdoch
• When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. -Georgia O'Keefe
• But let's be honest, userboy. If you needed to be told THAT, you're too stupid to use this product. -Tina the Tech Writer, DILBERT
• If you cry because you cannot see the sun, your tears will block your view of the stars. -Native American Proverb
• When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing. -Pablo Picasso
• People know what they want and they deserve to get it. - H. L. Mencken
• One cannot kill time without injuring eternity. -Thoreau.
• In the long run, we are all dead. -John M. Keynes
• Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live. -Robert F. Kennedy
• Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. - Robert F. Kennedy
• I am a bear of very little brain and big words confuse me. - Winnie the Pooh
• It's easy to forget how little importance this all has. -P. Buck
• When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live so that when you die, the world will cry and you will rejoice. -Indian proverb
• Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened. -Gerald W. Johnston
• Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. -Galbraith's Law
• The greatest masterpiece of literature is only a dictionary out of order. -Jean Cocteau
• We do not learn by experience, but by our capacity for experience. - Buddha
• Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images. -Jean Cocteau
• Life is like nothing because it is everything. - William Golding
• Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force. -Jean Cocteau
• Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time. -Jean Cocteau
• Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far. -Jean Cocteau
• The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but "That's funny..." -Isaac Asimov
• Before you beat the dog, learn his master's name. -Chinese Proverb
• Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you. -Aldous Huxley
• It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -Aristotle
• When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. -Peter Drucker
• Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness. - Meister Eckhart
• Education is about the only thing lying around loose in the world, and it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away. -George Lorimer
• You live and learn. At any rate, you live. -Douglas Adams
• Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. -Douglas Adams
• An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. - Mohandas Gandhi
• Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. -W. Edwards Deming
• Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that? Nobody. -Benjamin Franklin
• Education is that which allows you to get into more intelligent trouble. -Anon
• Footnotes, sources, and references are omitted in this work. Educated people will not need them, uneducated people will not read them. -St. Francis de Sales
• The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about ancient history, 19th-century mathematics, manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea.
• Study the past if you would divine the future. -Confucius
• In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. -Eric Hoffer
• The dog's kennel is not the place to keep a sausage. - Danish Proverb
• The dog wags his tail, not for you, but for your bread. - Portuguese Proverb
• Don't fall before you're pushed. - English Proverb
• Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence. - Spanish Proverb
• Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.
• Malayan Proverb
• Every animal knows more than you do. -Native American Proverb (Nez Perce)
• Everyone thinks his own burden heavy. -French Proverb
• Examine what is said, not him who speaks. -Arab Proverb
• Experience is the comb that nature gives us when we are bald. - Belgian proverb
• People are not against you. They are only for themselves.
• A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire
• Wit's an unruly engine, wildly striking, sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer. - George Herbert
• All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. -Schopenhauer
• When you understand one thing trough and through, you understand everything. -Shunryu Suzuki
• When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. - Sherlock Holmes
• The only thing worse than the babbling of fools is to hear your own voice among them. --Michael Cochran
• If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we always want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are. -Montesquieu
• Restraint shows the master's hand. -Goethe
• Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar, is as important to the child, as it is to the caterpillar. - Bradley Miller
• Adversities do not make the man either weak or strong, but they reveal what he is. -Faith Forsyte
• Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. - Winston Churchill
• You can't kiss a girl unexpectedly - only sooner than she thought you would.
• Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. -Abraham Lincoln
• Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. -Meg Chittenden
• The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. - Henry David Thoreau
• Only when the last tree has died and the last river were poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.
• Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. -George Orwell
• In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse. -Saki
• The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team. -John Wooden
• There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site. -Sydney Harris
• Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose. -Baltasar Gracian
• Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. - Lincoln
• Year by year, the monkey's mask reveals the monkey's face. -Basho
• One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment...But to pronounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must have an unimpeachable character; one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors of knowledge; one needs an unbreached integrity, that is, the absence of any indulgence in conscious, willful evil. -Ayn Rand
• Only an unlit candle lasts forever.
• Vanity made the revolution; liberty was only a pretext. -Napoleon
• We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence. -Eric Hoffer
• Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. -Oscar Wilde
• Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is. -Horace Walpole
• Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• He who listens to truth is not less than he who utters truth. -Kahlil Gibran
• At the banquet of life each is in turn a guest and a dish. - Fabre
• Nothing contributes more to peace of soul than having no opinion at all. -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. -Henry David Thoreau
• A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. -Saul Bellow.
• If you don't learn to laugh at troubles, you won't have anything to laugh at when you grow old. -Ed Howe
• The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. -Dorothy Nevill
• Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. -Jonathan Kozol
• Change your thoughts and you change your world. -Norman Vincent Peale
• 'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Failures are divided into two classes: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought. -John Charles Salak
• The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell. -Simone Weil
• Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. -Marie Curie
• Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing. -John Erskine
• A person starts to live when he can live outside himself. -Albert Einstein
• Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfful to seek other than itself. -Kahlil Gibran
• One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer. -Stephen Hawking
• Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. If anyone finds out he'll become happy at once. -Dostoyevsky
• Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know. -Andre Maurois
• Blessed is he who has learned to laugh at himself, for he shall never cease to be entertained. -John Powell
• Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Look when you look, hear what you hear, taste what you taste, smell what you smell. -Allen Ginsberg
• One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family. -Pat Conroy
• Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know. -Michel de Montaigne
• Anything we fully do is an alone journey. -Natalie Goldberg
• Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. -Charles Baudelaire
• The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men. -Leonardo da Vinci
• Some people approach every problem with an open mouth. -Adlai Stevenson
• There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. -William Wordsworth
• My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. -Thomas Paine (The Rights of Man)
• The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. -William Butler Yeats
• Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. -Mark Twain
• If you can't explain it to an 8-year-old, you don't understand it. -Albert Einstein
• When you want to test the depths of a stream, don't use both feet. -Chinese Proverb
• We judge others by their actions, while we judge ourselves by our motives.
• A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside of us. -Franz Kafka
• Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion. -Ethiopian proverb
• The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature. -Marcus Aurelius
• Real gold fears not the wrath of fire. - Chinese proverb
• Success is not measured by the position one has reached in life, rather by the obstacles overcome while trying to succeed. -Booker T. Washington
• Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. -Gustave Flaubert
• Noise proves nothing--often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid. -Mark Twain
• An inch of time cannot be bought with an inch of gold. -Chinese proverb
• We are all born into the world with nothing. Everything we acquire after that is profit. -Sam Ewing
• But they are useless. They can only give you answers. -Picasso, on computers.
• The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it. -Mother Theresa
• If you always give you will always have. -Chinese Proverb
• Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it. -Charles Caleb Cotton
• When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out. -Otto von Bismarck
• Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. -B.F. Skinner
• There are men who would quickly love each other if once they were speak to each other; for when they spoke they would discover that their souls had only separated by phantoms and delusions. -Ernest Hello
• There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming. -Soren Kierkegaard
• There is no such thing in anyone's life as an unimportant day. -Alexander Woollcott
• Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist. -Michael Levine
• Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• Mistakes live in the neighborhood of truth and therefore delude us. -Rabindranath Tagore
• Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies - that which to us is merely an evening's meal, but to them is life itself. -T. Casey Brennan
• Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. -Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley
• Those who give you a serpent when you ask for a fish, may have nothing but serpents to give. It is then generosity on their part. -Kahlil Gibran
• Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty. -Stanislaw J. Lec
• Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. -Heraclitus
• Every child comes with the message that God is not yet tired of man. -Rabindranath Tagore
• Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more. -Franz Kafka, while admiring fish in an aquarium
• You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips. -Oliver Goldsmith
• To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life. -Samuel Johnson
• He who seizes the right moment, is the right man. -Goethe
• Never rise to speak till you have something to say; and when you have said it, cease. -John Witherspoon
• Music is a higher revelation than philosophy. -Beethoven
• The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. -Amos Bronson Alcott
• They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. -Carl W. Buechner
• The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. -William Thackeray
• There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures. -James Thurber
• An honest God's the noblest work of man. - Robert Ingersoll
• Speak the truth, then leave quickly. -Serbian Proverb
• When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere. -La Rochefoucauld
• History is fables agreed upon. -Voltaire
• The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men. -Emile Zola
• Knowing all truth is less than doing a little bit of good. -Albert Schweitzer
• I do not cut my life up into days but my days into lives, each day, each hour, and entire life. - Juan Ramon Jimenez
• The world is ruled by letting things take their course - Lao Tzu
• Say not "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found A truth." -Kahlil Gibran
• Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a flea, yet he makes gods by the dozens. -Montaigne
• The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning. -George Baker
• Practice no vice because it is trivial. Neglect no virtue because it is so. -Chinese proverb
• What you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. -Aldous Huxley
• If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe. -Abraham Lincoln
• The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an extraordinary father. -Austin O'Malley
• Better is the enemy of good. -Voltaire
• You can't know wisdom, you have to be it. - Ram Dass
• There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -Francis Bacon
• To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when life stops. - Erich Fromm
• Imagination is the eye of the soul. -Joubert
• To hold and fill to overflowing is not as good as to stop in time. -Lao Tzu
• Sharpen a knife-edge to its very sharpest and the edge will not last long. -Lao-Tzu
• How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception. -Louis Charles Alfred de Musset
• Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. -Berthold Auerbach
• Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. -Mark Twain
• When the effective leader is finished with his work, the people say it happened naturally. -Lao-Tzu
• Life is the childhood of our immortality. -Goethe
• You can't get the genie back in the bottle. - Don Henley
• The human animal dances wildest on the edge of the grave. - Rita Mae Brown
• Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. -Helen Keller
• Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. -Rabindranath Tagore
• When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. -Joseph Campbell
• In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place. -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
• When Life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind. -Kahlil Gibran
• Life is life--whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage. -Sri Aurobindo
• It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others. -Michel De Montaigne
• A critic is one who leaves no turn unstoned. -George Bernard Shaw
• Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be. -Abraham Lincoln
• There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking. -Theodore Rubin
• The illusion that we are separate from one another is an optical delusion of our consciousness. -Albert Einstein
• Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -Mark Twain
• Live as you will have wished to have lived when you are dying. -Christian Furchtegott Gellert
• If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. -J.D. Salinger
• Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. -Henry David Thoreau
• It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. -Alfred Adler
• The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject. -Marcus Aurelius
• You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with. -Wayne Dyer
• Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is. -Jorge Luis Borges
• Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves. -La Rochefoucauld
• Difficulties increase the nearer we approach our goal. -Goethe
• The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any. -Alice Walker
• Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus
• If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme. - Pablo Picasso
• Have no friends not equal to yourself. -Confucius
• Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen. -James Russell Lowell
• We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.-Aesop
• True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and choice. -Samuel Johnson
• In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. -Albert Camus
• He who allows oppression, shares the crime. -Erasmus Darwin
• Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts. -Pascal
• There are two perfect men; one dead, and the other unborn. -Chinese proverb
• It is more shameful to distrust one's friends than to be deceived by them. -De la Rochefoucauld
• Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets. -Paul Tournier
• We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. - Longfellow
• There is nothing so disagreeable, that a patient mind cannot find some solace for it. -Seneca
• You can lead a computer to the Superhighway but you can't make it think. -Des Waller
• You train people how to treat you by how you treat yourself. -Martin Rutte
• If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
• Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives. - William Dement
• What is success? It is a toy balloon among children armed with pins. - Gene Fowler
• Fortune does not change men; it only unmasks them. -Madame Riccoboni
• It's amazing how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit. - Noel Coward
• Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. -Victor Hugo
• No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not. - H. L. Mencken
• Everyone complains of the badness of his memory, but nobody of his judgment. --La Rochefoucauld
• The calm is on the water and part of us would linger by the shore, For ships are safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.~ Kimmel & Lille
• The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value. -Charles Dudley Warner
• To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all. - Helen Rowland
• This was life, that two people, no matter how carefully chosen, could not be everything to each other. - Doris Lessing
• In all science error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last. -Horace Walpole
• Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets. -Eddy Peters
• These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day. -Albert Camus
• If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him. -Cardinal Richelieu
• A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging: it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used. -Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Everything you do is Zen. -Bodhidharma
• Out beyond fields of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. - Jelaluddin Rumi
• The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. - Proust
• I am not evolving, I am. -Pablo Picasso
• The nature of mind is the nature of everything. -Dudjon Rinpoche
• Man imagines that it is death he fears; but what he fears is the unforeseen, the explosion. What man fears is himself. -Saint-Exupery
• Reality is the leading cause of stress among those who are in touch with it. -Jane Wagner
• Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself. -Erich Fromm
• i imagine that yes is the only living thing. -e.e.cummings
• Scalding coffee from a freezing cup. At the rim no telling which is which. -Lou Hartman
• If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are. -Zen saying
• Genius is nothing more than childhood, recaptured at will. - Baudelaire
• One can't complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. -Eeyore
• Beat your sword into a ploughshare if you like, but beat your enemy into smithereens first. -Saki
• All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• Once in awhile, right in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairy tale. ~Unknown
• Virtue debases itself in justifying itself. -Voltaire
• By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. -Socrates
• The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. - William Blake
• The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it. - Stanley Kubrick
• Men have bodies that they might express their soul. -Leonardo da Vinci
• Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards. -Fred Hoyle
• Truth is generally kindness, but where the two diverge and collide, kindness should override truth. -- Samuel Butler
• If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. -Anatole France
• Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly. -Langston Hughes
• Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. -Martin Luther King
• "How does one become a butterfly?" she asked pensively. "You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar." You mean to die?" asked Yellow. "Yes and no," he answered. "What looks like you will die, but what's really you will live." - Trina Paulus
• Any fool can know. The point is to understand. -Albert Einstein
• Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future. -Author Unknown
• It's easy to be brilliant if you are not bothered about being right. -Hector McNeil
• Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on. - Duc FranÁois de La Rochefoucauld
• The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. - Lily Tomlin
• If you think that you know much, you know little. -The Upanishads
• A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. -Charles Robert Darwin
• An ordinary man is Buddha; desire and passion is enlightenment. One thought of folly makes a man an ordinary man. The next enlightened thought and he is Buddha. - Hui-Neng
• To do nothing is the most difficult thing in the world - the most difficult and the most intellectual. -Oscar Wilde
• People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Silence is the essential condition of happiness. - Heinrich Heine
• We cannot choose whether to engage with the world, only how to. - Stephen Batchelor
• Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation. -Tibetan saying
• The man who masters himself is delivered from the force that binds all creatures - Goethe
• There is no joy but calm. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Being has not been given its due. -Jean-Paul Sartre
• The first key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning. For by doubting we are led to question, and by questioning we arrive at truth. Peter Abelard
• It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to set around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. -Gertrude Stein
• Nothing so completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straightforward and simple integrity in another. Charles Caleb Colton
• Honor is like a steep island without a shore: one cannot return once one is outside. - Nicolas Boileau
• The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February. -Joseph Wood Krutch
• The mask often tells more than the face. -Canadian proverb
• There are two ways of spreading light: To be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. -Edith Wharton
• On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. -Virginia Woolf
• The world breaks us all. Afterward, some are stronger at the broken places. -Hemingway
• One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. -Leonardo da Vinci
• It is far better to fight on your feet than on your knees, but you can still fight on your knees. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do. -Benjamin Disraeli
• Always do one thing less than you are able to do. -Bernard M. Baruch
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• The value of money is that with it we can tell any man to go to the devil. It is the sixth sense which enables you to enjoy the other five. - Somerset Maugham
• If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid. -Navy SEALs
• Nor love thy life nor hate but thou livest - live well. - Milton
• The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home. -Jeanette Winterson
• It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good. -Margaret Mead
• We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. -Anais Nin
• Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers. -Mary Catherine Bateson
• This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do on chewing gum. -Elbert Hubbard
• The reverse side also has a reverse side. - Japanese proverb.
• A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it. - Dogen
• I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom sets limits to knowledge, too. - Nietzsche
• The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. - William James
• A wise man never loses anything if he has himself. - Montaigne
• As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death. -Leonardo da Vinci
• It's all right to have butterflies in your stomach. Just get them to fly in formation. -Rob Gilbert
• Only the moment counts. It determines life. - Franz Kafka
• The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself. - Wallace Stevens
• When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one and a lily with the other. -Chinese Proverb
• Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort, and advantage. He lives... by make-believe. -W. Somerset Maugham
• The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world. - Willa Cather
• The most beautiful music is the music of what happens. - Irish proverb
• Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. - Alan Watts
• A halo has to fall only a few inches to be a noose. -Dan McKinnon
• I know I am among civilized men because they are fighting so savagely. -Voltaire
• Sometimes I think and other times I am. - Paul Valery
• There is no reality except in action. - Sartre
• The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. -John Milton
• An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. -Victor Hugo
• No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does. -La Rochefoucauld
• Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast. -Peter Drucker
• Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die. -Amelia Burr
• God gives every bird his worm, but he does not throw it into the nest. -Swedish proverb
• Kindness is loving people more than they deserve. -Joseph Joubert
• No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft. -H.G. Wells
• There is but one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way. - Christopher Morely
• Zen is the madman yelling "If you wanta tell me that the stars are not words, then stop calling them stars!" -Jack Kerouac
• The great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart. - Mencius
• Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die. - Basho
• I'm patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it. - Edith Sitwell
• Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -Ernest Hemingway
• One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual. -Terry Pratchett
• In this sport, confidence is a flaw. - Ron Dennis
• Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the entire journey that way. - E. L. Doctorow
• To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself. - Georges Braque
• This moment contains all moments. - C. S. Lewis
• To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable. - Erich Fromm
• The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is incomprehensible. - Albert Einstein
• We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all. - Jean de La Bruyere
• Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of
• human society. - Emerson
• He was born with the gift of laughter and the knowledge that the world was mad. -Raphael Sabatini
• Rules make the learner's path long, examples make it short and successful. -Seneca
• Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. -Emerson
• We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey. -Stephen Covey
• Stop thinking, and end your problems. -Lao-Tzu
• You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are the echo and after-effect of your experiences. - Nietzsche
• There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life. - Federico Fellini
• Be humble, for you are made of dung. Be noble, for you are made of stars. - Serbian proverb.
• To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. - Jose Ortega y Gasset
• When I hear somebody sigh that "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?" ~ Sidney J. Harris
• There are few situations in life that cannot be resolved promptly, and to the satisfaction of all concerned, by either suicide, a bag of gold, or thrusting a despised antagonist over a precipice on a dark night. -Ernest Bramah
• It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable. -Moliere
• The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality. -John Quincy Adams
• There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. -Elie Wiesel
• The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. -Sigmund Freud
• Appreciation is a wonderful thing; it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. -Voltaire
• A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• The rule is, jam tomorrow, and jam yesterday, but never jam today - Lewis Carroll
• All men should try to learn/ before they die/ what they are running from/ and to, and why - James Thurber
• Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted. -John Lennon
• Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed. -Natalie Clifford Barney
• Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind over-taxed. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
• When I hide my language, my body utters. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult. ~Roland Barthes
• We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about. -Charles Kingsley
• One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. -Thomas Brackett Reed
• Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men. --Douglas Bader
• The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. -James Branch Cabell
• Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. - Sir Arthur Eddington
• The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
• It is much easier to apologize than to ask permission. - Grace Murray Hopper
• >From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step. -Denis Diderot
• Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music. -Angela Monet
• Life to me is no brief candle; it is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. - George Bernard Shaw
• The older I get, the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology. - H. L. Mencken
• All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about, unnoticed and invisible. -Doris Lessing
• If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. -Longfellow
• It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that. - G. H. Hardy
• The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old, servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits. -Hervey Allen
• The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. -Dante Alighieri
• It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn. -Robert Southey
• The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said. -CS Lewis
• Every saint has a past and every sinner a future. -Oscar Wilde
• Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought; our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. -Samuel Johnson
• There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man. -Aristotle
• When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on Earth. So what the hell, leap! -Cynthia Heimel
• Find something you love to do and do it until it kills you. Otherwise, something you don't love will do the job. - Mark Twain
• My way of joking is to tell the truth. - George Bernard Shaw
• Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. -Thomas Szasz
• At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves. - George Orwell
• We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. -Carl Sagan
• Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. - Rita Mae Brown
• Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But *history*... ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just...well, things happening one after another. - Terry Pratchett
• There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness." - Dave Barry
• I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education. - Wilson Mizner
• Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself. -George Bernard Shaw
• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. -Ellen Parr
• The value of life lies, not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them: a man may live long, yet live very little. Satisfaction in life depends not on the number of your years, but on your will. -Michel de Montaigne
• We learn from experience. A man never wakes up his second baby just to see it smile. -Grace Williams
• Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. -Victor Borge
• I've never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation. - Mike Todd
• Learning can be defined as the process of remembering what you are interested in. - Richard Saul Wurman
• The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust and everything priced above its proper value. - Oscar Wilde
• Where is the weapon with which I enforce your bondage? You give it to me every time you open your mouth. -Frank Herbert
• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. -Ellen Parr
• A failure is not always a mistake. It may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying. -BF Skinner
• I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• The finest eloquence is that which gets things done. -David Lloyd George
• Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs. -P.J. O'Rourke
• Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness. -Richard Carlson
• We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. -Aristotle
• Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind the stronger the trees. - Williard Marriott
• Learn to recognize the inconsequential, then ignore it. -H. Jackson Brown Jr.
