Who Said It? · Memorable Quotes

Imitation is suicide.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch of a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Self-Reliance", 1841
Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims (Quotation and Originality)
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "American Civilization", The Atlantic Monthly, 1862
Hitch your wagon to a star.

What a new face courage puts on everything.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

As we grow old?the beauty steals inward.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Nature"
The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eyes and the heart of the child.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

We take care of our health, we lay up money, we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient, but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting the best property of all -- friends?

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he know that every day is Doomsday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Conduct of Life
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face.

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Natural History of Intellect (1893)
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essay: Nature
To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.

Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power.

Nature hates calculators.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Society and Solitude: Works and Days, 1870
A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

If eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Address on The Method of Nature, 1841
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely...

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self Reliance (essay)
...the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness, the independence of solitude.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

I hate quotations.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Method of Nature (1841)
Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "The Rhodora"
If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Who so would be a man, must be a nonconformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - quoting a friend
Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquility that religion is powerless to bestow.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.

A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.

Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

Give all to love; obey thy heart.

Whoever is open, loyal, true; of humane and affable demeanour; honourable himself, and in his judgement of others; faithful to his word as to law, and faithful alike to God and man....such a man is a true gentleman.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show for any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

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.

The less government we have the better.

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well, remembering that she has seen dark times before, indeed with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Society and Solitude (1870)
As soon as there is life there is danger.

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Always do what you are afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims: Quotation and Originality, 1876
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - (attributed)
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims: The Comic, 1876
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples.

Before we acquire great power, we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invated by worry, fret and anxiety.

To know one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

What you are shouts so loud in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

I hate quotations.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

The more he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Journals, 1839
The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.

The first wealth is health.

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - An Essay on Self-Reliance
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - New England Reformers, 1844
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.

The glory of friendship is not the outstreched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.

Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health.

A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Society and Solitude
The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops?no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

The reward for a thing well done is to have done it.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Journal (May 1849)
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims: Progress of Culture, 1876
Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self Reliance
Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance
It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

The world belongs to the energetic.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

The people are to be taken in very small doses.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

We become what we think about all day long.

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.

People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

When you strike at a king, you must kill him.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the ordinary.

If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.

The faith that stand on authority is not faith.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims: The Comic, 1876
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

Nothing, at last, is sacred; but the integrity of your own mind.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Children are all foreigners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays, First Series: Prudence, 1841
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others with out getting a few drops on yourself.

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.

Work is victory.

The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is electrified.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air?

He is great who confers the most benefits.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Journals, 1824
When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.

Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity.

Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
Robertson Davies - "The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks"
To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.

Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman. The right sort of woman can distinguish between Creative Lassitude and plain shiftlessness.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.

The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.

Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
Robertson Davies - "A Voice from the Attic", 1960
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
Robertson Davies - The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947
I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.
Robertson Davies - "Fifth Business"
He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.

- Robertson Davies

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business.
Henry Ford - 1934
I foresee the time when industry shall no longer denude the forests which require generations to mature, nor use up the mines which were ages in the making, but shall draw its materials largely from the annual produce of the fields.

There is no man living that cannot do more than he thinks he can!

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.

History is more or less bunk.

History is bunk.

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

Reading musses up my mind.

My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.

It is well enough that the people of this nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.

The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.

History is more or less bunk.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

- Henry Ford

You wake me up early in the morning to tell me I am right? Please wait until I am wrong.
Johann von Neumann
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

- Johann von Neumann - on being phoned at 10:00 AM

Here stand I. I can do no other.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.
Martin Luther - in front of his inquisitors at the Diet of Worms.
I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

At night always carry in your heart something from Holy Scriptures to bed with you, meditate upon it like a ruminant animal, and go softly to sleep; but this must not be too much, rather a little that may be well pondered and understood, that you may find a remnant of it in your mind when you rise in the morning.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

It is pleasing to God whenever you rejoice or laugh from the bottom of your heart.