• Remember there is no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end. -Scott Adams
• The difficulty in life is the choice. - George Moore
• Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. - Samuel Beckett
• The events of our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order. - Eudora Welty
• With the stones we cast at them, geniuses build new roads. -Paul Eldridge
• I hear more than I like to... so I boil my head in a sense of humor... I laugh at what I cannot change... - Dave Matthews
• Young men are fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel... Men of age object too much, consult to long, adventure too little, repent too soon. -Francis Bacon
• Every stress leaves an indelible scar, and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older. -Hans Selye
• A man who has never passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. -Carl Jung
• Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest. -Douglas Jerrold
• Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles which one has overcome while trying to succeed. -Booker T. Washington
• Nothing is better than music, when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for. - Nadia Boulanger
• The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble. -Blaise Pascal
• For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair. - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• Instead of rating the man by his performances, we rate too frequently the performances by the man. - Samuel Johnson
• History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead. -Voltaire
• You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. -Dale Carnegie
• Nature gives you the face you have at 20; it is up to you to merit the face you have at 50. -Coco Chanel
• What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite. -Bertrand Russell
• The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outside conditions. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. -Henri Bergson
• Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects. -Herodotus
• The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. -Shakespeare
• The only difference between a rut and a grave are their dimensions. -Mark Twain
• When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. -Mark Twain
• The tender word forgotten/ The letter you did not write /The flower you might have sent, dear/ Are your haunting ghosts tonight. -Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
• There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is having lots to do and not doing it. -John W. Raper
• We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams. - Hoffer
• Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper. -Sir Francis Bacon
• Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors. -Eugene O'Neill
• Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. -Thomas Edison
• The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another. -George Bancroft
• Tragedy and comedy are but two aspects of what is real, and whether we see the tragic or the humorous is a matter of perspective. - Dr. Arnold Beisser
• We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand. - Winston Churchill
• It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, so much as the confident knowledge that they *will* help. - Epicurus
• In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. -Robert Green Ingersoll
• Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. - James M. Barrie
• This is what marriage really means: helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible beings who do not run away from life. - Paul Tournier
• It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed." "That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy". - Terry Pratchett
• A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. - Rilke
• Writing is like Prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally, you do it for the money." -- Moliere
• I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living. -William Maxwell
• I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless, the poison is in the sugar. -Stanislaw Lec
• One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning. -James Russell Lowell
• Between/ Our birth and death we may touch understanding/ As a moth brushes a window with its wing. -Christopher Fry
• There is no better measure of a person than what he does when he is absolutely free to choose. -Wilma Askinas
• People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead. -James Baldwin
• Where there are no tigers, a wildcat is very self-important. -Korean Proverb
• If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then a third time a tremendous whack! -Winston Churchill
• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -Oscar Wilde
• Discontent is something that follows ambition like a shadow. -Henry H. Haskins
• Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be. -Clementine Paddelford
• Little things console us, because little things afflict us. -Pascal
• The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has attempted to contact us. - Calvin & Hobbs
• Most technical writers make their living describing the smile on the face of a black cat in a dark room in a house that will be built next week.
• The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity. -Oscar Wilde
• With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown. -Chinese proverb
• The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will. - Vince Lombardi
• Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe. -Robert Service
• Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself. -Elie Wiesel
• Don't be humble; you're not that great. - Golda Meir
• Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility. -Hu Shih
• If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something. - Gertrude Stein
• Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion. -Mark Twain
• I am no more humble than my talents require. -Oscar Levant
• What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors. - Henry Becque
• A man's virtue is measured not by his exceptional actions but by his everyday behaviour. -Pascal
• Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -Susan Ertz
• To feel your subject thoroughly and to speak without fear, are the only rules of eloquence. -Oliver Goldsmith
• Tragedy is life in close-up and comedy is life in long-shot. - Charlie Chaplin
• Life is a long lesson in humility. -James M. Barrie
• The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. -Henry Miller
• Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter. -African proverb
• It is not every question that deserves an answer. -Publilius Syrus
• Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength. -Eric Hoffer
• Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. -Aldous Huxley
• I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself. -Mihkail Baryshnikov
• He who would travel happily must travel light. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. -Samuel Johnson
• From every path you walk upon a piece of dust will cling to your clothes. Likewise, from every person that crosses your path a piece will cling to your soul. - Goethe
• Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. - Ayn Rand
• We say we waste time, but that is impossible. We waste ourselves. -Alice Bloch
• Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for? -Robert Browning
• There are some defeats more triumphant than victories. -Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
• Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him. - Paul Eldridge
• Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth. - Jean-Paul Sartre
• A great ship asks deep water. -George Herbert
• The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms. - Lao-tzu
• The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness. - William Saroyan
• What I have in my heart and soul, must find a way out. That is the reason for music. -Ludwig Van Beethoven
• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, but the unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to him-therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man. -Samuel Butler
• Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. -William Lloyd George
• Never cut what you can untie. -Joseph Joubert
• If you put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.
• The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer. -Thomas J. Watson
• If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us. - Herman Hesse
• You cannot do a kindness too soon because you never know how soon it will be too late. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• We can either laugh in the face of death or die trying not to. -James Grippando
• Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions. -Samuel Johnson
• Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training. -Anna Freud
• The best way out is always through. -Robert Frost
• The man who has accomplished all that he thinks worthwhile has begun to die. -E. T. Trigg
• There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists or simulate it where it does not. - Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
• Two roads diverged in a wood, and I / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference. -Robert Frost
• Live your own life, for you will die your own death. -Latin Proverb
• Hypocrisy is homage paid by vice to virtue. - Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
• All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. -Ambrose Bierce
• A conservative is someone who believes in reform. But not now. -Mort Sahl
• If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it. - W. C. Fields
• The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality. -Oscar Wilde
• People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune. -William McFee
• Don't find fault. Find a remedy. - Henry Ford
• The woods are lovely, dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep. -Robert Frost
• Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude. -Goethe
• I look for what needs to be done.... After all, that's how the universe designs itself. -R. Buckminster Fuller
• A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once. -Blaise Pascal
• Everyone is the son of his own works. -Miguel de Cervantes
• I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream. -Vincent van Gogh
• If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. -Margaret Fuller
• All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. -Sean O'Casey
• What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. -Leo Tolstoy
• It is impossible to be happy. The best you can hope for is that you can be distracted. - Woody Allen
• Never confuse motion with action. -Benjamin Franklin
• Not all those that wander are lost. -J.R.R. Tolkien
• And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. -Anais Nin
• The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. - Tom Waits
• If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right. -Jules Renard
• You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering. -Henri Frederic Amiel
• The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. -Leo Tolstoy
• Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. -Carl Sandburg
• War is God's way of teaching Americans geography. -Ambrose Bierce
• So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world. -Immanuel Kant
• This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper. -T.S. Eliot
• Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it. - Jack London
• We shan't save all we should like to, but we shall save a great deal more than if we had never tried. - Sir Peter Scott, WWF founder 1961
• Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail. -John Donne
• Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in. - Alan Alda
• Self-Evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else. -Ambrose Bierce
• In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea. - Douglas Adams
• It is easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit to forgive them for having witnessed your own. -Jessamyn West
• The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. -Jean-Paul Sartre
• No man knows how bad he is until he has tried to be good. There is a silly idea about that good people don't know what temptation means. -Clive Staples Lewis
• It saves trouble to be conventional, for you're not always explaining things. - Myrtle Reed
• It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. -Samuel Johnson
• Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• The first and great commandment is, Don't let them scare you. -Elmer Davis
• It is well, when one is judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality. - Arnold Bennett
• No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true. - Oscar Wilde
• No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. - Jacob Bronowski
• Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future. -Paul Boese
• I'm a Spalding Gray in a Rick Dees world. -Homer Simpson
• Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time. -Goethe
• Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals with out the software. - Arthur C. Clarke
• Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets. -Oscar Wilde
• Here is a mental treatment guaranteed to cure every ill that flesh is heir to: sit for half an hour every night and mentally forgive everyone against whom you have any ill will or antipathy. -Charles Fillmore
• Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. - Arthur Conan Doyle
• It is necessary to relax your muscles when you can. Relaxing your brain is fatal. -Stirling Moss
• If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul... just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man. - Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Prolong human life only when you can shorten its miseries. -Stanislaw J. Lec
• Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.- Voltaire
• One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. -Maya Angelou
• If it can lick, it can bite. - French proverb
• Solitude has but one disadvantage; it is apt to give one too high an opinion of one's self. In the world we are sure to be often reminded of every known or supposed defect we may have. -Byron
• I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be. - Douglas Adams
• Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done. -Linus Torvalds
• The weaker the intellect, the stronger the belief - James Dee Richardson
• The evening of a well spent life brings its lamps with it. -Joseph Joubert
• Life is hard. Then you die.
• Then they throw dirt in your face.
• Then the worms eat you.
• Be grateful it happens in that order.
• - Solomon Short
• Act with kindness, but do not expect gratitude. -Confucius
• The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it. -John Ruskin
• No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you will see why. - Mignon McLaughlin
• Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game. -Goethe
• There'll be two dates on your tombstone/And all your friends will read 'em/But all that's gonna matter/is that little dash between 'em. -Kevin Welch
• It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, "Always do what you are afraid to do". -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world. -John Maynard Keynes
• What is pride? A rocket that emulates the stars. -Wordsworth
• Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. -Gilda Radner
• The cruelest lies are often told in silence. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated. - Mahatma Gandhi
• Sometimes people do get hurt. - Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry
• Finn
• I imagine that bugs and girls have a dim perception that nature played a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to really comprehend the magnitude of it. - Calvin and Hobbes
• A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know. -Jeanne Bourgeois
• I once asked a Jesuit priest what was the best short prayer he knew. He said, 'Fuck it,' as in 'Fuck it; it's in God's hands. -Anthony Hopkins
• As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others. - Germaine
• Greer
• But I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. -Eric Hoffer
• It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf. - Walter Lippmann
• You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it. -Art Buchwald
• Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river -Nikita Khrushchev
• I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass. - Maya Angelou
• War would end if the dead could return. - Stanley Baldwin
• Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn't roar? -Johann Friedrich von Schiller
• As one goes through life one learns that if you don't paddle your own canoe you don't move. -Katherine Hepburn
• A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice. -Thomas Paine
• The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it. -Moliere
• When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have. -Edgar Watson Howe
• A man of faith does not bargain or stipulate with God. -Mohandas Gandhi
• In communities where men build ships for their own sons to fish or fight from, quality is never a problem. -J. Deville
• Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down. -Rabindranath Tagore
• The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out. -Chinese Proverb
• Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. -African Proverb
• I have never been contained except I made the prison. -Mary Evans
• Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. -Iris Murdoch
• Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. -Robert Frost
• It's easy to identify people who can't count to ten. They're in front of you in the supermarket express lane. -June Henderson
• Unless we remember we cannot understand. -E. M. Forster
• For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. -Ecclesiastes
• A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams. -John Barrymore
• Gravedigger, when you dig my grave, could you make it shallow so that I can feel the rain? -Dave Matthews
• You should send that into Reader's Digest, they've got a page for people like you. -Arthur Dent
• You do ill to praise, but worse to censure, what you do not understand. -Leonardo da Vinci
• Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draft from here. -Groucho Marx
• Die two months ago, & not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year; but, by'r lady, he must build
• churches then. -Hamlet
• Go often to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Pay attention. You never know what disguise your next teacher will be wearing.
• You cannot teach a crab to walk straight. -Aristophanes
• Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also
• what it takes to sit down and listen. -Winston Churchill
• There is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man: man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.-Robert A. Heinlein
• The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it. -Richard L. Evans
• Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. -Anais Nin
• You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
• Seek first to understand, then to be understood. -Stephen Covey
• We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders. -Maya Angelou
• Never give a sword to a man who can't dance. -Celtic Proverb
• Where wisdom is called for, force is of little use. - Herodotus
• The manner of giving is worth more than the gift. - Pierre Corneille
• If you place a small value on yourself, rest assured, the world will not raise your price.
• You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears. - Winston Churchill
• In the decline of life shame and grief are of short duration; whether
• it be that we bear easily what we have borne long; or that, finding ourselves in age less regarded, we less regard others; or, that we look with slight regard upon afflictions to which we know that the hand of death is about to put an end. - Samuel Johnson
• Never wrestle with a pig, you just get dirty, and the pig has all the fun. - Dharma Finkelstein
• What destroys one man preserves another. -Pierre Corneille
• I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work the more of it I seem to have. - Coleman Cox
• The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate. -Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe
• Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle. -Robert Anthony
• To know that you can do better next time, unrecognizably better, and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing that there is not, there is a thought to be going on with. - Samuel Beckett
• In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college. -Joseph Sobran
• He that spares the bad injures the good. -Thomas Fuller
• Whoever has his foe at his mercy, and does not kill him, is his own enemy. -Saa'd
• Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. -Hanlon's Razor
• The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him. -Rachel Carson
• In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins - not through strength but by perseverance. - H. Jackson Brown
• Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. - Winston Churchill
• Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing. -Oscar Wilde
• Managers are like cats in a litter box. They instinctively shuffle things around to conceal what they've done. -Scott Adams
• I am not God, but I am my creator. -Terry Josephson
• Many people, of course, use "sentimentalism" as a term of abuse for other people's decent feelings, and "realism" as a disguise for their own brutality. -G. H. Hardy
• Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself. - Mark Twain
• To proceed from one truth to another, and connect distant propositions by regular consequences, is the great prerogative of man. - Samuel Johnson
• He who is firm and resolute in will molds the world to himself. - Goethe
• Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic. -Edward de Bono
• It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. -Barbara Kingsolver
• It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. - William Shakespeare
• Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you. -Kahlil Gibran
• Luck is like having a rice dumpling fly into your mouth. -Japanese Proverb
• Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little. - Samuel Johnson
• Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl. - Benjamin Jowett
• If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly. -Ashleigh Brilliant
• He that wrestles with us, strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. - Burke
• A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. -Rabindranath Tagore
• It requires wisdom to understand wisdom. The music is nothing if the audience is deaf. -Walter Lippmann
• We seek the truth and will endure the consequences. -Charles Seymour
• You must do the thing you think you cannot do. -Eleanor Roosevelt
• All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. - H.L. Mencken
• If we like them, they're freedom fighters ... If we don't like them, they're terrorists. In the unlikely case we can't make up our minds, they're temporarily only guerrillas. -Carl Sagan
• Consensus is what many people say in chorus but do not believe as individuals. -Abba Eban
• The man who moved the mountain began by carrying away small stones. -Chinese Proverb
• We are shaped by our thoughts. We become what we think. -Buddha
• At the third cup, wine drinks the man. -Hokekyo Sho
• Character is what you are in the dark. - Dwight L. Moody
• If you are not very clever, you should be conciliatory. -Benjamin Disraeli
• How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty. -Eric Hoffer
• But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated. -Ernest Hemingway
• The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be rules by evil men. - William Penn
• A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed - I will know. For it's a sign that he tried to surpass himself. -Georges Clemenceau
• A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes. -Thomas Huxley
• Intuition is truly a feminine quality, but women should not mistake rash conclusions for this gift. - Minna Antrim
• Learn to say No - and to be rude about it when necessary. - Robert A Heinlein
• Perfection is reached not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. -Saint-Exupery
• The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. -Herbert Spencer
• There is a difference between him who does no misdeeds because of his own conscience and him who is kept from wrongdoing because of the presence of others. -Anonymous
• One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity. -Andrew Carnegie
• Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman; it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the human. - George Bernard Shaw
• Be who you are and say what you feel, Because those who mind don't matter, And those who matter don't mind. -Dr. Seuss
• The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. -George Orwell
• Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves. - Samuel Johnson
• Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. -H. L. Mencken
• Good jests bite like lambs, not like dogs. -anon.
• The relationships we have with the world are largely determined by the relationships we have with ourselves. -Greg Anderson
• The quickest way to end political correctness would be to start calling woman 'vaginal Americans.' - unnamed Dartmouth student
• The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. -Ayn Rand
• No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• A man's dreams are an index to his greatness. -Zadok Rabinwitz
• There are no guarantees. From the viewpoint of fear, none are strong enough. From the viewpoint of love, none are necessary. -Emmanuel
• The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words. -Hippocrates
• True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen. -La Rochefoucauld
• Saints are usually killed by their own people. -Eric Sevareid
• Never assume the obvious is true. -William Safire
• I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves. -Toni Cade Bambara
• Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. -Bertrand Russell
• Diplomacy is saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
• The masses seem to me worthy of notice in only three respects: first as blurred copies of great men, produced on bad paper with worn plates, further as a resistance to the great, and finally as the tools of the great; beyond that, may the devil and statistics take them. - Nietzsche
• The easiest thing to do on earth is not write. -William Goldman
• To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know. - Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Never despise a person's sensitivity. His sensitivity is his genius. -Charles Baudelaire
• All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. - T. E. Lawrence
• One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: "To rise above little things." -John Burroughs
• Treat people as if they are violent madmen long enough, and sure enough, they will become violent madmen. -M. Scott Peck
• They play one tune and dance to another. -John Clarke
• Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. -Graham Greene
• No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous. -Samuel Johnson
• The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win. - Sir Roger Bannister
• My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling, but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places. -Winnie the Pooh
• What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in! -Gustave Flaubert
• The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation. -John Cage
• The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. -Isaac Bashevis Singer
• Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships. -Charles Simic
• A full cup must be carried steadily. -English proverb
• In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. -Robert Frost
• There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. -Alfred Hitchcock
• Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission. -Eleanor Roosevelt
• The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting. - Fran Lebowitz
• Better make a weak man your enemy than your friend. - Josh Billings
• Endurance is frequently a form of indecision. - Elizabeth Bibesco
• I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. - Luigi Pirandello
• He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. - George Eliot
• It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark. - Howard Ruff
• Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling. - Andre Gide
• Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: that you are dreadfully like other people. - James Lowell
• If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a man and a dog. - Mark Twain
• Fame is proof that people are gullible. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• If you speak the truth, have one foot in the stirrup. - Turkish proverb
• A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. -Saki
• Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are. -Jose Ortega & Gasset
• We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation. -Ivan D. Illich
• Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful. -George Bernard Shaw
• Of course, we are all worms--but I like to think, at least, that I am a glowworm. -Winston Churchill
• If people knew how hard I have had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all. - Michelangelo Buonarroti
• I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect. -Edward Gibbon
• It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant. -Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. -Brendan Gill
• A religion that is small enough for our understanding would not be big enough for our needs. -Corrie ten Boom
• If a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it. - Edgar Watson Howe
• The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. - Mohandas Gandhi
• If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues? - John Churton Collins
• You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave. - Sydney Smith
• I often marvel how it is that though each man loves himself beyond all else, he should yet value his own opinion of himself less than that of others. - Marcus Aurelius
• A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. - Sir Francis Bacon
• There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other. -Eric Hoffer
• From there to here, and here to there, Funny things are everywhere. -Dr. Seuss
• The reasons which any man offers to you for his own conduct betray his opinion of your character. - Sir Arthur Helps
• Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey. - Malcolm de Chazal
• When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. -John Muir
• What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. -Crowfoot
• When people tell you how young you look, they are also telling you how old you are. -Cary Grant
• It is better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all. - Georges Courteline
• We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. - Henry David Thoreau
• Most people have seen worse things in private than they pretend to be shocked at in public. - Edgar Watson Howe
• Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle. - James Russell Lowell
• Fortune favors the brave. -Virgil
• A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with the wind. - John Neal
• Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but by saying exactly what you think yourself. - James F. Steven
• Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is? -Frank Scully
• Relativity applies to physics, not ethics. -Albert Einstein
• Fall seven times, stand up eight. - Japanese Proverb
• There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music. - John Keats
• The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. -Thomas Szasz
• When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it. - A. A. Milne
• Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. - Mother Theresa
• It isn't the facts that trouble mankind; it's the opinions that are held about the facts. -Epictetus
• I can endure my own Despair. But not another's Hope. -William Walsh
• Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this, there can be no nobler aim in life. - Count Maurice Maeterlinck
• Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom. - de Montaigne
• Dogs give us their absolute all. We are the center of their universe. We are the focus of their love and trust. They serve us in return for scraps. It is without a doubt the best deal man has ever made. -Roger Caras
• We find comfort among those who agree with us - growth among those who don't. - Frank A. Clark
• Everything you can imagine is real. - Pablo Picasso.