- Martin Luther

On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks.
H. Allen Smith
When there are two conflicting versions of a story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.
H. Allen Smith
The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of "Ten Best".

- H. Allen Smith - "Let the Crabgrass Grow"

The foolish man lies awake all night
Thinking of his many problems;
When the morning comes he is worn out
And his trouble is just as it was.

- Norse Proverb - Myth and Meaning page 72

He not busy being born is busy dying.

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.
Bob Dylan - "If you see her, say hello"
Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past. I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

If the point is sharp, and the arrow is swift, it can pierce through the dust no matter how thick.
Bob Dylan - "To Ramona"
Everything passes. Everything changes. Just do what you think you should do.

- Bob Dylan

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Henry Ward Beecher - last words
Now comes the mystery.

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.

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.

You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.

Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities.

Troubles are often the tools God fashions us for better things.

Fear secretes acids; but love and trust are sweet juices.

I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.

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.

The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a "but".

Besides anarchy, the worst thing in this world is government.

Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.
Henry Ward Beecher - Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself - and be lenient to everybody else.

Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is a human owl, vigilant in darkness, and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

To become an able and successful man in any profession, three things are necessary, nature, study and practice.
Henry Ward Beecher - last words, 8 March 1887.
Now comes the mystery.
Henry Ward Beecher - "Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit", 1887
The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

- Henry Ward Beecher

At sixteen I was stupid, confused, insecure and indecisive. At twenty-five I was wise, self- confident, prepossessing and assertive. At forty-five I am stupid, confused, insecure and indecisive. Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence?

Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence.

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

- Jules Feiffer

Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Love is an irresistable desire to be irresistably desired.
Robert Frost - (attributed)
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawer.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
Robert Frost - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

There are tones of voices that mean more than words.

The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.
Robert Frost - "The Death of a Hired Man"
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

We dance in a circle and suppose, while the secret sits in the middle and knows.

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

As it is more blessed to give than receive, so it must be more blessed to receive than to give back.

The best way out is always through.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Robert Frost - The Black Cottage
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

An idea is a feat of association.

Do not follow where the path may lead...Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

- Robert Frost

Art is the illusion of spontaneity.

If you believe everything you read, better not read.

One kind word can warm three winter months.

The reverse side also has a reverse side.

If you believe everything you read, better not read.

Never rely on the glory of the morning nor the smiles of your mother-in-law.

Beginning is easy - Continuing is hard.

When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.

Gossip about a person and his shadow will appear.
Japanese Proverb - Also quoted in the movie Rising Sun
If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.

Fall down seven times, get up eight.

Fall seven times, stand up eight.

- Japanese Proverb

The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954, chapter 2
One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.
J. R. R. Tolkien - Gandalf on Saruman, The Two Towers
The treacherous are ever distrustful.
J. R. R. Tolkien - Mandos, The Silmarillion, Of the Flight of the Noldor
Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Few can foresee whither their road will lead them, till they come to its end.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring, spoken by Boromir
For though I do not ask for aid, we need it.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Little by little, one travels far.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring
Courage is found in unlikely places.
J. R. R. Tolkien
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Return of the King
I have no help to send, therefore I must go myself.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works...
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954
All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost.
J. R. R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The world has changed.
I see it in the water.
I feel it in the Earth.
I smell it in the air.
Much that once was is lost,
For none now live who remember it.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
What do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good on this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?
J. R. R. Tolkien - Spoken by Aragorn
The deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.
J. R. R. Tolkien - Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
The board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last...
The great battle of our time.
J. R. R. Tolkien
...for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.
J. R. R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Valour needs first strength, then a weapon.
J. R. R. Tolkien - Spoken by Faramir
I love you. I used to pity your sorrow. But now, were you sorrowless, without fear or any lack, still i would love you.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord Of the Rings, Book Four, Chapter One
Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.
J. R. R. Tolkien
There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over... Faint to my ears came the gathered rumour of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping, and the slow everlasting groan of overburdened stone.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring, spoken by Elrond
He should not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Still round the corner there may wait,
A new road or a secret gate.
J. R. R. Tolkien
With hope or without hope we will follow the trail of our enemies. And woe to them, if we prove the swifter!
J. R. R. Tolkien
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J. R. R. Tolkien - Letter to Michael Tolkien, March 1941
Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.