• I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. -Shakespeare, Richard II
• Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. - Clive James
• There exist limitless opportunities in every industry. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier. - Charles F. Kettering
• When the torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls. -Elie Wiesel
• Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from irony. -Erik Naggum
• If you vote for the lesser of two evils you are still voting for evil... Your vote is not a bet as to who is going to win the race. It is a statement of who you are. - Karl Hess
• Whatever tears at us, Whatever holds us down, And if nothing can be done, We'll make the best of what's around. - Dave Matthews
• Don't worry, it's not too late. You didn't miss it. It's right now. It's always gonna be... right now. -Todd Snider
• Life is a gamble at terrible odds - if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it. -Tom Stoppard
• You can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing? - Kahlil Gibran
• Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. - Douglas Jerrold
• Time spent laughing is time spent with the gods. -Japanese Proverb
• I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am. - Joseph Baretti
• Everyone in the room is wearing a uniform. Don't kid yourself. -Frank Zappa
• Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish. -Timothy Jones
• There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. - Edmund Burke
• I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on. - Stephen Sondheim
• Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. -Bertrand Russell
• Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference. -Liz Dubey
• The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself. - Nietzsche
• Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge. - Don Henley
• It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting. -Tom Stoppard
• No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in. - Gail Sheehy
• Worry gives a small thing a big shadow. -Swedish Proverb
• The future is no place to place your better days. - Dave Matthews
• We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them. -Abigail Adams
• My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate - that's my philosophy. -Thornton Wilder
• In marriage, being the right person is as important as finding the right person. -W.D. Gough
• Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. -Confucius
• Having power over yourself is an inoculation against the power of others. -Howard J. Ehrlich
• In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. -Alfred Whitney Griswold
• It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning. -Calvin, "Calvin and Hobbes"
• Jesters do oft prove prophets. -William Shakespeare
• I once complained to my father that I didn't seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad's advice? 'Margo, don't be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep.' -Margo Kaufman
• A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. -Frank Herbert
• The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply. -Kahlil Gibran
• If enough ain't enough, too much probably won't be either. -Heywood Williams
• The point of power is always in the present. -Louise L. Hay
• What was hard to endure is sweet to recall. -French Proverb
• Clever men are the tools with which bad men work. -William Hazlitt
• While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior. -Henry C. Link
• People will always forgive you for being wrong. What they won't forgive you for is being right. - Robert L. Bartley
• Make no judgments where you have no compassion. -Anne McCaffrey
• Yesterday is ashes; tomorrow wood. Only today does the fire burn brightly. - Inuit proverb
• If you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you. -Terry Pratchett
• You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. -Eric Hoffer
• Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced. -Bertrand Russell
• If I tell you I'm strong will you play along or will you see I'm as insecure as everybody else? - Blue Man Group
• Who makes himself a sheep will be eaten by the wolves. - Proverb
• It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others. -John Andrew Holmes
• I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. -Michel de Montaigne
• ##
• Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself. -Richard M. Nixon
• Danger and delight grow on one stalk. -English Proverb
• Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. -John Donne
• It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward. -Lewis Carroll
• A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives the rose. -Chinese proverb
• Life is mostly froth and bubble, / Two things stand like stone, / Kindness in another's trouble, / Courage in your own. -Adam Lindsay Gordon
• Sometimes even to live is an act of courage. -Seneca
• Nature uses as little as possible of anything. -Johannes Kepler
• The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. -Tennessee Williams
• O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! - Shakespeare, Othello
• He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. -Thomas Paine
• They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin
• It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it. -Goethe
• Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. -Arthur Schopenhauer
• The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. -Anonymous
• A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. -Barry Goldwater
• There's a fine line between participation and mockery. -Scott Adams
• If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. -Woodrow Wilson
• A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults. -Louis Nizer
• A modest little person, with much to be modest about. -Winston Churchill
• When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? -Michel de Montaigne
• He had delusions of adequacy. -Walter Kerr
• I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -Groucho Marx
• He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts: for support, rather than illumination. -Andrew Lang
• He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet. -Joseph Joubert
• The question is not can they reason? Nor can they talk? But can they suffer? -Jeremy Bentham
• Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides. -Rita Mae Brown
• Kindness makes a fellow feel good whether it's being done to him or by him. -Frank A. Clark
• Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence. -Hal Borland
• Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated. -Voltaire
• The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight, / But they, while their companions slept, / Were toiling upward in the night. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. -Mohandas Gandhi
• Maybe this world is another planet's Hell. -Aldous Huxley
• The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of his tail. -Rabindranath Tagore
• Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own. -Goethe
• Don't mistake the edge of a rut for the horizon. -James Patterson
• Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way. -Jean Anouilh
• Life is a sum of all your choices. -Albert Camus
• The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself. -Thomas Szasz
• I don't need time. What I need is a deadline. -Duke Ellington
• The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. -Samuel Johnson
• Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations. -Leo Buscaglia
• Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders. -Walter Bagehot
• I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. -Thomas Jefferson
• We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones. -Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
• There was never a genius without a tincture of madness. -Aristotle
• Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission. -Eleanor Roosevelt
• Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both. -John Andrew Holmes
• The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist. -Rabindranath Tagore
• Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned. -Buddha
• We are so fond of being out among nature, because it has no opinions about us. -Nietzsche
• The truth is rarely pure, and never simple. -Oscar Wilde
• Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. -Paulo Freire
• No one has ever become poor by giving. -Anne Frank
• One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life. -Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not. -Samuel Johnson
• Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented nonsense. -Robert Heinlein
• The world was made round so that we cannot see too far ahead. - Isak Dinesen
• Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world. -George Bernard Shaw
• Whenever you're called on to make up your mind, / and you're hampered by not having any, / the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, / is simply by spinning a penny. / No - not so that chance shall decide the affair / while you're passively standing there moping; / but the moment the penny is up in the air, / you suddenly know what you're hoping. -Piet Hein
• The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. -Arthur C. Clarke
• I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. -Albert Einstein
• I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people. -Katherine Hepburn
• Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It's unreliable levers that are the problem. -Terry Pratchett
• Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use. -Mark Twain
• The way you see people is the way you treat them and the way you treat them is what they become. - Goethe
• The superior man is intelligently, not blindly, faithful. -Confucius
• I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. -Bjarne Stroustrup, designer of C++
• First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak. - Epictetus
• In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all but very interesting. - John Cage
• History is like shampoo: exotic or generic, the last step is always "repeat". -Paul A. Bradley
• A man can only live by absolutely forgetting he is a man like other folk. -Bertolt Brecht
• Edible. adj. Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm. -Ambrose Bierce
• Those who failed to oppose me, who readily agreed with me, accepted all my views, and yielded easily to my opinions, were those who did me the most injury, and were my worst enemies. -Napoleon Bonaparte
• There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical. -Niels Bohr
• My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those who are sad. -Olive Schreiner
• Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein
• As one gets older, one discovers everything is going to be exactly the same with different hats on. - Noel Coward
• No man ever quite believes in any other man. -HL Mencken
• The lesson we learn from history is: This is what people are like. -David Glaser
• The trouble is that sex is a force of nature, and reason is not. -Ashley Brilliant
• Don't complain to others about your troubles. Half of them don't care and the other half are glad. - Emmett Smith
• It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. - Evelyn Waugh
• Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond. -Jeffery Borenstein
• Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is. -Albert Camus
• He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice. - Albert Einstein
• It is never too late to be what you might have been. - George Eliot
• There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them. -Heisenberg
• People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. - Kierkegaard
• All power has its sphere of activity, beyond which it produces no effect. - Samuel Johnson
• A comprehended god is no god. -John Chrysostom
• Of all things that can happen to us, triumph is the most difficult to endure when we are alone. Deprived of witnesses, it shrinks at once. -Gabrielle Roy
• Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side. - La Rochefoucauld
• To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice. - Confucius
• You all laugh because I'm different; I laugh because you're all the same.
• The manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing being endured. -Dean Acheson
• Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. - Albert Camus
• You hate your job? There's a support group for that. They're called 'Everyone'. They meet at the bar. - Drew Carey
• People change and forget to tell each other. -Lillian Hellman
• The secret of joy is the mastery of pain. -Anais Nin
• Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education. -Chuang-Tzu
• When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always. -Rita Rudner
• Trees are not known by their leaves, nor even by their blossoms, but by their fruits. -Eleanor of Aquitaine
• If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable. -John F. Kennedy
• The Past: our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition. -Israel Zangwill
• Conformity in matters of human performance is a crime against yourself. -Laurence Morehouse
• Cynics have claimed there are only six basic plots. Frankenstein and My Fair Lady are really the same story. -Leslie Halliwell
• It is discouraging to try and penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. -Mark Twain
• Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. -Pablo Picasso
• You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other. -Frank Lloyd Wright
• I like talking to Rabbit. He talks about sensible things. He doesn't use long, difficult words, like Owl. He uses short, easy words, like ëWhat about lunch' and ëHelp yourself, Pooh'. I suppose I really ought to go and see Rabbit. -Winnie the Pooh (A. A. Milne)
• The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is. -Phillips Brooks
• I am ashes where once I was fire. -Lord Byron
• People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within. -Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
• When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay. -Brian Aldiss
• Beware of him that is slow to anger; for when it is long coming, it is the stronger when it comes, and the longer kept. Abused patience turns to fury. -Francis Quarles
• The feminine values are the fountain of bliss. Know the masculine, Keep to the feminine. -Lao Tzu
• A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation." -Stephen Crane
• If you can't change your fate, change your attitude. -Amy Tan
• The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. -Karl Marx
• A happy childhood is the worst possible preparation for life. -Kinky Friedman
• When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why they have no food, they call me a Communist. -Archbishop Helder Camara
• Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it. -Jules Renard
• What breaks in a moment may take years to mend. - Swedish Proverb.
• Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity. -Tobias Wolff
• Humans differ from other animals only a little - and most men throw that away. - Confucius
• Personal isn't the same as important. - Terry Pratchett
• Worry's a self-inflicted wound. -Roy Rogers
• What is talent? Reason manifested gloriously. -M. J. de Chenier
• Suffering isn't ennobling; recovery is. - Christiaan H. Barnard
• Truth often suffers most by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers. -William Penn
• We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality. -Iris Murdoch
• The height of ability consists in knowing the price of things. - La Rochefoucauld
• A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life. -Robertson Davies
• It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to. - William Jefferson Clinton
• Man's greatness lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. -Albert Camus
• Once you label me, you negate me. -Soren Kierkegaard
• How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms. -Aristotle
• Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment? -Robert Louis Stevenson
• This I surely know, if I wrestle with dung, win or lose, I am always defiled. - Rollenhagen
• An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it. -Donald R. Perry Marquis
• It's not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts. -Will Rogers
• An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought. -Pablo Picasso
• An idea is, in the end, always stronger than circumstances. - Albert Schweitzer
• An idea is salvation by imagination. -Frank Lloyd Wright
• What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.- Mignon McLaughlin
• The genius of communication is the ability to be both totally honest and totally kind at the same time. -John Powell
• The marvelous thing about a joke with a double meaning is that it can only mean one thing. -Ronnie Barker
• Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. -Saul Bellow
• Hands that work are better than mouths that pray. -Robert Ingersoll
• There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos. - John Hightower
• To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• By the accident of fortune a man may rule the world for a time, but by virtue of love he may rule the world forever. -Lao Tzu
• The way I look at life - we're all on the Hindenburg, so there's no use in arguing over the window seat. -Richard Jeni
• Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. - Terry Pratchett
• The first duty of man is that of subduing fear. -Thomas Carlyle
• It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it. -Goethe
• To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. - Thomas Paine
• I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am forever shocking. -Jean Cocteau
• Realize that if you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it. - Anthony J. D'Angelo
• This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic. - Terry Pratchett
• In life as in dance: Grace glides on blistered feet. -Alice Abrams
• The morality of an action depends on the motive from which we act. - Samuel Johnson
• For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. -Terry Pratchett
• Many people fail because they conclude that fundamentals do not apply in their case. - M. L. Cichon
• Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't. - Barbara Sher
• Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. -George Santayana
• Our daily breakfast grows odder & odder; It's a wise child that knows its fodder. -Ogden Nash
• The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take. -C. Northcote Parkinson
• After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an accident, it makes you wonder about history. -Dave Barry
• Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison
• Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself. - Harvey Fierstein
• The gods too are fond of a joke. -Aristotle
• To tell a woman who is forty, "You look like sixteen," is baloney. The blarney way of saying it is "Tell me how old you are, I should like to know at what age women are most beautiful." -Fulton John Sheen
• When a man grows old wisdom will not help him, but emotion will preserve him. He should be careful to feed passion. -Mark Rutherford
• Art is a lie which tells you a truth. - Picasso
• Let us bear with magnanimity whatever it is needful for us to bear. -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
• I have had dreams, and I've had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams. -Jonas Salk
• Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth. - Terry Pratchett
• If you have an idea but can't write it down, you don't really have an idea. - Lee Iacocca
• Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. - Thomas Szasz
• Inconsistencies cannot both be right; but, imputed to man, they may both be true. - Samuel Johnson
• The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt. -Bertrand Russell
• Life is an adventure in forgiveness. -Norman Cousins
• He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak. -Michel De Montaigne
• One can pay back the loan of gold, but one dies forever in debt to those who are kind. -Malayan Proverb
• There is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity. -Socrates
• God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. -Voltaire
• A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company. -Charles Evans Hughes
• Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable. -Kurt Vonnegut
• Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches. -Percy Bysshe Shelley
• The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. -Hubert H. Humphrey
• The silence of the envious is too noisy. -Khalil Gibran
• The capacity to be puzzled is... the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science. -Erich Fromm
• If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough. -Mario Andretti
• And yet It still moves. -Galileo Galilei
• Most minds are the slaves of external circumstances, and conform to any hand that undertakes to mould them. -Samuel Johnson
• There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. -George Santayana
• It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded. -Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• He who is different from me does not impoverish me, he enriches me. -Saint-ExupÈry
• Our need to control our future by understanding the rules is greater than our need to know the truth. -Sheri Tepper
• In his heart, mankind has never been able to evolve past the tribal stage. Civilization does not take the place of tribalism, but if it is well designed, it can control it. -Sheri Tepper
• People will always forgive you for being wrong. What they won't forgive you for is being right. -Robert L. Bartley
• Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts. -William O. Douglas
• Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. -Stephen Mitchell
• Without deviation, progress is not possible. -Frank Zappa
• Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself. -Charlie Chaplin
• The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt. -Max Lerner
• If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you. -Billy Wilder
• The real secret of how to use time is to pack it as you would a portmanteau, filling up the small spaces with small things. - Sir Henry Haddow
• You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream. -Frank Zappa
• Is it time to go home yet? I keep clicking these damn shoes, but nothing happens. -Robin Hecht
• Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well-informed just to be undecided about them. -Laurence J. Peter
• Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.- Anais Nin
• No matter how desperate the predicament is, I'm always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head. -Charlie Chaplin
• Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got. -Janis Joplin
• If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be on more equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field. -de Montaigne
• Any idiot can face a crisis - it is the day to day living that wears one out. -Anton Chekov
• Management by objective works if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't. - Peter Drucker
• It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement. -Jackson Pollock
• The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. - James Baldwin
• The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.-Bertrand Russell
• The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. -Steve Biko
• It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory. -Blaise Pascal
• What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship? -Anais Nin
• In idleness there is a perpetual despair. - Thomas Carlyle
• A man should think less of what he eats and more with whom he eats because no food is so satisfying as good company. -Michel de Montaigne
• The dream was always running ahead of one. To catch up, to live for a moment in union with it, that was the miracle. - Anais Nin
• You can't hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have. -Zig Ziglar
• If you're in a fair fight, you didn't plan it properly. -Nick Lappos, Chief R&D Pilot, Sikorsky Aircraft
• If man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss. -Thomas Carlyle
• Violence seldom accomplishes permanent and desired results. Herein lies the futility of war. -A. Philip Randolph
• Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest. -Mark Twain
• The real war will never get into the books. -Walt Whitman
• Women are natural guerrillas. Scheming, we nestle in the enemy's bed, avoiding open warfare, watching the options, playing the odds. -Sally Kempton
• You cannot push back the darkness with reason. You have to use fire. -Lois Bujold, _Paladin of Souls_
• The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key. -Edith Wharton
• Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don't count on harvesting Golden Delicious. -Bill Meyer
• One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it. -French Proverb
• Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true. -Robert Brault
• I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror; the plagues and the blights and the maggots. -Isak Dinesen
• It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head. -Sally Kempton
• Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth. -Oscar Wilde
• It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. Alfred North Whitehead
• Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukeboxes play. -Willie Nelson
• When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped. - Samuel Johnson
• You can't lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself. - Gene Mauch
• The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. - Thomas Jefferson
• Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief? - William Blake
• Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. -Alfred North Whitehead
• If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm. -Marcus Aurelius
• If you never did, you should. These things are fun, and fun is good. -Dr. Seuss
• People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The freedom of any society varies proportionately with the volume of its laughter. - Zero Mostel
• Love is the fart Of every heart:
• It pains a man when 'tis kept close,
• And others doth offend, when 'tis let loose.
• -John Suckling
• It is my rule never to lose my temper until it would be detrimental to keep it. - Sean O'Casey
• It's the unconquerable soul of man, not the nature of the weapon he uses, that ensures victory. -George S Patton
• The possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason. - Immanuel Kant
• Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? - Ernest Gaines
• The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them. -George Bernard Shaw
• To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness. -Confucius
• Some folks go through life pleased that the glass is half full. Others spend a lifetime lamenting that it's half-empty. The truth is: There is a glass with a certain volume of liquid in it. From there, it's up to you! -James S. Vuocolo
• Be a good animal, true to your instincts. -D. H. Lawrence
• Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well - he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish. -Yiddish proverb
• You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. -John Morley
• The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. -Carl Jung
• Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. -Eric Hoffer
• Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind. -Albert Schweitzer
• Those who wish to sing always find a song. -Swedish proverb
• Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; Some blunders and absurdities crept in; Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truly better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master. -Marguerite Yourcenar
• There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. -14th Dalai Lama
• We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• The mind is but a barren soil--a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter. -Sir Joshua Reynolds
• I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do. - D. Dale Gulledge
• No lepidopterist's collection in the entire world...full of iridescent wings, is worth the life of a single butterfly. -Isaac Bashevis Singer
• I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial. -Goethe
• We are, all of us, calling and calling across the incalculable gulfs which separate us even from our nearest friends. -David Grayson
• The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say. -Kahlil Gibran
• Life is not what one has lived, but what one remembers and how one chooses to tell it. -Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Your suffering is the pain of holding onto that which no longer serves you. Kahlil Gabran
• Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God. -Martin Luther
• I don't know which is worse... that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low. - Hobbes
• If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. -Ursula LeGuin
• You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil. -John Ruskin
• You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money. P. J. O'Rourke
• Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of
• authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made
• to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are
• men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They
• promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
• -Daniel Webster
• Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety. -Joseph Joubert
• You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it. -Charles Buxton
• While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions. -Stephen R. Covey
• It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word. -Andrew Jackson
• I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. -Mohandas Gandhi
• The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range. -Goethe
• Well-behaved women rarely make history. - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
• One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. -Bertrand Russell
• Ah, silent rage... the essence of a good marriage. - Homer Simpson
• Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse. -Dorothy Gale
• Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. - Tom Robbins
• Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide. -Tom Robbins
• Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match. -Ingrid Bengis
• Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in one pretty and well preserved piece, but to skid across the line broadside, thoroughly used up, worn out, leaking oil, shouting GERONIMO!- Unknown
• In memory everything seems to happen to music. -Tennessee Williams
• If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things. -Rene Descartes
• I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. -Jonathan Swift
• It is our doubts that unite us and our certainties that divide us. -Peter Ustinov
• When tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle, they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle. -Dr. Seuss
• The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage. -Barbara Kingsolver
• The best you can get is an even break. -Franklin Pierce Adams
• The beauty of simplicity is the complexity it attracts. -Tom Robbins
• No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately. -Michel de Montaigne
• Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power. -Gloria Steinem
• Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go. -James Baldwin
• The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. -Erica Jong
• Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul... You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair. -Douglas MacArthur
• The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever. -Anatole France
• You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. -Booker T. Washington
• Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion. -Benjamin Franklin
• Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind. ñ Leonardo da Vinci
• When someone demands blind obedience, you'd be a fool not to peek. -Jim Fiebig
• The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour. -Japanese proverb
• When someone blunders, we say that he makes a misstep. Is it then not clear that all the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill our history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing. -Moliere
• Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come. - Rabindranath Tagore
• If little else, the brain is an educational toy. - Tom Robbins
• We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. - Tom Robbins
• God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. -Terry Pratchett
• Your life lies before you like freshly fallen snow. Be careful where you step, for every step will show. -anonymous
• The great business of man is to improve his mind, and govern his manners; all other projects and pursuits, whether in our power to compass or not, are only amusements. - Gaius Plinius Secondus Pliny, the Elder
• All the Constitution guarantees is the pursuit of happiness. You have to catch up with it by yourself. -Benjamin Franklin
• A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. -Albert Einstein
• Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt. -William Shakespeare
• To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself. -Albert Einstein
• The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be. -Socrates
• The real slavery of Israel in Egypt was that they had learned to endure it. - Rabbi Hanokh of Alexander
• Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. -Mark Twain
• If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. -Spider Robinson
• A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights. -Napoleon Bonaparte
• When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws. -G. K. Chesterton
• It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out where the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood. At best, he knows the triumph of high achievement; if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. -Theodore Roosevelt
• Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined. - Patrick Henry
• If you reduce morality to legality, you have removed morality from human conduct. -Zbigniew Brzezinski
• Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false,
• and by rulers as useful. -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
• One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities
• required to explain anything. -William of Occam
• No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place. - Zen saying
• One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time. - Herman Hesse
• The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.-Joseph Addison
• Expect people to be better than they are; it helps them to become better. But don't be disappointed when they are not; it helps them to keep trying. - Merry Browne
• If no one responds to your call, Walk alone. -Rabindranath Tagore
• Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. -Iris Murdoch
• The reason angels can fly is that they take themselves very lightly. -G K Chesterton
• Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains
• and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take,
• but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death! -Patrick Henry
• Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure. -Robert Lefevre
• From error to error, one discovers the entire truth. -Sigmund Freud
• The road to wisdom? Well it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less. -Piet Hein
• Men are at war with one another because each man is at war with himself. -Francis J. Meehan
• Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. -Reinhold Niebuhr
• Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder; it is a howling reproach. What Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai were not suggestions but ten commandments. -Ted Koppel
• If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing. -Kingsley Amis
• The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever. - Pascal
• The highest result of education is tolerance. -Helen Keller
• Don't confuse language with reality. Human language is far better at capturing human experience than at expressing deep physical laws. -Brian Greene
• If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -Henry Miller
• It takes courage to grow up & turn out to be who you really are. -e. e. cummings
• Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar. -Drew Carey
• I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the Constitution to a man who will burn the Constitution and then wrap himself in the flag. -Craig Washington
• The myth of socialism is far stronger than the reality of capitalism. That is because capitalism is not really an 'ism' at all. It is what people do if you leave them alone. -Arnold Beichmen
• Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do. -Voltaire
• When you know that you're capable of dealing with whatever comes, you have the only security the world has to offer. -Harry Browne
• When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous. We are timid only when there is something we can still cling to. -Carlos Castaneda
• I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The damage such perception did to me I have felt ever since... I could never belong entirely to one side of any question. -Pearl S. Buck
• Reality is whatever doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. -Philip K. Dick
• If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles. -Doug Larson
• One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. -Helen Keller
• Hatred corrodes the vessel in which it is stored. -Chinese Proverb
• Government is not reason and it is not eloquence. It is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. -George Washington
• One always dies too soon -or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are your life, and nothing else. - Sartre
• It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief. - George Bernard Shaw
• I am an optimist rather than a pessimist. It is possible that the pessimists may be proven right in the long run, but we optimists have a better time on the trip. -William Everitt
• Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also. -Billy Wilder
• Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation. -Henry Ward Beecher
• All animals are equal but some are more equal than others. -George Orwell
• Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be! - Miguel de Cervantes
• One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. -Bertrand Russell
• Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are. -Rod Serling
• Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. -R. D. Laing
• It is a general error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare. -Edmund Burke
• Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. -Henry David Thoreau
• The value of an idea lies in the using of it. -Thomas Edison
• I know I am but summer to your heart, And not the full four seasons of the year. -Edna St. Vincent Millay
• ##
• The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. -Plutarch
• Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us. -Eric Hoffer
• I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man. -Alexander Hamilton
• In fact, no gods anywhere play chess. They prefer simple, vicious games, where you 'Do Not Achieve Transcendence' but "Go Straight to Oblivion"; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. - Terry Pratchett
• A good friend will come and bail you out of jail... A true friend will be sitting next to you saying "Damn that was fun!"
• All gods and devils that have ever existed are within us. -Hermann Hesse
• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. -George Bernard Shaw
• All great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes. -Stanley Kubrick
• There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth. - Charles Dickens
• The surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth. -Mark Twain
• They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are. -Aldous Huxley
• And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? -Edgar Allan Poe
• Everyone needs a tiny part of themselves that can, metaphorically, be allowed to run naked in the rain, to think the unthinkable thoughts, to hide in corners and spy on the world, to do the forbidden but enjoyable deeds. -Terry Pratchett
• No path of flowers leads to glory. -Jean de La Fontaine
• Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas we have bright ideas. -Eric Bentley
• You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. -Terry Pratchett
• Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting a bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian. -Dennis Wholey
• Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal. -Alexander Hamilton
• The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -Paul Valery
• Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. - Gene Fowler
• Two things you need to know about God. First, there is a God. Sure, why not. Second, it's not you. - John Hiatt
• I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine... 'Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned.' That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters. -Samuel Beckett
• Such... is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change; the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. -Samuel Johnson
• What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth. -Norman Cousins
• Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy. -Gilbert K. Chesterton
• In life it's not important how you fall, but how you get up. -Halle Berry
• Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him? -Pierre Troubetzkoy
• We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves. -Arnold Toynbee
• The path is your only home. - S. L. Viehl
• We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind, in which understanding may come to us. -Aldous Huxley
• All modern men are descended from a worm-like creature, but it shows more on some people. -Will Cuppy
• The first rule of venture capitalism should be 'Shoot the Inventor'. -Richard Storey
• The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. -General Omar Bradley
• "You are out of danger," he said. I laughed, I guess, and said, "How can I be--I don't feel dead yet.î -Margaret Laurence
• Religion is a fashionable substitute for Belief. -Oscar Wilde
• For news of the heart, ask the face. -West African proverb
• Never break the neutrality of a port or place, but never consider as neutral any place from whence an attack is allowed to be made. -Horatio Nelson
• It's easier to copy than to think - hence fashion. Besides, a community of originals is not a community. -Wallace Stevens
• A modesty in delivering our sentiments leaves us a liberty of changing them without blushing. -Thomas Wilson
• Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life. -Ezra Pound
• The social body persists although the component cells may change. -Aldous Huxley
• If one's different, one's bound to be lonely. -Aldous Huxley
• Always go hard and fast enough so that when you hit the ditch you can pull out the other side. - Johnny Paycheck
• The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. -William Faulkner
• You can lead a horse to drink but you can't make it water. -Joh Bjelke-Petersen
• The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp. -Terry Pratchett
• Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snake bite and furthermore always carry a small snake. -W. C. Fields
• I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards. -Albert Einstein
• I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies. - Aristotle
• If a sane dog fights a mad dog, it's the sane dog's ear that is bitten off. -Burmese proverb
• Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember. -Anne Sullivan
• He who attacks must vanquish. He who defends must merely survive. -Master Kan (Kung Fu)
• The secret of success is constancy of purpose. -Benjamin Disraeli
• Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. -John Milton
• The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention. -Proverb
• There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. -James Russell Lowell
• The injuries we do, and those we suffer, are seldom weighed in the same balance. - Charles Simmon
• Believe you can surpass. Believe you can go beyond. Those who harbor the second-best attitude are invariably second-best doers. - David J. Schwartz
• Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best. -Henry van Dyke
• Crimes are not to be measured by the issue of events, but by the bad intentions of men. - Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have. -Anonymous
• Every animal leaves traces of what it was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created. - Jacob Bronowski
• You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note. - Doug Floyd
• I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. -Thomas Jefferson
• Above all, intelligence forbids tears. -Doris Lessing
• It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -Krishnamurti
• Dance to the tune that is played. -Spanish Proverb
• The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. -Tom Clancy
• Insignificant events can take on monumental proportions when your head is full of practically nothing. - Grace Slick
• There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - Shakespeare
• What we have to remember is that it's not us and them. When you look at the world, it's really just us. -Dave Matthews
• To stumble twice against the same stone is a proverbial disgrace. -Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person. - Mother Teresa
• A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them. - P. J. O'Rourke
• To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion. -Albert Camus
• One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license. -P.J. O'Rourke
• I must tell you that the supply of words on the world market is plentiful, but the demand is falling. - Lech Walesa
• Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once. - Lillian Dickson
• Sometimes fate hits you with the Clown Hammer of Circumstance and there's nothing to do but sit there and watch the little birds fly around your head. - Tara Calishain
• The wicked are always surprised to find that the good can be clever. -Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues
• If every American donated five hours a week, it would equal the labor of 20 million full-time volunteers.
• The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving any excuse. -Jules Renard
• Often the real test of courage is not to die, but to live. -Conte Vittorio Alfieri
• A generous heart suffers for the misfortunes of others as much as though it had caused them. -Marquis de Vauvenargues
• Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. - Dr. Johnson
• A man's most open actions have a secret side to them. - Joseph Conrad
• The only alternative to coexistence is co-destruction. -Jawaharlal Nehru
• I understood that comedy was just another form of condolence. -John Irving
• People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights. -Indira Gandhi
• It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. -Doris Lessing
• The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. -Thomas Jefferson
• Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. -Mark Twain
• Today millions of men and women consider that their happiness is destroyed if they must get along without a few things of which their grandfathers had never dreamed. Luxuries have become necessities to them; and the more things a man needs in order to be happy, the more he has increased his chances of disappointment and despair. -Fulton John Sheen
• For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. - Friedrich Nietzsche
• Better by far that you should forget and smile, Than you should remember and be sad. -Christina Rossetti
• That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner. - Samuel Johnson
• Conduct is more convincing than language. -John Woolman
• Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm ó but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.- T.S. Eliot
• Good has but one enemy, the evil; but the evil has two enemies, the good and itself. - Johannes Von Muller
• If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. -The 14th Dalai Lama
• That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.- Doris Lessing
• My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it. -Quentin Crisp
• Each excellent thing, once learned, serves for a measure of all other knowledge. -Sir Philip Sidney
• Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this. -Gustave Flaubert
• You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door. -Henry Ward Beecher
• The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves. -Plato
• I and the public know. / What all schoolchildren learn. / Those to whom evil is done. / Do evil in return -W.H. Auden
• I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made. -Franklin D. Roosevelt
• The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it. -Arthur Schopenhauer
• Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat. -Jean-Paul Sartre
• The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts. -Edmund Burke
• Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. -Albert Einstein
• The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes -- ah, that is where the art resides. -Artur Schnabel
• "The question is," said Alice, "whether you CAN make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all." -Lewis Carroll
• How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean. - Arthur C. Clarke
• A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meaning right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. -John Steinbeck
• I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. -Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
• The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem. - Theodore Rubin
• Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand. -George Eliot
• The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. -Susan Sontag
• I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. -Jack Kerouac
• Money has only one use--to give one independence from his enemies. -Humphrey Bogart
• Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. -Susan Sontag
• I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself. -Rod Serling
• To be angry at people means that one considers their acts to be important. -Juan Matus
• All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. -Henry Miller
• The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. -Albert Einstein
• Sanity is a cozy lie. - Susan Sontag
• The antidote to hubris, to over-weening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systemise ideas. -Ralph Ellison
• Justice delayed is justice denied. -William Ewart Gladstone
• You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it. -Malcolm X
• We all love animals. Why do we call some "pets" and others "dinner?" -k.d. lang
• Good intentions always randomize behavior. -Marion J. Levy
• The key to security is public information. -Margaret Chase Smith
• Style is the feather that helps the arrow fly, not the one you put in your hat. - Stephen Bayley
• When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bike. Then I realized that The Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked him to forgive me. -Emo Phillips
• The only nice thing about being imperfect is the joy it brings to others. -Doug Larson
• The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures. - Humphrey Davy
• A man in power must have men around him whom his awesome power does not intimidate. -William Safire
• The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. -Steve Biko
• If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important. -Bertrand Russell
• I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion. -Henry David Thoreau
• Despair is with us always, lurking in darkness," I said. "But we must be stronger than our sadness, or darkness will eclipse the world." - Leslie What
• The test of good manners is to be able to put up pleasantly with bad ones. -Wendell Willkie
• Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. -Andre Gide
• Being shot out of a cannon is always better than being squeezed through a tube. - Hunter S. Thompson
• In the blogosphere, everyone's famous for 15 people. -Dave Weinberger
• Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic. - W E Gladstone
• Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him. -Mel Brooks
• But they who bleed remember far better. -Victor Hugo
• Personalize your sympathies; depersonalize you antipathies. -William Inge
• To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny. -Quentin Crisp
• Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. -Ovid
• If you don't accept responsibility for your own actions, then you are forever chained to a position of defense. -Holly Lisle
• I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness, those that fit the thing. -Walter Savage Landor
• The history of the world and its peoples in three words: "born, troubled, died." -Carl Sandburg
• One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways. -Stephen Vincent BenÈt
• Things equal out pretty well. Our dreams seldom come true, but then neither do our nightmares. -Charles Kennedy
• Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. - Edmund Burke
• Please fence me in baby the world's too big out here and I don't like it without you. -Humphrey Bogart telegram to Lauren Bacall
• What's gone, and what's past help, should be past grief. -Shakespeare
• In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity. -Ambrose Bierce
• Son, you're ropin' things you can't ride.
• The pure are not fortune's favorites. -Welsh Proverb
• It is clear that there never was a time when nothing existed; otherwise nothing would exist now. -C. S. Lewis
• If you live in the river, you should make friends with the crocodile. -Indian proverb
• Imitate Jesus and Socrates. -Benjamin Franklin
• We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. -Elie Wiesel
• Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are. -Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
• I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law. -Aristotle
• Magic is directed almost entirely to men, you know. And it's a return for them to boyhood, childhood. It has nothing to do with women, who hate itóit irritates them. They don't like to be fooled. And men do. - Orson Welles
• The man who has no problems is out of the game. -Elbert Green Hubbard
• Honk if you can distinguish parody from satire. -Bumper sticker
• Where there is much light, the shadow is deep. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• He who has a choice has trouble. -Dutch Proverb
• He preaches well that lives well, quoth Sancho; that's all the divinity I understand. -Miguel de Cervantes
• Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river. -Cordell Hull
• And Silence, like a poultice, comes / To heal the blows of sound. -Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. -Nietzsche
• There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in the world. -Marguerite Guardiner
• Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. -Mark Twain
• He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals. -Immanuel Kant
• The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on. -Joseph Heller
• Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground. -Frederick Douglass
• When two elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled. -African proverb
• Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received. -Antonio Porchia
• Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow. -T.S. Eliot
• What you do is of little significance; but it is very important that you do it. -Mohandas K. Gandhi
• No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back. -Turkish proverb
• My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast. -Miguel de Unamuno
• Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. -Mark Twain
• In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. -Jose Narosky
• Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. -Albert Schweitzer
• If something happens once, it will never happen again. If it happens twice, it will invariably happen a third time. -Paulo Coehlo
• Wickedness must be opposed by some, or virtue would be entirely driven out of the world. - Samuel Johnson
• The more reason we have to pay attention to life, the less we have to pay attention to death. -B. F. Skinner
• If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking. - General S. George Patton, Jr.
• I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it. -Thomas Carlyle
• The bear licks, loves, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers. - Edmund Burke
• Humor is just another defense against the universe. -Mel Brooks
• A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges. -Juan Matus
• Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. -Richard Dawkins
• Gullibility is the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life. - G. K. Chesterton
• Lock your door rather than accuse your neighbor. - Lebanese proverb
• The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or as a curse. -Carlos Castaneda
• I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. - T. S. Eliot, 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'
• The key to security is public information. -Margaret Chase Smith
• A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. -Bertrand de Jouvenel
• People can come up with statistics to prove anything. Fourteen percent of people know that! - Homer Simpson
• Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: "For my sake was the world created," and in his left: "I am earth and ashes." - Rabbi Bunam of Pzhysha
• Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife. -US Supreme Court
• But I'm a madly irritating person, and I irritated them for years. Anything definite is irritating ó and stimulating. - Katharine Hepburn
• No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings. -William Blake
• Life is a jest and all things show it; I thought so once, but now I know it. - John Gay
• All revolutions devour their own children. - Ernst Rˆhm
• Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is two wolves attempting to have a sheep for dinner and finding a well-informed, well armed sheep. - Ron Tavel
• No lock avails against a hatchet. - French Proverb
• They can't censor the gleam in my eye. - Charles Laughton
• Once you start doing only what you've proven you can do, you're on the road to death. -Jerry Seinfeld
• I went sky diving; I went Rocky Mountain climbing; I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu. And I loved deeper, and I spoke sweeter, And I gave forgiveness I'd been denying. And he said, "Some day I hope you get the chance To live like you were dying." - Nichols and Wiseman
• Everything starts as somebody's daydream. - Larry Niven
• God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them. -Stephen Hawking
• There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity. -Douglas MacArthur
• Rudeness is better than any argument; it totally eclipses intellect. -Arthur Schopenhauer
• Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. -Confucius
• It is kindness immediately to refuse what you intend to deny. -Publilius Syrus
• One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth. -Voltaire
• The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher. -T. H. Huxley
• I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others. -Marcus Aurelius
• If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. -Noam Chomsky
• It is human nature to hate the man whom you have hurt. -Publius Cornelius Tacitus
• If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers. -Thomas Pynchon
• In a pond koi can reach lengths of eighteen inches. Amazingly, when placed in a lake, koi can grow to three feet long. The metaphor is obvious. You are limited by how you see the world. -Vince Poscente
• And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• It needs some intelligence to be truly selfish. The unintelligent can only be self-righteous. - Eric Hoffer
• You will not become a saint through other people's sins. - Anton Chekhov
• Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact. -Honore de Balzac
• A great deal of human grief is caused by our demanding perfection from everybody but ourselves. -Jim Todd
• Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack. -Harry Emerson Fosdick
• A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Who so goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; society will retaliate. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning. -Louis L'Amour
• Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices -- just recognize them. - Edward R. Murrow
• Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem. -Henry Kissinger
• Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten. - G. K. Chesterton
• It is only when you are pursued that you become swift. - Kahlil Gibran
• There was never a night that had no morn. - Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
• Our opponents think they have refuted us when they repeat their own opinions without paying any attention to ours. -Goethe
• Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. -John Fitzgerald Kennedy
• Talking comes by nature, silence by wisdom. - C H Spurgeon
• What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens
• It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• Prejudice disfigures the observer, not the person observed. -William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
• No people were ever better than their laws, though many have been worse. - Joseph Priestley
• I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent. -S¯ren Kierkegaard
• Every man lives behind bars, which he carries within him. -Franz Kafka
• Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking. -John Maynard Keynes
• Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power. -Descartes
• Voyages are accomplished inwardly, and the most hazardous ones, needless to say, are made without moving from the spot. -Henry Miller
• Nature is often obscure or impenetrable, but she is not, like Man, deceitful. - C. G. Jung
• As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. -Thoreau
• The plain fact is that I am not a fair man and don't want to hear both sides. - H.L. Mencken
• Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people. -Martina Navratilova
• The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. -Stendhal
• Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought. -Graham Greene
• Loneliness... is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man. -Thomas Wolfe
• The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. -Hans Hofmann
• It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. -George Santayana
• You can outdistance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you. -Rwandan Proverb
• What's done to children, they will do to society. -Karl A. Menninger
• Those who put out the people's eyes, reproach them for their blindness. -John Milton
• Illness is in part what the world has done to a victim, but in a larger part it is what the victim has done with his world. -Karl Menninger
• None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -Goethe
• It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering. -Robert Lynd
• In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations. -Iroquois proverb
• True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess. -Louis Nizer
• What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature. -Voltaire
• Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing. - Maynard James Keenan
• No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded. -Margaret Mead
• "Well, that's society for you, I'm afraid," said Carrot. "Everything is dumped on the people below until you find someone who's prepared to eat it." -Terry Pratchett
• One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon one can neither resist nor understand. -George Orwell
• It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Descartes
• He who stops being better stops being good. -Oliver Cromwell
• I don't think we have failed, we have just found another way that doesn't work. -Andy Elson
• When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain, and not necessarily at the top. -Jacques Cousteau
• More harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil. -Friedrich August von Hayek
• Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them. -Andrew V. Mason
• You only really get to know people when you've had a jolly good row with them. Then and then only can you judge their true characters! -Anne Frank
• The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God. -Martin Buber
• Dance there upon the shore; What need have you to care For wind or water's roar? - William Butler Yeats
• The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation. - Roger Scruton
• In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is none. There never was. - Cormac McCarthy
• Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. -George Washington
• Strategy is something you do until opportunity comes along.- Jud Lamas
• I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. -Isaac Asimov
• The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts. -Blaise Pascal
• The world speaks to me in colors, my soul answers in music. -Rabindranath Tagore
• I allow myself to be understood as a colorful fragment in a drab world. - Errol Flynn
• To exaggerate is to weaken. -Jean Francois de La Harpe
• Always act as if you were seen. -Baltasar Gracian
• You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. -Marie Curie
• Men at forty learn to close softly the doors to rooms they will not be coming back to. -Donald Justice
• If they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. -Rainer Maria Rilke
• There is an eagle in me that wants to soar and there is also a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud. -Carl Sandburg
• Efficacy is when you fight every effing day and still go home to remember that the greatest strength is in your gentleness and understanding. - attr. Tiffani Crawford
• Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure. -Jack Lemmon
• Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter. - Benjamin Disraeli
• "Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." -Saint-Exupery
• Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked. -Pearl S. Buck
• Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life. -Benjamin Disraeli
• Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life... But what is that something? -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously. -Thomas Sowell
• A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience. -Doug Larson
• Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack. -Harry Emerson Fosdick
• Since when was genius found respectable? -Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself. -Hermann Hesse
• There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside. -Pearl Bailey
• What's a joy to the one is a nightmare to the other. That's how it is today, that's how it'll be forever. -Bertolt Brecht
• Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. -Hermann Hesse
• Home is not where you live but where they understand you. -Christian Morgenstern
• There's no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. -Hermann Hesse
• Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does. -Josh Billings
• A writer who says there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't. -Roger Scruton
• Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. -Kurt Vonnegut
• We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh. -Agnes Repplier
• Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy. - Isaac Newton
• Keep the other person's well-being in mind when you feel an attack of
• soul-purging truth coming on. - Betty White
• Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. -John Ruskin
• All language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved. - Casey Miller
• We must remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school. -Thucydides
• It is said the warrior's is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways. -Miyamoto Musashi
• The greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking. - Edward Dahlberg
• Myth does not mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth. -Doris Lessing
• Fears are educated into us and can, if we wish, be educated out. -Karl A. Menninger
• Compassion is just understanding the difficulty there is in living this human life, and therefore giving everybody that you know as much space as can be given to them to be themselves. -Swami Chetanananda
• You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. -Harper Lee
• Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have. - Dale Carnegie
• Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.-Tom Lehrer
• Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. -Jonathan Swift
• An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it. -Don Marquis
• The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. -Amelia Earhart
• The stones that critics hurl with harsh intent, A man may use to build his monument. -Arthur Guiterman
• This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. -George Bernard Shaw
• Who has not for the sake of his reputation sacrificed himself? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
• We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and bones. -Henry David Thoreau
• What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. -Richard Bach
• You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. -Naguib Mahfouz
• Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. -John Steinbeck
• The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly. -Charles Reznikoff
• There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher. -Henry van Dyke
• Just because you were born in a stable, it does not mean you are a horse. -Duke of Wellington
• We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter. -Denis Diderot
• Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread. - Richard Wright
• A wise man will keep his suspicions muzzled, but he will keep them awake. - George Savile
• Joy lies in the fight, in the attempt, in the suffering involved, not in the victory itself. -Mohandas K. Gandhi
• Dead leaves when they lose themselves in soil take part in the life of the forest. - Rabindranath Tagore
• All of us are mad. If it weren't for the fact every one of us is slightly abnormal, there wouldn't be any point in giving each person a separate name. -Ugo Betti
• Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats. -Voltaire
• In difficult and desperate situations, the boldest plans are the safest. - Lucius Marcius
• Beware the lollipop of mediocrity - lick it once and you suck forever.
• Defeat is not bitter unless you swallow it. -Joe Clark
• One must deny to anyone the right to ventriloquize the dead. -Christopher Hitchens
• Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise. -William Hazlitt
• It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons. -Henry Miller
• Neither age nor size makes a man. -Louis L'Amour
• Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on. -Terry Pratchett
• But any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood, and that is what happened to those of Jesus. -H.L. Mencken
• Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues. -Napoleon Bonaparte
• First rule of existence, my boy: learn the arts of survival, most of which involve combat in one form or another, against man, animal or the elements. Second rule, which old Cicero wrote most elegantly: 'Expediency and honor never conflict.' -Morris West
• The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved. -Russell Lynes
• Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them. -Edward R. Murrow
• Style is knowing what kind of play you are in. -Sir John Gielgud
• Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory. -Albert Schweitzer
• You save me, and I will save the day. -Train
• Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts. -Edward R. Murrow
• The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. -Mother Teresa
• Ignorance makes it possible for us to sleep at night. -Dean Koontz
• What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. -C.S. Lewis
• The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are. -Marcus Aurelius
• The reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. -James Baldwin
• You don't have to teach people to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman. -Eldridge Cleaver
• We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails. -Vince Lombardi
• The tragedy of man is what dies inside himself while he still lives. -Albert Schweitzer
• Blame it on a simple twist of fate. -Bob Dylan
• Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit. - Peter Sellers
• We do not remember days; we remember moments. -Cesare Pavese
• Until you can intelligently articulate the other side's position, you are not an adult. You are a liberal. -Ann Coulter
• Noble souls, through dust and heat, Rise from disaster and defeat The stronger. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. -G. K. Chesterton
• Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid. -Heinrich Heine
• I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than an army of one hundred lions led by sheep.- Prince Talleyrand-Perigord
• The house of delusions is cheap to build but draughty to live in. -A.E. Housman
• If we are ever to enjoy life, now is the time, not tomorrow or next year... Today should always be our most wonderful day. -Thomas Dreier
• Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing. -Randy K. Milholland
• The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong." -Sydney J. Harris
• Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act. -Leonard Cohen
• Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world. -Voltaire
• The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. -Bertrand Russell
• I'd rather be a lightning-rod than a seismograph. -Ken Kesey
• There's only us, there's only this. Forget regret or life is yours to miss... There's only now, there's only here. Give in to love or live in fear. No other path, no other way, no day but today. -Jonathan Larson
• If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you what to do, then YOU DESERVE IT. -Frank Zappa
• A man's real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks. - George Macdonald
• Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others. -William Hazlitt
• Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who forgives you -- out of love - - takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice. Dag Hammarskjold
• The one principle of hell is--I am my own. I am my own king and my own subject. -George MacDonald
• Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names. -John F. Kennedy
• Most men die of their remedies, not of their illnesses. - Moliere
• When facing a difficult task, act as though it is impossible to fail. If you're going after Moby Dick, take along the tartar sauce. -H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
• One must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. -Friedrich Wilheim Nietzsche
• Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. - Leonard Cohen
• If you want to know your future, look into your present actions. -Buddhist saying
• Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. -Virginia Woolf
• Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. -Tom Robbins
• To cease to think is but little different from ceasing to be. -Benjamin Franklin
• The deeds you do today may be the only sermon some people will hear today. -Francis of Assisi
• Force may make hypocrites, but it can never make converts. -William Penn
• You can no more win a war that you can win an earthquake. -Jeannette Rankin
• Be always restless, unsatisfied, unconforming. Whenever a habit becomes convenient, smash it! The greatest sin of all is satisfaction. -Nikos Kazantzakis
• Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. - Leonard Cohen
• Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers. - Goethe
• it is in our interest to punish the first insult; because an insult unpunished is the parent of many others. -Thomas Jefferson
• Nonviolence should never be used as a shield for cowardice. It is a weapon for the brave. -Mohandas Gandhi
• No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself. -Fulke Greville
• We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves. -Tom Robbins
• There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. - P.J. O'Rourke
• When I lay my head on the pillow at night I can say I was a decent person today. That's when I feel beautiful. -Drew Barrymore
• Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach. -Tom Robbins
• There is going to be a race between mass self-education and mass self-destruction. -Arnold J. Toynbee
• Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights. -Georg Wilhelm Hegel
• It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them. -P.G. Wodehouse
• Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter. -Nietzsche
• Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace. -Eugene O'Neill
• It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not. -Jonathan Swift
• Love was the key to every good; love lay like a mirage through the golden gates of sex. -Doris Lessing
• Unrequited sincerity can be hard to bear, even if you're not prone to violence. For a man with a rough streak, 'whatever' means war. -Nick Paumgarten
• Minds are cluttered from the age of six with the values of others -values which bear little relation to their own private capacities, needs and desires. - Marya Mannes
• Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -H.L. Mencken
• As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. - Socrates
• Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true. -Julius Caesar
• Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? -Douglas Adams
• A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak. -Michael Garrett Marino
• I think it would be REALLY good if everyone would snip more and snipe less. -Aussie Lady Heidi (alt.quotations)
• There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth. -Victor Borge
• One ship drives east and another drives west/With the selfsame winds that flow./'Tis the set of sails and not the gales/Which tells us the way to go. -Ella Wheeler Wilcox
• Like warmed-up cabbage served at each repast, The repetition kills the wretch at last. -Juvenal
• On the Plains of Hesitation bleach the bones of countless millions who, at the Dawn of Victory, sat down to wait, and waiting... died. - George. W. Cecil
• There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the
• padded cell. -G. K. Chesterton
• We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. - Joseph Campbell
• Patience and shuffle the cards. -Miguel de Cervantes
• It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. -Carl Frederick Gauss
• Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own. -George Bernard Shaw
• We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies it is the first law of nature. - Voltaire
• Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up. If not, I'll stay down here until I'm somebody else. -Lewis Carroll
• It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort; it's not the sort of comfort they supply there. -C. S. Lewis
• But with every deed you are sowing a seed, Though the harvest you may never see. -Ella Wheeler Wilcox
• A problem cannot be solved by the same mind that created it. -Albert Einstein
• To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation. -St. Augustine
• Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart. -Khalil Gibran
• When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set. -Lin Yutang
• How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold? -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Never express yourself more clearly than you think. -Niels Bohr
• The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. -Ernest Hemingway
• It is clear that there never was a time when nothing existed; otherwise nothing would exist now. -C. S. Lewis
• Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please. -Pythagoras
• The essence of genius is to know what to overlook. -William James
• Mankind is divided into three classes - the immovable, the movable, and those who move. -Arab proverb
• When the music changes, so does the dance. -African Proverb
• He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it. -Boswell
• Finding good players is easy. Getting them to play as a team is another story. -Casey Stengel
• It is useless to threaten a strong man; he will ignore you. It is dangerous to threaten a weak man; he will kill you if he can. -John Woodgate
• Only the brave know how to forgive... A coward never forgave; it is not in his nature. -Laurence Sterne
• Bread is the best advice to the hungry. -Russian proverb
• Content yourself with doing, leave the talking to others. -Balthasar Gracian
• I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death. -Zora Neale Hurston
• Pay no attention to appearing. Being is alone important. -Andre Gide
• The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views. -Doctor Who
• I'll not willingly offend, Nor be easily offended; What's amiss I'll strive to mend, And endure what can't be mended. -Isaac Watts
• Even a flounder takes sides. -Stanislaw Lec
• Every act alters the soul of the doer. -Oswald Spengler
• There ain't no money in poetry and that's what sets the poet free. -Guy Clark
• The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. - Edward Gibbon
• I like things to happen, and if they don't happen, I like to make them happen. -Winston Churchill
• He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence. - William Blake
• None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. - Emerson
• Talk low, talk slow, and don't say too much. -John Wayne
• Be sure you are right and then go ahead; but in case of doubt, go ahead anyway. -Josh Billings
• The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts. - John Locke
• Until thy feet have trod the road advise not wayside folk. - Rudyard Kipling
• Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life. -John F. Kennedy
• Never lose your temper, except intentionally. -Dwight Eisenhower
• An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be swallowed. - Konrad Adenauer
• Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. - Aesop
• Form ever follows function. -Louis Henri Sullivan
• The end of an argument or discussion should be not victory, but enlightenment. -Joseph Joubert
• It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. - Voltaire
• I make it a rule to believe only what I understand. -Benjamin Disraeli
• We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry. - John Webster
• We're all tools in somebody's kit. But that doesn't mean we can't make tools out of other people. Or figure out interesting things to use ourselves for. -Orson Scott Card
• Women tell men things that men are not very likely to find out for themselves. - Robertson Davies
• Remorse is the poison of life. -Emily Bronte
• Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed? - Count Oxenstierna
• A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. -Winston Churchill
• Little things affect little minds. -Benjamin Disraeli
• Dame Trot and her cat/Led a peaceable life/When they were not troubled/With other folks' strife. - Mother Goose
• You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair. -Chinese proverb
• I'll walk where my own nature would be leading, It vexes me to choose another guide. -Emily Bronte
• I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. -Susan Sontag
• Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain. -Nietzsche
• The brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised. -William James
• Take calculated risks: this is quite different from being rash. - George Patton
• The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. -Colin Wilson
• Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self. -Arnold Toynbee
• I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again. -F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Prayer is a means of adding power to the strength we already possess. Sometimes we know what is right, but we lack the willpower to do it. -Harry Thomas Stock
• Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books. -Benjamin Disraeli
• Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right. -Henry Ford
• Magrat was probably the only person in Lancre who worried about things being biodegradable. Everyone else just hoped things would last and knew that damn near everything went rotten if you left it long enough.-Terry Pratchett
• Each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. -Ursula K. LeGuin
• Hope is a punishable offense. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart. -Tanith Lee
• There is nothing noble in being superior to someone else. The true nobility is in being superior to your own previous self. - Hindu proverb
• A man who has been an animal has infinitely more knowledge of that animal than a man who has merely dissected one. -Jack Sharkey
• In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. -Terry Pratchett
• As a matter of cosmic history it has always been easier to destroy than to create. -Jack Sowards
• There are no small matters. Just as there is no small life. The life of an insect, a spider; his life is as large as yours and yours is as large as mine. Life is life. -Philip K. Dick
• There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. - Shakespeare
• Society is now one polish'd horde, form'd of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored. -Byron
• The measure of love is compassion, and the measure of compassion is kindness.
• Enemies should be chosen as carefully as friends.
• What a day may bring, a day may take away. - Thomas Fuller
• When a man lies dying, he does not die from disease alone. He dies from his whole life. - Charles Peguy
• Some lick before they bite.
• It is only our deeds that reveal who we are. - Carl Jung
• I have everything I need to enjoy my here and now -- unless I am letting my consciousness be dominated by demands and expectations based on the dead past or the imagined future. -Ken Keyes, Jr.
• There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose. -Kin Hubbard
• It is easier to devote one's life to fanaticism... The Flat Earth society is, after all, more committed to its flatness than I am to its roundness. -Rabbi Lionel Blue
• Truth is too simple for us; we do not like those who unmask our illusions. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• An expert is someone called in at the last minute to share the blame. - Sam Ewing
• It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge an elephant, but we can't dodge a fly. -Josh Billings
• Reason's a rabbit in a hutch, And ecstasy's a were-wolf ghost; But, O, beware the nothing-much And welcome madness and the most! -Elinor Wylie
• She faces a sky blood-red with sunset colours that deepen into darkness, and prophesies dawn. She faces death, and prophesies life. -Felix Adler
• In time of great anxiety we can draw power from our friends. We should at such times, however, avoid friends who sympathize too deeply, who give us pity rather than strength. -D. Lupton
• The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards. -Alexander Jablokov
• I've had that feeling all my life. I never heard anybody else call it that. A guardian idiot: a little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me... only he's a complete imbecile. -Spider Robinson
• Whether spiritual or corporeal, beauty is what expresses the ecstasy in life. -me
• I reject your reality and substitute my own. -Adam Savage
• As swords were designed to kill, they did well to make them tongue-shaped. -Anwar I-Suhaili
• Success seems to be connected with action. Successful men keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit. -Conrad Hilton
• Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of each day and hour. -Stephen Butler Leacock
• Where there is honey, there are bees. -saying
• He's so dishonest he has to get someone else to call his dog for him. -Jed Clampett
• If a pretty picture and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon. -Larry Kersten
• You can learn as much about someone from watching them belly-laugh as you can from making love with them. -Spider Robinson
• I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers. -Kahlil Gibran
• Wherever you are - be all there. -Jim Elliot
• Don't let your head get too big, it'll break your neck. -Elvis Presley
• No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. -Elizabeth Moon
• He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. -Jim Elliot
• If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door. -Lois McMaster Bujold
• The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance--it is the illusion of knowledge. - Daniel Boorstin
• One faces the future with one's past. -Pearl S. Buck
• A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free. -Nikos Kazantzakis
• You may not get what you pay for, but you will pay for what you get. -Maya Angelou
• Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree. -Rabindranath Tagore
• You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. -H.L. Mencken
• Though most of us would not write except for money we would not write any differently for more money. - Evelyn Waugh
• The solution to a problem changes the nature of the problem. -John Peers
• Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards. -Lois McMaster Bujold
• Let's not start swimmin' 'til we hit water. -Jed Clampett
• I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies. -Pietro Aretino
• People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of
• foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools. -Alice Walker
• My life is my message. -Mohandas K. Gandhi
• Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of
• power. -John Steinbeck
• Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do
• only a little. -Edmund Burke
• If you want to work on your art, work on your life. -Anton Chekhov
• Calumnies are best answered with silence. -Ben Jonson
• Thinking has always been to me an occupation painful and without charm. -Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. -Lois McMaster Bujold
• There was once a man in China who liked pictures of dragons. His clothing and his furniture were therefore accordingly adorned with dragons. This deep affection for their kind was brought to the attention of the Dragon Lord, who one day sent a real dragon to stand outside the man's window. It is said that he probably died of fright. - Yamamoto Tsunetomo
• "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone,"it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." -Lewis Carroll
• It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. - Philip K. Dick
• Searching is half the fun: life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party. -Jimmy Buffett
• When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth. -George Bernard Shaw
• The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion. -Richard Feyman
• You don't grow your hair 35 feet long and hang it out of a tower just because you've read "Rapunzel". -Jack Sowards
• For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. -Albert Einstein
• If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. -Noam Chomsky
• If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey. -A. N. Wilson
• Do you really have to be the ice queen intellectual or the slut whore? Isn't there some way to be both? -Susan Sarandon
• It's not easy sometimes. They build these walls ever higher and hide behind them. Seems an odd way to try and make things right. -Dave Matthews
• No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. -Henry Brooks Adams
• History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable. -John W. Gardner
• Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven. -Yiddish Proverb
• Spilling your guts is exactly as charming as it sounds. -Fran Lebowitz
• He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away. -Raymond Hull
• It isn't what they say about you; it's what they whisper. -Errol Flynn
• If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely. -Sir Arthur Helps
• Revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst. -Walter Weckler
• It is never safe to look into the future with eyes of fear. -E. H. Harriman
• Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand. -George Santayana
• Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away. -Sir Arthur Helps
• He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. -Albert Einstein
• There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. -Oscar Wilde
• Laws that prevent the choosing of sin also prevent the choosing of virtue. -Daniel B. Klein
• Nothing happens unless first a dream. -Carl Sandburg
• Every man is a quotation from his ancestors. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Men make history - not the other way around. -Harry S. Truman
• He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery. -Harold Wilson
• You're never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose. -Lou Holtz
• We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin. -AndrÈ Berthiaume
• All sunshine makes a desert. -Arab proverb
• The law is not designed to make us honorable, only bearable. -Marie C. Malaro
• Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation. -Edward R. Murrow
• Diligence is the mother of good luck. -Benjamin Franklin
• Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words. -Rainer Maria Rilke
• We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret and disappointment. -Karl Marx
• Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'. - Rincewind, (Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic)
• When a dove begins to associate with crows its feathers remain white but its heart grows black. - German Proverb
• As long as you live, keep learning how to live. -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
• I have always felt that laughter in the face of reality is probably the finest sound there is and will last until the day when the game is called on account of darkness. In this world, a good time to laugh is any time you can. - Linda Ellerbee
• Some folk are wise, and some are otherwise. -Tobias Smollett
• At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide. -F. Scott Fitzgerald
• As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. -Nelson Mandela
• Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. -Fyodor Dostoevsky
• She's the sort of woman who lives for others-you can always tell the others by their hunted expression. -C.S. Lewis
• Our patience will achieve more than our force. -Edmund Burke
• Never miss a good chance to shut up. -Will Rogers
• Leap, and the net will appear. -Jimmy Buffet
• Indeed we are all in peril if the flawed messenger invalidates the message. -Philip Yancey
• No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document. -Renata Adler
• Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him. -Mel Brooks
• A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history-with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. -Mitch Ratcliffe
• How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true! -Logan P. Smith
• The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life. -Lucan
• All problems become smaller if you don't dodge them, but confront them. Touch a thistle timidly, and it pricks you; grasp it boldly, and its spines crumble. -William S. Halsey
• Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content. -Helen Keller
• Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. -Vincent van Gogh
• If you don't think every day is a good day, just try missing one. -Cavett Robert
• The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision. -T. S. Eliot
• Two rules of success in life: 1. Don't tell people everything you know.
• It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably. -Immanuel Kant
• Zen... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes. -Alan Watts
• Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. -Scott Raymond Adams
• What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers. -Martina Horner
• Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. -Thomas a Kempis
• Nothing is cheap which is superfluous, for what one does not need, is dear at a penny. -Plutarch
• The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity. -Edmund Burke
• Problems cannot be solved with the same level of intelligence that created them. -Albert Einstein
• Always say 'yes' to the present moment... Surrender to what is. Say 'yes' to life - and see how life starts suddenly to start working for you rather than against you. - Eckhart Tolle
• Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Give a man health and a course to steer; and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not. -George Bernard Shaw
• Bloom where you are planted. -Nancy Reader Campion
• The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. -Muhammad
• To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. -T.S. Eliot
• We presuppose two things: that there is yet to be learned infinitely more than is now known, and that man can learn it. -John W. Campbell, Jr.
• Words are living entities capable of great magic, hence the word spell for making magic. -Jane Gleeson-White
• My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents. -Arthur C. Clarke
• Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. -William Gladstone
• I have as much authority as the Pope... I just don't have as many people who believe it. -George Carlin
• My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does... Writers are always selling somebody out. -Joan Didion
• To be blessed with a mind that can write often means you'll be cursed with a mind that will torture you. -Caroline Aherne
• Live with your century, but do not be its creature. -Friedrich Schiller
• Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy. -Henry Havelock Ellis
• We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne. -Marcus Aurelius
• In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way. -Henry Havelock Ellis
• Your deeds are your religion. -Hadith
• It's not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choices we make, which regrets we'll have. -David Weber
• We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned,so as to have the life that is waiting for us. - Joseph Campbell
• How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. -Annie Dillard
• When you have robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power. He is free again. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other. - James Boswell
• The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head. -Terry Pratchett
• Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. -George Bernard Shaw
• The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. -Aristotle
• Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough. -William Saroyan
• Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure. -Scott Adams
• Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them. - Rabindranath Tagore
• My work always tried to unite the truth with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful. - Hermann Weyl
• I do not bring forgiveness with me, nor forgetfulness. The only ones who can forgive are dead; the living have no right to forget. -Chaim Herzog
• The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. -Chinese proverb
• Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice. -Thomas Paine
• You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning... a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. - Joseph Campbell
• With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.
• Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.
• In spite of the fact that the ladder tapers to one-man rungs at the top, the roomiest part is farthest up. -Charles R. Gow
• What can be done at any time is never done at all. - English proverb
• Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of great design as of chance. - Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
• Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. - Vaclav Havel
• I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. -Herman Melville
• We have no right to make people happy against their will. - James Boswell
• What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger. -Alcuin
• In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends. - Charles Caleb Coulton
• Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed. -Henrik Ibsen
• Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders. - Sloan Wilson
• What is a memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself. -Stanley Kauffmann
• Civility costs nothing, and buys everything. -Lady M. W. Montague
• I have noticed that when chickens quit quarreling over their food, they often find that there is enough for all of them. I wonder if it might not be the same with the human race. - Don Marquis
• No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility. -Gerald W. Johnson
• Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal. - E. Joseph Crossman
• There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in
• reality. -Seneca
• There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best. - Doris Lessing
• There are years that ask questions and years that answer. -Zora Neale
• Reflect upon your present blessings - of which every man has many - not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. - Charles Dickens
• A neoconservative is someone who watches The Matrix and thinks it's real. -Lewis Black
• Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it. -Rene Descartes
• The horse is not judged by the saddle. -German proverb
• Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from. -Honore De Balzac
• The simplest questions are the most profound... Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change. -Richard Bach
• When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. -Jimi Hendrix
• We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same. -Carlos Castaneda
• Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend? -Roger Ebert
• He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm. - Goethe
• There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only a pack of matches handed down from one generation to the next. Humanity does not have a long fuse and this generation holds the last match. - JonArno Lawson
• Remember: and it came to pass. Not to stay. -Larry Winget
• Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do. - Goethe
• Before beginning a Hunt, it is wise to ask someone what you are looking for before you begin looking for it. -A A Milne
• Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny. -Frank Outlaw
• If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you it's quite conscious. - Kingman Brewster, Jr.
• Give them quality. That's the best kind of advertising. -Milton Snavely Hershey
• They are only truly great who are truly good. -George Chapman
• Having stripped myself of all illusions, I have gone mad. - Nietzsche
• He rises by lifting others. -Robert Ingersoll
• Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. - Albert Camus
• Do not be hasty to praise or blame; speak always as though you were giving testimony before the judgment seat of the gods. -Seneca the Younger
• The nearer men come to truth... the more dangerous their mistakes are. -Samuel Butler
• The secret of good writing is telling the truth. - Gordon Lish
• Most men are not wicked... They are sleepwalkers, not evildoers. - Franz Kafka
• We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. - Stewart Udall
• The best servant does his work unseen. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Those who prefer victory to peace will have neither.
• All that is outside is also inside. -Goethe
• Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own. -J. M. Barrie
• Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. - Publius Syrus
• The secret of all those who make discoveries is that they regard nothing as impossible. -Justus Liebig
• The brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised. -William James
• The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. -Paul Valery
• I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. -Mohandas Gandhi
• We live, not as we wish to, but as we can. - Menander
• When you are an anvil be patient; when a hammer, strike. -Arab Proverb
• Whenever two people meet there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is. -William James
• We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal. -Tennessee Williams
• We're not responsible, but we're responsive. -Thomas Evans
• A man who enjoys responsibility usually gets it. A man who merely likes exercising authority usually loses it. -Malcolm S. Forbes
• It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive disenchanted. -Japanese proverb
• Parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are even some who insist on it) are like usurers who gladly risk their capital if only they receive interest. - Franz Kafka
• One of the ill effects of cruelty is that it makes the bystanders cruel. -Thomas Fowell Buxton
• Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly. -Amos Bronson Alcott
• Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly. -Stephen R. Covey
• You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. -Sir Max Beerbohm
• Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack. -Harry Emerson Fosdick
• It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem. -G.K. Chesterton
• A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired, but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was. -Joseph Hall
• They sicken of the calm that know the storm. -Dorothy Parker
• If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. -Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa
• It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Sacrifice is a form of bargaining. -Holbrook Jackson
• The ripe melon falls of itself. -Chinese proverb
• The fear of man is the beginning of wisdom. - Paul Eldridge
• Discontent is the first necessity of progress. -Thomas Edison
• In a crisis, some detail always decides the issue. -Napoleon Bonaparte
• When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide. - Victor Hugo
• Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. -Carl Jung
• Defeating an aggressor is invariably more effective than bandaging his victims. - David Warren
• Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of the few; and number not voices, but weigh them. -Immanuel Kant
• You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. -C.S. Lewis
• Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint. -Vincent Van Gogh
• Behavior is a mirror in which every one displays his image. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided. -Casey Stengel
• Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act. -Talmud
• If we had been born where they had been born, if we had been taught what they had been taught, we would believe what they believe. -Abraham Lincoln
• Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little >things, I am tempted to think there are no little things. -Bruce Barton
• Everyone must row with the oars he has. -English Proverb
• You can shoot the tiger or stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian.- Richard Mitchell
• The fire of adversity will melt you like butter, or temper you like steel. The choice is yours.
• A creative mind makes uncommon connections. So does a crazy mind. A creative mind makes uncommon *insightful* connections. -Richard Bach
• Humility is like Zen; once you think you've got it, it's gone.
• It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust. -Samuel Johnson
• Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are. -Julius Charles Hare
• Burn not your house to fright away the mice. -Thomas Fuller
• That's how it is on this bitch of an earth. -Samuel Beckett
• I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened. - Mark Twain
• It's not down on any map. True places never are. -Herman Melville
• "Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it." -Lewis Carroll
• One must separate from anything that forces one to repeat "No" again and again. --Friedrich Nietzsche
• Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation. -Henry Ward Beecher
• The problem with communication is the assumption that it has been accomplished. - George Bernard Shaw
• The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. -Oscar Wilde
• You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted. -Ruth E. Renkl
• When many share in the joy, individuals also feel a richer delight. They kindle excitement among themselves and are inflamed by one another. -Saint Augustine
• So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level. -Alan Watts
• The pain passes, but the beauty remains. -Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• News is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity. -Bill Moyers
• I laugh, my voice spiralling into Forever for I have found perfection and it has always been right here in the temple of Self. - Miranda Padgett
• Because my mouth/Is wide with laughter/And my throat/Is deep with song,/You do not think/I suffer after/I have held my pain/So long? -Langston Hughes
• The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. -Tommy Smothers
• I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it. -Frank A. Clark
• It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that make the master's fame. - Orison Swett Marden
• The conquering of fear is the beginning of wisdom. -Bertrand Russell
• The difference between common-sense and paranoia is that common-sense is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal -- they are. Paranoia is thinking that they're conspiring. - J. Kegler
• Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man's growth without destroying his roots. -Frank A. Clark
• The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead. -Robert Brault
• To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest. -Mohandas Gandhi
• Real courage is risking something that you have to keep on living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's cliches. -Tom Robbins
• You can knock me down, but you better have a big rock to keep me there. -Dottie West
• If you are humble, nothing will touch you; neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. -Mother Teresa
• Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problem. -Donald Kingsbury
• Success is always temporary. When all is said and done, the only thing you'll have left is your character. -Vince Gill
• You have to be as fully prepared for the dull game as you are for the great game, or else you won't be prepared for the great one. - Red Barber
• We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons. -Aldous Huxley
• No matter how complex human civilization becomes, there are always interludes during which the course of mankind depends upon the action of a single individual. -Frank Herbert
• If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. -Cicero
• If you want to make a dangerous man your friend, let him do you a favor. -Lewis E. Lawes
• The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes. -Benjamin Disraeli
• Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don't go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won't laugh at you. - Jim Rohn
• Honesty is the most subversive of all disguises. -T-Bone Burnett
• I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. -Anne Lamott
• How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in the truth. -Sophocles
• Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and goodness. -Blaise Pascal
• Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary. -Thoreau
• One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve. -Albert Schweitzer
• The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become. - Jim Rohn
• It is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it tyrannous to use it like a giant. - Shakespeare
• One blade of grass or one speck of dust is enough to occupy your entire mind in beholding the art with which it has been made. - St. Basil the Great
• Dreams that do come true can be as unsettling as those that don't.- Brett Butler
• You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do. - Henry Ford
• He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity. - Ben Jonson
• Happiness is a good feeling I get when things go a particular way; joy is an attitude I adopt in spite of how things go. - Fil Anderson
• Whoever fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth; when perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed; nor has anyone who is apt to be angry when he hears the truth any cause to wonder that he does not hear it. - Tacitus
• First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then prepare to improve on the worst. - Dale Carnegie
• When searching for harmony in life, one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators. -Niels Bohr
• We all live under the same sky, but we don't have the same horizon. - Konrad Adenauer
• People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense. -Terry Pratchett
• If you hold on tight/ To what you think is your thing/ You may find you're missing all the rest. -Dave Matthews
• Dressed in the lion's skin, the ass spread terror far and wide. -Jean de La Fontaine
• Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. -Helen Keller
• They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion. -Gustave Le Bon
• Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life. -Robert Stevenson
• He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a life-time is unraveled. - William Ellery Channing
• My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness. - The 14th Dalai Lama
• As long as you still feel the stars as being something "over you," you still lack the eye of the man of knowledge. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• It was lonely on the hill, and cold. And all you could do was keep going. You could scream, cry, and stamp your feet, but apart from making you feel warmer, it wouldn't do any good. You could say it was unfair, and that was true, but the universe didn't care because it didn't know what "fair" meant. That was the big problem about being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you. -Terry Pratchett
• I can stand brute force. but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect. -Oscar Wilde
• I said goodbye a long time ago, you must not have heard me. -T-Bone Burnett
• Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork? -Stanislaw Lec
• Adversity introduces a man to himself. -Alonzo Mourning
• Striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is. It's your excuse to yourself for not doing anything. Instead, strive for excellence. Strive for doing your best. -Sir Laurence Olivier
• Silence hides nothing. Words conceal. -August Strindberg
• The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• And oftentimes the excusing of a fault doth make the fault worse by the excuse. -Shakespeare
• Tempt not a desperate man. -Shakespeare
• I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down. -Jack Kerouac
• Our life is what our thoughts make it. -Marcus Aurelius
• People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it. -Edith Schaeffer
• Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. -Bertrand Russell
• Some people are like Slinkies... they don't really do anything, but they bring a smile to your face when you push them down the stairs.
• No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true. -Nathaniel Hawthorne
• God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages. -Jacques Deval
• Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it. -Benjamin Franklin
• Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it. -Brigid Brophy
• Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking. -John Maynard Keynes
• Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax. -Arthur Schopenhauer
• We are beat, man. Beat means beatific, it means you get the beat. -Jack Kerouac
• Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly. - Robert H. Schuller
• The tongue, like a sharp knife, kills without drawing blood. -Buddha
• The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology. -Red Auerbach
• Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested. -Giorgos Seferis
• All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare. -Benedict de Spinoza
• At seventy, I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron. -Ezra Pound
• All great truths begin as blasphemies. -George Bernard Shaw
• There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in
• reality. -Senca
• You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something. - George Bernard Shaw
• Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. -Paula Poundstone
• Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened. -Billy Graham
• What luck for rulers that men do not think. -Adolf Hitler
• Autumn wins you best by this its mute Appeal to sympathy for its decay. -Robert Browning
• Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death. -Hunter S. Thompson
• To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature. -Auguste Rodin
• Necessity has no law. -Saint Augustine
• On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. -George Orwell
• I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. -Augusten Burroughs
• Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.- William Shakespeare
• The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. - Chinua Achebe
• Judge people from where they stand, not from where we sit. - Randall Nagy
• They have a right to censure, that have a heart to help: The rest is cruelty, not justice. -William Penn
• Worriers spend a lot of time shoveling smoke.- Claude McDonald
• Ours is a world in which knowledge accumulates and wisdom decays. -Aldous Huxley
• We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. -Henri Frederic Amiel
• Your neighbor's vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you. -Miguel de Unamuno
• I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand. -Baruch Spinoza
• Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law. -Louis D. Brandeis
• The only gift is a portion of thyself. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The arrogance of the young is a direct result of not having known enough consequences. The turkey that every day greedily approaches the farmer who tosses him grain is not wrong. It is just that no one ever told him about Thanksgiving. -Harry Golden
• When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. -John Muir
• I laugh, my voice spiralling into Forever for I have found perfection and it has always been right here in the temple of Self. - Miranda Padgett
• If you don't control your mind, someone else will. - John Allston
• Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus. -George Bernard Shaw
• It is so. It cannot be otherwise. -Inscription on a Flemish cathedral
• For every ailment under the sun, there is a remedy or there is none; If there be one try to find it. If there be non, never mind it. -Mother Goose
• You are not what you think you are, but what you *think*, you are. -Norman Vincent Peale
• Happiness is not mostly pleasure, it is mostly victory. -Harry Emerson Fosdick
• The North wind made the Vikings. -Scandinavian proverb
• It's not so easy to play the clown when you have to run the circus is it? -M.A.S.H.
• With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works. -Jane Austen
• History is a race between education and catastrophe. - H.G. Wells
• Nothing is worth more than this day. -Goethe
• It is a great mistake to fancy oneself greater than one is and to value oneself at less than one is worth. - Goethe
• The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners. - Florence King
• Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen. - Compton Mackenzie
• Jesus is like 7 leprechauns, except a lot harder to catch. -Homer Simpson
• Decisions are always made with insufficient information. If you really knew what was going on, the decision would make itself.-Gregory MacAllister
• Know emptiness, Be compassionate.- Milarepa
• All my life, you have told me that the world is a dark, cruel place. But now I see that the only thing dark and cruel about it is people like you. -Quasimodo
• People have a peculiar pleasure in making converts, that is, in causing others to enjoy what they enjoy, thus finding their own likeness represented and reflected back to them. -Goethe
• There is a pleasure in madness, which none but madmen know. -John Dryden
• The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them. -Goethe
• A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings. -W.R. Inge
• The free mind is not barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain. -Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
• Never be bullied into silence. -Harvey Fierstein
• A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one. -Moliere
• To understand everything makes one tolerant. - Madame de Stael
• Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none. -Shakespeare
• He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm. -Goethe
• Our universities are so determined to impose tolerance that they'll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony. - John Perry Barlow
• Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. -George Orwell
• It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges. -Michaelangelo
• Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance. -G.K. Chesterton
• I am angry nearly every day of my life...but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so. -Louisa May Alcott
• There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times. -Voltaire
• Honor is a gift a man must give to himself. -Patrick Henry
• Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. - Michelangelo
• The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. -Harlan Ellison
• Dreams are free therapy. Consult your inner Freud. -Grey Livingston
• Law and custom I know nothing of, public opinion I despise, and shame and fear I defy. For everyone has a right to be happy in their own way. -Louisa May Alcott
• The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. -H. L. Mencken
• You're only given a little spark of madness; you mustn't lose it. - Robin Williams
• The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate. -Joseph Priestly
• Never take counsel of your fears. -Andrew Jackson
• The ship that will not obey the helm will have to obey the rocks. - English proverb
• If you need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of each arm. -Yiddish proverb
• There are two kinds of people in the world: those who walk into a room and say "There you are." and those who say "Here I am." -Abigail van Buren
• Well done is better than well said. -Benjamin Franklin
• The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep. -E. Joseph Cossman
• It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
• To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it. -Charlie Chaplin
• Gray is the color of all theory. -Goethe
• The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success. -Bruce Fierstein
• What is to give light must endure burning. - Viktor Frankl
• If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, at least you can make it dance. -George Bernard Shaw
• Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings. - Victor Hugo
• Trust not one night's ice. -George Herbert
• It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions. -De Foe
• Nothing matters very much, and very few things matter at all. -Sir Arthur James Balfour
• No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience. -John Locke
• Life is too short to blend in. -Paris Hilton
• Do you not know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled? -Pope Julius III
• Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.- Mohandas Gandhi
• The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work. -Robert Frost
• The problem with the world is that there are too many stupid people and nobody to eat 'em. - Carlos Mencia
• If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow. - Chinese proverb
• Before eating, always take a little time to thank the food. -Arapaho saying
• Humor is a rubber sword. It allows you to make a point without drawing blood. -Mary Hirsch
• No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. -Booker T. Washington
• He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances. -David Hume
• If you are humble, nothing will touch you; neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. -Mother Teresa
• Though the years are sad, the days have a way of being jubilant. - Edith Wharton
• Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny. - Charles Reade
• Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he could be, and he will become what he should be. - Jarret Bell
• The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -Marcus Aurelius
• Undertake not what you can not perform, but be careful to keep your promises. - George Washington
• How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it. -Marcus Aurelius
• We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning. -Bret Harte
• We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser. -Red Auerbach
• Technology keeps answering ever less important questions in ever longer sentences. - Peter Egan
• It is as respectable to be a modified ape as to be modified dirt. -Thomas Huxley
• To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know. -Rousseau
• Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them. -Epictetus
• Some people have a way with words. Other people...not have way. - Steve Martin
• Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit. -Hosea Ballou
• To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands. -Madame Swetchine
• It isn't the tragedies or triumphs that dig into the soul, it's the embarrassments. - Dawn Powell
• It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it. -Joseph Joubert
• The urge for destruction is also a creative urge. -Michael Bakunin
• Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it. - Salvadore Dali
• Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better. -Florence Nightingale
• Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke. -F. Scott Fitzgerald
• When we have done our best, we should wait the results in peace. -John Lubbock
• I am often wrong. My prejudices are innumerable, and often idiotic. -H. L. Mencken
• Many people just wait around for something to "turn up". They might start with their sleeves. - Sam Walton
• Same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words! -Ursula K LeGuin
• Don't bother with the sardines when Leviathan looms. -Ray Bradbury
• I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms. - Giovanni Giacomo Casanova
• You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth. -Henrik Ibsen
• The only free cheese is in the mousetrap. - Russian proverb
• We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. -Bertrand Russell
• Anyone who thinks he can draw a line between good and evil is at best mistaken, at worst demented. -George Turner
• Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will. -James Stephens
• How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.-Henry Miller
• The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. -H. L. Mencken
• In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd. -Miguel de Unamuno
• Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit. -Edward R. Murrow
• If you want to go east, don't go west. - Ramakrishna
• The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get, but what you give. -Eleanor Roosevelt
• Whatever you live is life.
• Do what's right. Do it right. Do it right now. -Barry Forbes
• Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing. - Warren Benis
• It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers. -James Thurber
• Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. - Scott Adams
• History has no laws, and all patterns that we find there are useful illusions. -Orson Scott Card
• One of the problems of hiring the best, Commander--sometimes they're better than you. - Dan Brown
• It is one thing to ignore the Rites; it is quite another to expect the gods to ignore the Penalties. - E. Bramah
• Only a few people are interested in what you have to say, but that's all right. You don't tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds. -Richard Bach
• Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. -Bertolt Brecht
• You've all learned something that someone somewhere needs to remember. How will you let them know? -Richard Bach
• Want a thing long enough, and you don't. - Chinese Proverb
• Writers have two main problems. One is writer's block, when the words won't come at all and the other is logorrhea, when the words come so fast that they can hardly get to the wastebasket in time. -Cecilia Bartholomew
• In this world, a good time to laugh is any time you can. -Linda Ellerbee
• I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. -Mohandas Gandhi
• I wanted to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why is that so difficult?-Hermann Hesse
• Much less evil would be done on earth if evil could not be done in the name of good. -Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
  
• You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted. - Ruth E. Renkl
• The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality. - George Bernard Shaw
• Pressure is having to do something you are not totally prepared to do. - Harvey B. Mackay
• Sometimes I would almost rather people take away years of my life than take away a minute. - Pearl Bailey
• Had Cicero himself pronounced one of his orations with a blanket about his shoulders, more people would have laughed at his dress than admired his eloquence. -Joseph Addison
• Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to what is present. -Albert Camus
• I must keep on rowing, not until I reach port but until I reach my grave. -Germaine de Stael
• For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself. -Henry David Thoreau
• Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a heap of stones is a house. -Jules-Henri PoincarrÈ
• Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. -Theodor Adorno
• The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it. -Richard Bach
• To spell out the obvious is often to call it into question. - Eric Hoffer
• I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun. -Katharine Hepburn
• Whatever is funny is subversive. Every joke is ultimately a custard pie. -George Orwell
• We bestow on others praise in which we do not believe, on condition that in return they bestow upon us praise in which we do. -Jean Rostand
• The morality of an action depends on the motive from which we act. -Samuel Johnson
• The glory of great men must always be measured against the means they used to acquire it. -Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
• We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them. -Kahlil Gibran
• Every turn in your life, every time you decide, you become parent to all your alternate selves who follow. -Richard Bach
• If a man once fall, all will tread upon him. -Thomas Fuller
• We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence. -Eric Hoffer
• If the first button of one's coat is wrongly buttoned, all the rest will be crooked. - Giordano Bruno
• Learn the lesson that, if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you need is not a scepter but a hoe. - Bernard of Clairvaux
• Nature is often obscure or impenetrable, but she is not, like Man, deceitful. - C. G. Jung
• It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don't give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade. -George Eliot
• There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
• -Ursula K. LeGuin
• Anyone who thinks he can draw a line between good and evil is at best mistaken, at worst demented. -George Turner
• The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders, a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician. -Henry Miller
• When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away your ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer. -Corrie Ten Boom
• Good will is earned by many acts; it can be lost by one. - Duncan Stuart
• Without a belief a man is helpless against the dragons. -Heywood Campbell Broun
• You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward. -Amelia Earhart
• No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. - Samuel Johnson
• My enemy said to me, "Love your enemy." And I obeyed him and loved myself. -Kahlil Gibran
• The prosperity of a people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. - Samuel Johnson
• The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.- Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
• The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. -Patrick Henry
• Civilization will not attain its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest. - Emile Zola
• To understand is to perceive patterns. -Plato
• Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire. - Jean de la Fontaine
• Watch for big problems. They disguise big opportunities. -H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
• I have struggled against tyranny. I didn't do that in order to substitute one tyranny with another. -Desmond Tutu
• If you live with a cripple, you will learn to limp. -Plutarch
• He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. -Jim Elliot
• Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk. -Terry Pratchett
• Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us. -William Penn
• We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle. -Oswald Chambers
• God's first language is silence -- everything else is a bad translation. - attrib. Fr. Thomas Keating
• One blade of grass or one speck of dust is enough to occupy your entire mind in beholding the art with which it has been made. - St. Basil the Great
• To spell out the obvious is often to call it into question. - Eric Hoffer
• We live our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.
• -Arthur Golden
• A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus. -Herbert Hoover
• It was a dream, but Moist was good at selling dreams. And if you could sell the dream to enough people, no one dared to wake up. -Terry Pratchett
• One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious. -Chateaubriand
• He who shuns the millstone, shuns the meal. -Desiderius Erasmus
• A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him. -Ezra Pound
• Once in a while you will stumble upon the truth, but most of us manage to pick ourselves up and hurry along as if nothing had happened. -Winston Churchill
• Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back. - G. K. Chesterton
• How can we expect somebody else to keep our secret if we cannot keep it ourselves? -Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to. -Malcolm Muggeridge
• One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. -G. K. Chesterton
• To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. - George Orwell
• The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided. -Casey Stengel
• When the mouse laughs at the cat, there is a hole nearby. -Nigerian proverb
• Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not. -Michael J. Fox
• The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• The truth will set us free. But freedom is cold, and empty, and frightening, and lies can often be warm and beautiful. -George R. R. Martin
• The knife is the strongest, the most immortal, the most brilliant of man's creations. The knife... is the universal means of solving all knots. -Yevgeny Zamiatin
• Goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil. -Robert A. Heinlein
• Progress is precisely that which the rules and regulations did not foresee. - Ludwig von Mises
• To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself. -Soren Kierkegaard
• Truth demands silence before it will raise its voice. -Soren Kierkegaard
• The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it. - Samuel Johnson
• I'd tried kindness. I'd tried friendship. I'd tried respect. But when all else fails, fear will do the job. -Anita Blake
• Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition. -Jacques Barzun
• My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations. - Michael J. Fox
• Overdoing is the ordinary way of undoing. -Richard Baxter
• Though I may not know where I'm going, I'm not lost, I'm exploring. -Jana Stanfield
• People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. -Terry Pratchett
• Discouragement comes when we insist on having our own way. -Oswald Chambers
• You know, people, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over. -Frank Zappa
• Doubt is not always a sign that a man is wrong; it may be a sign that he is thinking. -Oswald Chambers
• In times of tumult & discord, bad men have the most power; mental & moral excellence require peace. -Tacitus
• We all have scars. I'm just lucky that most of mine are on the outside. - Sherrilyn Kenyon
• This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power. - Herodotus
• I can't control when I feel good or when I don't. I can control how clear my mind is. And I can control how willing I am to step up if somebody needs me. -Michael J. Fox
• There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. -Thomas Pynchon
• More men fail through lack of purpose than through lack of talent. -Billy Sunday
• If the audience knew what they needed, they wouldn't be the audience; they'd be the artist. -Alan Moore
• The strongest of all warriors are these two--time and patience. -Leo Tolstoy
• We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime. -Franz Kafka
• The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him. -James Baldwin
• The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me. -Donald Miller
• Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. - Marcus Aurelius
• No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good... Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. -C. S. Lewis
• You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time. -John Knox
• Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow. -Benedict de Spinoza
• The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears. - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
• I couldn't wait for success, so I went on ahead without it. -Jonathan Winters
• Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. -James Baldwin
• But he that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose. -Anne Bronte
• You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble. -James Baldwin
• Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence. - E. B. White
• Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me. -Carol Burnett
• The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself. -James Baldwin
• Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. -Michel de Montaigne
• Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding, he sings. -Ed Gardner
• You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes. -A. A. Milne
• The two most important days of your life were the day you were born and the day you knew why. -Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
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• Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all. -Harriet Van Horne
• Among life's perpetually charming questions is whether the truly evil do more harm than the self-righteous and wrong. -Jon Margolis
• Having resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. -Malachy McCourt
• Never look for justice in this world. But never cease to give it. -Oswald Chambers
• To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. -Aldous Huxley
• To use bitter words, when kind words are at hand is like picking unripe fruit when the ripe fruit is there. -Thiruvalluvar
• It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truths before their times. -Thomas Brackett Reed
• Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance. -Everett Dean Martin
• You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint paradise, then in you go. -Nikos Kazantzakis
• Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder
• They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato
• Men hate those to whom they have to lie. -Victor Hugo
• Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right. -Laurens van der Post
• A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. -James Kern Feibleman
• How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves. -Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason. -Henry Fielding
• Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. -Gustave Flaubert
• An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does the truth become error because nobody will see it. -Mohandas K. Gandhi
• All ideas are already in the brain, just as all statues are in the marble. -Carlo Dossi
• What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. -Alice Walker
• It is not life and wealth and power that enslave men, but the cleaving to life and wealth and power. -Buddha
• Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. -Elie Wiesel
• We all have handicaps. The difference is that some of us must reveal ours, while others must conceal theirs, to be treated with mercy. -Yahia Lababidi
• I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day; I'd rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way. -Edgar Guest
• A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition. -Jose Bergamin
• Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on? -James Richardson
• I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us. -Konrad Lorenz
• The knife disappears with sharpening. -James Richardson
• The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes. -Henri Frederic Amiel
• Science is like sex - sometimes something useful comes out, but that's not why we're doing it. - Richard Feynman
• Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. -William James
• When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion. -Abraham Lincoln
• We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves. -Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld
• We are all equal before the law, but not before those appointed to apply it. -Stanislaw J. Lec
• Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength. -Blaise Pascal
• It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards. -Baltasar Gracian
• This above all: to thine own self be true, \ And it must follow, as the night the day, \ Thou canst not then be false to any man. -William Shakespeare
• Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice? -Lillian Hellman
• Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone. -Gladys Browyn Stern
• Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. -Sam Harris
• History is a vast early warning system. -Norman Cousins
• Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen. -Louis L'Amour
• The perfection of a clock is not to go fast, but to be accurate. -Luc de Clapiers
• It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truths before their times. -Thomas Brackett Reed
• Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand. -William Shakespeare
• Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade. -Noel Coward
• It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgement to be silent. -Jean de la Bruyere
• The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. -Norman Vincent Peale
• A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid. -Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
• There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else. -James Thurber
• Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be. -Miguel de Cervantes
• Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves. - Rainer Maria Rilke
• No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs,we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. -P.J. O'Rourke
• A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. -Oscar Wilde
• Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance. -Everett Dean Martin
• Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd. -Jalaluddin Rumi
• Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder
• They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato
• Men hate those to whom they have to lie. -Victor Hugo
• Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now -- always. -Albert Schweitzer
• It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation. -John Gray
• Every man's memory is his private literature. -Aldous Huxley
• To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none. -Francis Bacon
• Love involves a peculiar, unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding. -Diane Arbus
• I prefer the sign NO ENTRANCE to the sign which says NO EXIT. -Stanislaw J. Lec
• All ideas are already in the brain, just as all statues are in the marble. -Carlo Dossi
• What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. -Alice Walker
• If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction. -Francis Picabia
• A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain. -Samuel Johnson
• Invention requires an excited mind; execution, a calm one. -Johann Peter Eckermann
• One does not advance the swimming abilities of ducks by throwing the eggs in the water. -Multatuli
• There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for. -Mohandas Gandhi
• It is also a victory to know when to retreat. -Erno Paasilinna
• God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through. -Paul Valery
• Truth never damages a cause that is just. -Mohandas Gandhi
• Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right. -Carl Schurz
• How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young? -Paul Sweeney
• For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery. -Jonathan Swift
• Not being able to govern events, I govern myself. -Michel de Montaigne
• Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face. -Albert Camus
• The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. -Arthur C. Clarke
• A yawn is more disconcerting than a contradiction. - Mason Cooley
• Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. -Bertrand Russell
• Sacred cows make the best hamburger. -Mark Twain
• I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses. -Johannes Kepler
• Without love and laughter there is no joy; live amid love and laughter. -Horace
• I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself. -Pietro Aretino
• The gods love the obscure and hate the obvious. -Upanishads
• Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. -Joseph Joubert
• Two-thirds of help is to give courage. -Irish proverb
• Never underestimate your power to change yourself. -H. Jackson Brown, Jr
• Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you. -Yassir Arafat
• One of the most important weapons in your arsenal is the knowledge that someone is underestimating you. - William Q. Johnson
• If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle. -Rita Mae Brown
• Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters. -Albert Einstein
• People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what they do does. -Michel Foucault
• The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. -Michelangelo
• Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. -Robert Benchley
• Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut. - Daniel S. Greenberg
• Russian roulette is not the same without a gun. -Lady GaGa
• A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man. -Arnold Toynbee
• We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach. -Bertrand Russell
• If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us? -Lois McMaster Bujold
• True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive. -Mignon McLaughlin
• One should count each day a separate life. -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
• I am a part of all that I have met. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  …
• Men build too many walls and not enough bridges. -Isaac Newton
• Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him. -Albert Camus
• The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. -Dr. Albert Bartlett.
• Conscience is a dog that does not stop us from passing but that we cannot prevent from barking. -Nicolas de Chamfort
• What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -Ursula K. Le Guin
• Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief. -Arthur Schnitzler
• Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe. -John Milton
• There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. -Michel de Montaigne
• The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. -John Updike
• Each morning puts a man on trial and each evening passes judgment. -Roy L. Smith
• I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. -Abraham Lincoln
• Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product. -Eleanor Roosevelt
• Only the madman is absolutely sure. -Robert Anton Wilson
• We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice - that is, until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.' -Sydney J. Harris
• We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves. -George Eliot
• He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it. -Dante Alighieri
• He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses. -Horace
• In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it. -Shakti Gawain
• I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day; I'd rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way. -Edgar Guest
• We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves. -Eric Hoffer
• The stateliest building man can raise is the ivy's food at last. -Charles Dickens
• Silence is the severest criticism. -Charles Buxton
• What you cannot enforce, do not command. -Sophocles
• Personality is born out of pain. It is the fire shut up in the flint. -J. B. Yeats
• Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time. - A. E. Housman
• There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'. - Edward Tufte
• Backup not found: A)bort, R)etry, M)assive heart failure?
• All that glitters has a high refractive index.
• The terrorists have won. They have successfully convinced America to attack itself. - Steve Kirsch
• Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. -Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts. -John Locke
• It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. -J.K. Rowling
• I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university. -Albert Einstein
• The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. -Oscar Wilde
• Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. -George Bernard Shaw
• In one and the same fire, clay grows hard and wax melts. -Francis Bacon
• Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible. -Frank Zappa
• One law for the lion and ox is oppression. -William Blake
• Don't surrender your loneliness / So quickly. / Let it cut more deeply. / Let it ferment and season you / As few human / Or even divine ingredients can. -Hafez
• Go to where the silence is and say something. -Amy Goodman
• The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep. -Henry Maudsley
• We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. -Kenji Miyazawa
• What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. -Christopher Hitchens
• If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse. -Woody Allen
• A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. -Albert Einstein
• Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. -Joyce Carol Oates
• Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Henry Huxley
• Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. -Dandamis
• Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. -Robert A. Heinlein
• We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there -- lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. -Mark Twain
• We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin. -Andre Berthiaume
• Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there. -Eric Hoffer
• In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds. -Robert Green Ingersoll
• No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else. -Charles Dickens
• Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer. - Brian Greene
• I'd rather be a climbing ape than a falling angel. -Terry Pratchett
• Poisons and medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents. -Peter Mere Latham
• When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with. -Anais Nin
• I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. -Stephen Roberts
• The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it. -George Marshall
• Our choicest plans / have fallen through, / our airiest castles / tumbled over, / because of lines / we neatly drew / and later neatly / stumbled over. -Piet Hein
• Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another. -John Muir
• Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence. -Hal Borland
• The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. -Charles Darwin
• There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. -Michel de Montaigne
• Men have slow reflexes. In general it takes several generations later for them to understand. -Stanislaw J. Lec
• Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. -Bertrand Russell
• The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. -Aldous Huxley
• Like cars in amusement parks, our direction is often determined through collisions. -Yahia Lababidi
• A man should live with his superiors as he does with his fire: not too near, lest he burn; nor too far off, lest he freeze. -Diogenes
• It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than "try to be a little kinder." -Aldous Huxley
• Oh, how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living! -Philip of Macedon
• If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both. -Horace Mann
• If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages. -Isak Dinesen
• There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. -Nelson Mandela
• Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. -Bertrand Russell
• One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy. -Florence Scovel Shinn
• The catch with ardent followers is that they'll go ardently follow something else after a while. - Walter Podrazic
• If you learn nothing from losing, you have no right to love winning. The end result is meant to be appreciation, not adulation. - Corey Taylor
• Courage is a kind of salvation. -Plato
• Greater is he who acts from love than he who acts from fear. -Simeon Ben Eleazar
• Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. -Arthur Koestler
• Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country. -Anais Nin
• I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. -Rabindranath Tagore
• You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends. -Joseph Conrad
• We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them. -Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don't read the lines. -Margaret Millar
• When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favor. -Jane Welsh Carlyle
• "Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass," Sarah says. "It's about learning to dance in the rain."
• Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like patÈ. -Margaret Atwood
• It ought to be plain / how little you gain / by getting excited / and vexed. / You'll always be late / for the previous train, / and always in time / for the next. -Piet Hein
• Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration. -William Hazlitt
• The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. -John Gilmore
• Inquiry is fatal to certainty. -Will Durant
• What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do. -John Ruskin
• Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts. -Leo Rosten
• Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known. - Carl Sagan
• All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop. -Kabir
• There is more to life than increasing its speed. -Mohandas Gandhi
• All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. -Anatole France
• By a free country, I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like. -Robert Cecil
• The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth. -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable. -Moliere
• There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience. -Hartley Shawcross,
• Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. -William Butler Yeats
• The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. -Thomas Jefferson
• If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. -Thomas Szasz
• It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. -Cesare Beccaria
• It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. -Anatole France
• Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it. -Rabindranath Tagore
• Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. -Edward Abbey,
• The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else. -George Bernard Shaw
• It's like watching paint that's already dry in the hope that it will dry a little more.
• Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts. -Leo Rosten
• Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface; he, however, who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice. -Washington Irving
• If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit. -Robert Brault
• Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. -Thomas Jefferson
• I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. -Khalil Gibran
• Ah, good taste, what a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness. -Pablo Picasso
• As I get older, I have come to learn that the modern persona has the ability to get offended by anything. Worst of all, that very fact offends me. -Rodney Stanton III
• What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens
• Ignorance has nothing to do with bliss. - don Miguel Ruiz, Jr.
• There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. -Nietzsche
• Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known. - Carl Sagan
• Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes. ñ William Gibson
• Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. - Ambrose Redmoon
• All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop. -Kabir
• There is more to life than increasing its speed. -Mohandas Gandhi
• All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. -Anatole France
• By a free country, I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like. -Robert Cecil
• The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth. -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable. -Moliere
• There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience. -Hartley Shawcross,
• Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. -William Butler Yeats
• The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. -Thomas Jefferson
• If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. -Thomas Szasz
• It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. -Anatole France
• Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it. -Rabindranath Tagore
• Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. -Edward Abbey,
• The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else. -George Bernard Shaw
• Life's a cruel joke. Make sure you're the one laughing maniacally.
• Moral outrage is jealousy with a halo. -H.G. Wells
• I'm not a victim til I let you take me down. -Stone Sour
• A snake sheds its skin, but it's still the same snake.
• However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -Winston Churchill
• The impossible is often untried.
• Today is the oldest you've ever been, yet the youngest you'll ever be, so enjoy this day while it lasts!
• Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. -James Baldwin
• Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Be still and allow the mud to settle. -Lao Tzu
• The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. -Rabindranath Tagore
• Light is faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until they speak.
• Don't let anybody tell you the sky is the limit. There are galaxies, known and unknown, beyond the skies. - Raghda Salama
• Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? -T.S. Eliot
• Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. -Herman Melville
• Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second. -Bernard Berenson
• I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law. -Aristotle
• In matters of conscience the law of majority has no place. -Gandhi
• To know how to say what other people only think is what makes men poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers, or both. Elizabeth Rundle Charles
• Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. -Joseph Campbell
• If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point. -Randall Monroe
• As theater replaces life, so nostalgia replaces history. - Robert Hughes
• Anger as soon as fed is dead- / 'Tis starving makes it fat. -Emily Dickinson
• We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for. -Marie Ebner von Eschenbach
• Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves. -Abraham Lincoln
• It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. -Robert A. Heinlein
• Nothing dates faster than peoples' fantasies about the future. - Robert Hughes
• Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. -James Thurber
• There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with. -Harry Crews
• In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it. -John Ruskin
• Mistakes are part of the dues that one pays for a full life. -Sophia Loren
• My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain. -Sara Teasdale
• If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. -Francis Bacon
• One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it. -Martin Luther King Jr.
• No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same. -Viktor Frankl
• It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry. -Thomas Paine
• To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation. -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence. -Mahatma Gandhi
• To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. -Voltaire
• If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. -Virginia Woolf
• A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation. -Samuel Johnson
• The worst kind of people are those who confuse kindness for weakness. -Werner Makowski
• A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain. -Mildred Witte Stouven
• Who knows what Columbus would have discovered if America hadn't got in the way. -Stanislaw J. Lec
• Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned. -Heinrich Heine
• My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those who are sad. -Olive Schreiner
• There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies. -Raoul Vaneigem
• A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions. -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
• Think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act will be of any use to him. -Mahatma Gandhi
• Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. -John Steinbeck
• Every man possesses three characters: that which he exhibits, that which he really has, and that which he believes he has. -Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr
• If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out. -Rabindranath Tagore
• Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell. -Proverb
• The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. -Bertrand Russell
• It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. -Jonathan Swift
• The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out. -Thomas Babington Macaulay
• The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character. -Walter Scott
• Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. -Sydney J. Harris
• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -Leonardo da Vinci
• There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. -Peter Drucker
• We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others. -Blaise Pascal
• Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial. -Richard Ben Sapir
• Misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• He who has a why can endure any how. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers. -Steve Allen
• There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with. -Harry Crews
• I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. -Frederick Douglass
• Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Be still and allow the mud to settle. -Lao Tzu
• It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair
• If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit. -Robert Brault
• Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none. -William Shakespeare
• If what you are getting online is for free, you are not the customer, you are the product. -Jonathan Zittrain
• A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. -Confucius
• It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. -Cesare Beccaria
• Don't let anybody tell you the sky is the limit. There are galaxies, known and unknown, beyond the skies. - Raghda Salama
• Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? -T.S. Eliot
• Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. -Herman Melville
• Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second. -Bernard Berenson
• I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law. -Aristotle
• In matters of conscience the law of majority has no place. -Gandhi
• To know how to say what other people only think is what makes men poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers, or both. Elizabeth Rundle Charles
• Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. -Joseph Campbell
• You give me miles and miles of mountains And I'll ask for the sea. -Damien Rice
• Nothing dates faster than peoples' fantasies about the future. - Robert Hughes
• Joy is not in things; it is in us. - Richard Wagner
• You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy. Then you should sit for an hour. - Zen saying
• Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. - William Butler Yeats
• Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. - Eric Hoffer
• The karma of the world, be it in Boston or Africa, Syria or sexually abused, suicidal teen girls, is not yours to take on. Attempt to shoulder the horrors and brutalities of the world, and watch yourself die. - Mark Morford
• Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. - Confucius
• Amazing creatures we are, no? Like flawed angels; confused and broken gods, hurling lightning bolts at ourselves. - Mark Morford
• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. - Leonardo da Vinci
• If every atheist left the USA, it would lose 93% of the National Academy of Sciences but less than 1% of the prison population.
• Amazing creatures we are, no? Like flawed angels. Confused and broken gods, hurling lightning bolts at ourselves. - Mark Morford
• Creativity is the residue of time wasted. - Einstein
• Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized. -Margaret Atwood
• Veganism is a way of living that seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing and any other purpose. - The Vegan Society
• The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question. - Stephen J. Gould
• In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. -Albert Schweitzer
• Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. -H.L. Mencken
• I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs. -Joseph Addison
• Art is the elimination of the unnecessary. -Pablo Picasso
• Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher. -Japanese proverb
• Useless laws weaken the necessary laws. -Charles de Montesquieu
• Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. -Leo Tolstoy
• Our chief want in life, is, somebody who shall make us do what we can. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. -Walt Whitman
• Every increased possession loads us with new weariness. -John Ruskin
• I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first. -E.F. Schumacher
• Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. -Leo Buscaglia
• You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by. -James M. Barrie
• Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought. -Matsuo Basho
• Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. -William James
• You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave. -Billie Holiday
• On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• Learning is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily. -Chinese proverb
• The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious. -Marcus Tullius Cicero
• One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night. -Margaret Mead
• We are information rich and theory poor. - Malcolm Gladwell
• Love truth, but pardon error. - Voltaire
• It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. -Voltaire
• Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer. -Mignon McLaughlin
• There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to -- if there are no doors or windows -- he walks through a wall. -Bernard Malamud
• To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms. -John Leonard
• Several excuses are always less convincing than one. -Aldous Huxley
• Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way. -Martin Luther King Jr.
• Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it, but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance. -Charles A. Lindbergh
• A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular. -Adlai Stevenson
• It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry. -Thomas Paine
• The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been. -Madeleine L'Engle
• He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise. -Voltaire
• Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. -Claude Monet
• Patience is also a form of action. -Auguste Rodin
• Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. -Margaret Mitchell
• What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence. -Samuel Johnson
• Never trust a man whose television is bigger than his book shelf. - Emilia Clarke's father
• I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve. -Albert Schweitzer
• Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise. -Pierre Beaumarchais
• I am only one, / But still I am one. / I cannot do everything, / But still I can do something; / And because I cannot do everything, / I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. -Edward Everett Hale
• The cure for anything is salt water -- sweat, tears, or the sea. -Isak Dinesen
• Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage. -Ray Bradbury
• There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to -- if there are no doors or windows -- he walks through a wall. -Bernard Malamud
• Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide. -Eric Sevareid
• Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer. -Mignon McLaughlin
• The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it. -Albert Einstein
• The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question. -Stephen Jay Gould
• Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. - Eric Hoffer
• Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. -Leo Buscaglia
• You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by. -James M. Barrie
• Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought. -Matsuo Basho
• Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. -William James
• True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
• We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, "I speak as a citizen of the world" without others saying, "God, what a nut." -Lawrence Lessig
• If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good. -Thornton Wilder
• Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change. -Harriet Lerner
• Every increased possession loads us with new weariness. -John Ruskin
• The cure for anything is salt water -- sweat, tears, or the sea. -Isak Dinesen
• Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. -Nietzsche
• Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. -Carl Jung
• Since my house burned down / I now own a better view / of the rising moon. -Mizuta Masahide
• Every human being's essential nature is perfect and faultless, but after years of immersion in the world we easily forget our roots and take on a counterfeit nature. -Lao-Tzu
• Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings. -Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
• We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage. -Ray Bradbury
• Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough. -Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Creativity is the residue of time wasted. - Einstein
• How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward. -Spanish proverb
• The basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as things; that is to say separate things, separate events. That is only a way of talking. What do you mean by a thing? A thing is a noun. A noun isn’t a part of nature it’s a part of speech. There are no nouns in the physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world either. - Alan Watts
• There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher. -Henry van Dyke
• Don't set yourself on fire to make someone else warm. - Robbie Abed
• But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. - Alan Watts
• We are a landscape of all we have seen. -Isamu Naguchi
• Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun. -Christina Rossetti
• Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe. -John Milton
• Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view. -Paul Klee
• Using the weapons of the enemy, no matter how good one's intentions, makes one the enemy. -Charles de Lint
• Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. -John Morley
• If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers. -Steve Allen
• There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself. - Herman Hesse
• Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness. -Ouida
• Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right. -Isaac Asimov
• Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. -Umberto Eco
• 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion'. Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect. -Salman Rushdie
• People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. -Haruki Murakami
• To move freely you must be deeply rooted. -Bella Lewitsky
• The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up. That is possible for him who never argues and strives with men and facts, but in all experience retires upon himself, and looks for the ultimate cause of things in himself. -Albert Schweitzer
• Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. -Lord Byron
• Sometimes you can't see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others. -Ellen DeGeneres
• Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. -Colette
• Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. -Edward Abbey
• The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. -Havelock Ellis
• When the weather is hot, keep a cool mind. When the weather is cold, keep a warm heart.― Ajahn Brahm
• All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. -Adlai Stevenson
• Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet. -Alice Walker
• The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. -Charles Darwin
• In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated. -Margaret Halsey
• Time is the fairest and toughest judge. -Edgar Quinet
• Life is an adventure, it's not a package tour. - Eckhart Tolle
• There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. -Ansel Adams
• Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use. -Victor Hugo
• He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You. -Dr. Seuss
• Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have. -Emile Chartier
• Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege. -William Beveridge
• The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. -Douglas Adams
• All of life is a foreign country. -Jack Kerouac
• We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. -Penelope Lively
• I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it. - Bill Gates
• When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. -Richard Dawkins
• History is a novel whose author is the people. -Alfred de Vigny
• Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds -- all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have. -Edward Everett Hale
• Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality. -Nicolas de Chamfort
• I do what I do because there is a Hitler inside of me. - Mother Teresa
• O innocent victims of Cupid, / Remember this terse little verse: / To let a fool kiss you is stupid, / To let a kiss fool you is worse. -Yip Harburg
• Bad weather always looks worse through a window. -Tom Lehrer
• Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses. -Thornton Wilder
• The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. -Robert Lynd
• "Don't think of it as dying," said Death. "Just think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush." -Terry Pratchett
• A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking. -Jerry Seinfeld
• Don’t do letting go, let go of doing. - Ajahn Brahm<
• A teacher who is attempting to teach, without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on a cold iron. -Horace Mann
• No two persons ever read the same book. -Edmund Wilson
• It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. -Richard Feynman
• Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that. -Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
• I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate. -Max Frisch
• It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. -Arthur Conan Doyle
• Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Compassion is not weakness and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism. -Hubert Humphrey
• Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale. ― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
• I'm sometimes asked "Why do you spend so much of your time and money talking about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men?" I answer: "I am working at the roots." -George T. Angell
• The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper. -E.O. Wilson
• I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, -- light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful. -John
• Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right. -Igor Stravinsky
• Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -Blaise Pascal
• Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me. -Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid? -Richard Bach
• It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard. -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings. -Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
• We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. -Oliver Sacks
• If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs. -John Clare
• Choose only one master -- Nature. -Rembrandt
• Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead. -Ernest Hemingway
• There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science, art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous. -Raymond Thornton Chandler
• A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business. -Henry Ford
• Trust is the first step to love. -Munshi Premchand
• The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves. -P.D. James
• Ah! what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith. -Percy Bysshe Shelley
• There are none so sour as those who are sweet to order. -Luc de Clapiers
• It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars. -Garrison Keillor
• Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying that you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. - Edward Snowden
• The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse. -Herta Müller
• Dreams heed no borders, the eyes need no visas. With eyes shut I walk across the line in time. All the time. -Gulzar
• The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly. -Ogden Nash
• It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen. -Aristotle
• To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. -Jorge Luis Borges
• If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together. -Rita Dove
• The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist." -Maria Montessori
• Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes. -Henry George
• The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes. -Mary Renault
• People forget years and remember moments. -Ann Beattie
• A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction. -Leo Tolstoy
• Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control. -Cyril Connolly
• It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. -Agatha Christie
• What power has love but forgiveness? -William Carlos Williams
• Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men. -Samuel Johnson
• Invention requires an excited mind; execution, a calm one. -Johann Peter Eckermann
• Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o'clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman. -Lord Chesterfield
• In my youth I thought of writing a satire on mankind; but now in my age I think I should write an apology for them. -Horace Walpole
• A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others. -William Faulkner
• In the end, only three thing matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let of of things not meant for you. -Jack Kornfield
• Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. -Truman Capote
• Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way. -Alice Childress
• Think for yourself and question authority. -Timothy Leary
• There is one art of which man should be master, the art of reflection. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad. -Theodore Roosevelt
• If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth. -Carl Sagan
• If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag, wash it. -Norman Thomas
• There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard. -Arundhati Roy
• We haven't yet learned how to stay human when assembled in masses. -Lewis Thomas
• A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order. -Jean-Luc Godard
• If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. -James Thurber
• Contentment is, after all, simply refined indolence. -Thomas Chandler Haliburton
• No one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell. -Charles de Lint
• Men build too many walls and not enough bridges. -Isaac Newton
• An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc. -Henri Matisse
• He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers. -Charles Peguy#
• The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. -Hermann Göring
• Sometimes laughter hurts, but humor and mockery are our only weapons. -Cabu
• If triangles had a God, he would have three sides. -Charles de Montesquieu
• Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. -Edgar Allan Poe
• When you turn the corner / And you run into yourself / Then you know that you have turned / All the corners that are left. -Langston Hughes
• Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. -Henry Adams
• What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams. -Nikos Kazantzakis
• The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped. -Arthur Schopenhauer
• One does not advance the swimming abilities of ducks by throwing the eggs in the water. -Multatuli
• I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer. -Douglas Adams
• Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world. -Ben Okri
• Our shouting is louder than our actions, / Our swords are taller than us, / This is our tragedy. / In short / We wear the cape of civilization / But our souls live in the stone age. -Nizar Qabbani
• Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him. -Erich Fromm
• Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities when directing one's course by it, one must still try to follow its direction. -Vincent van Gogh
• It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them. -Leo Buscaglia
• Curiosity is the lust of the mind. -Thomas Hobbes
• Dreaming is what you do when you sleep. Achieving is what you do when you work. - David Coulthard's grandmother
• Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. -Thomas Szasz
• You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. -Clarence Darrow
• Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind, you have failed. -Jan de Hartog
• If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story. -Terry Pratchett
• Science is built with facts as a house is with stones, but a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. -Jules Henri Poincaré
• It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. -William Kingdon Clifford
• The Fates lead those who come willingly, and drag those who do not. - Stoic adage
• Comparison is the thief of joy. -Theodore Roosevelt
• Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. -Bertrand Russell
• Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science. -Hal Clement
• I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. -Walt Whitman
• If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone. -Thomas Hardy
• 'Writing' is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound. -Lawrence Lessig
• The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools. -Marguerite Yourcenar
• Ethics, decency, and morality are the real soldiers. -Kiran Bedi
• H. sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. -Joyce Carol Oates
• There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. -Emma Goldman
• What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? -Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone. -Czeslaw Milosz
• I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. -Ernest Hemingway
• Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. -Eric Hoffer
• What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give. -P.D. James
• When I can look Life in the eyes, / Grown calm and very coldly wise, / Life will have given me the Truth, / And taken in exchange---my youth. -Sara Teasdale
• These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb. - Najwa Debian
• I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. -John Cage
• Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men. -Sydney J. Harris
• Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them. -T.S. Eliot
• For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken
• It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. -Evelyn Waugh
• Our cemeteries are full of people who prayed to live. -Annie Laurie Gaylor
• It is always possible to comport oneself with dignity. If one has a quarrel it ought to elevate rather than to degrade one. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
• The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be. -Louis de Bernieres
• The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. -Muriel Rukeyser
• One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night. -Margaret Mead
• What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? -George Eliot
• If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions. -Susanne Langer
• It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him. -J.R.R. Tolkien
• It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor. -Max Eastman
• Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. -Benjamin Franklin
• A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. -Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Roads endure longer than pyramids. -Karol Bunsch
• Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman. -Luther Burbank
• Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world. -Ben Okri
• What didn't you do to bury me / But you forgot that I was a seed. -Dinos Christianopoulos
• One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. -Erich Fromm
• History is a novel whose author is the people. -Alfred de Vigny
• I am only one, / But still I am one. / I cannot do everything, / But still I can do something; / And because I cannot do everything, / I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. -Edward Everett Hale
• We take our colors, chameleon-like, from each other. -Nicolas de Chamfort
• Joy is the best makeup. -Anne Lamott
• Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom. -Theodore Rubin
• History is all explained by geography. -Robert Penn Warren
• The doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind. -Herbert J. Muller
• If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers. -Thomas Pynchon
• Life has no meaning a priori. ... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose. -Jean-Paul Sartre
• Shadow owes its birth to light. -John Gay
• A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill. -Robert A. Heinlein
• All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. -Ernest Hemingway
• No amount of belief makes something a fact. -James Randi
• A few cobras in your home will soon clear it of rats and mice. Of course, you will still have the cobras. -Will Cuppy
• Spurned pity can turn into cruelty just as spurned love turns into hate. -Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
• Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference. -Sydney J. Harris
• We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them. -Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
• You end up accepting everything in your life - suffering, horror, love, loss, hate, all of it. It's all a movie anyway. -Harry Dean Stanton
• Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow. -T.S. Eliot
• Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence. -Henri Frederic Amiel
• There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring. -Evelyn Beatrice Hall
• The infinite quietness frightens me. - Blaise Pascal
• We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out. - Winston Churchill
• He serves his party best who serves the country best. -Rutherford B. Hayes
• Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not. -Neil deGrasse Tyson
• There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign. -Robert Louis Stevenson
• Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except the best. -Henry van Dyke
• Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. -Claude Monet
• Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! -Andre Gide
• If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag, wash it. -Norman Thomas
• Normal is the average of deviance. -Rita Mae Brown
• I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I will try. -Rainer Maria Rilke
• I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow, and I have borrowed a lot. -Woodrow Wilson
• Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. -Umberto Eco
• Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind. -William Somerset Maugham
• The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. -Havelock Ellis
• When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece. -John Ruskin
• It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. -Charles Darwin
• We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. -Tzvetan Todorov
• Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us. -John Irving
• If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed. -Luther Burbank
• Comparison is the thief of joy. -Theodore Roosevelt
• Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools. -Richard Steele
• Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. -Albert Einstein
• Next time someone complains that you have made a mistake, tell him that may be a good thing, because without imperfection neither you nor I would exist. -Stephen Hawking
• Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world. -Ben Okri
• Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him. -Erich Fromm
• History is a novel whose author is the people. -Alfred de Vigny
• We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color. -Maya Angelou
• I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him. -Booker T. Washington
• Conscience is a dog that does not stop us from passing but that we cannot prevent from barking. -Nicolas de Chamfort
• Bad weather always looks worse through a window. -Tom Lehrer
• Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life -- except religion. -Christopher Hitchens
• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. -Fred Brooks
• If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you've got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference. -Robert Fulghum
• The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it. -Francis Crick
• In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world. -Franz Kafka
• The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves. -P.D. James