- J. R. R. Tolkien - The Two Towers

Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night.

- Marilyn vos Savant

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

- Konrad Lorenz

Death is the enemy. I spent 10 years of my life singlemindedly studying, practicing, fighting hand to hand in close quarters to defeat the enemy, to send him back bloodied and humble and I am not going to roll over and surrender.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Cicely, 1992
We hold in our hands, the most precious gift of all: Freedom. The freedom to express our art. Our love. The freedom to be who we want to be. We are not going to give that freedom away and no one shall take it from us!
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Cicely, 1992
There is nothing sadder in this world than the waste of human potential. The purpose of evolution is to raise us out of the mud, not have us grovelling in it.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Northern Lights, 1993
Real meaningful endeavours, the biggies in human existence, often require the sacrifice of others.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Zarya, 1994
As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Seoul Mates, 1991
I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, All is Vanity, 1991
A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Old Tree, 1993
Trees like to have kids climb on them, but trees are much bigger than we are, and much more forgiving.

By mid-November I always like to have an extra 15 pounds on me.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Revelations, 1993
There can be no spirituality, no sanctity, no truth without the female sex.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Northern Lights, 1993
A person has three choices in life. You can swim against the tide and get exhausted, or you can tread water and let the tide sweep you away, or you can swim with the tide, and let it take you where it wants you to go.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Cicely, 1992
One person can have a profound effect on another. And two people...well, two people can work miracles. They can change a whole town. They can change the world.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, Do The Right Thing, 1992
People are simply incapable of prolonged, sustained goodness.

- Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider - Northern Exposure, First Snow, 1993

Give all to love; obey thy heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Conduct of Life
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essay: Nature
To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.

People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.

If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.

We become what we think about all day long.

He is great who confers the most benefits.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

To know one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

I hate quotations.

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

As we grow old?the beauty steals inward.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The world belongs to the energetic.

Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique.

Nature hates calculators.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch of a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims: The Comic, 1876
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

Nothing, at last, is sacred; but the integrity of your own mind.

The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.

The glory of friendship is not the outstreched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Society and Solitude: Works and Days, 1870
A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Journals, 1824
When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Address on The Method of Nature, 1841
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the ordinary.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity.

Who so would be a man, must be a nonconformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved.

What a new face courage puts on everything.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Journal (May 1849)
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

The less government we have the better.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - (attributed)
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Whoever is open, loyal, true; of humane and affable demeanour; honourable himself, and in his judgement of others; faithful to his word as to law, and faithful alike to God and man....such a man is a true gentleman.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims: Quotation and Originality, 1876
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - An Essay on Self-Reliance
To be great is to be misunderstood.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance
It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "American Civilization", The Atlantic Monthly, 1862
Hitch your wagon to a star.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air?

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

The people are to be taken in very small doses.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

I hate quotations.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invated by worry, fret and anxiety.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims: Progress of Culture, 1876
Every artist was first an amateur.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well, remembering that she has seen dark times before, indeed with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Method of Nature (1841)
Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Self-Reliance", 1841
Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.

Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he know that every day is Doomsday.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims (Quotation and Originality)
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

If eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

The reward for a thing well done is to have done it.

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely...

We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

We take care of our health, we lay up money, we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient, but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting the best property of all -- friends?

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

What you are shouts so loud in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self Reliance (essay)
...the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness, the independence of solitude.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

The faith that stand on authority is not faith.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

The more he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show for any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others with out getting a few drops on yourself.

When you strike at a king, you must kill him.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Society and Solitude
The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops?no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is electrified.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Nature"
The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eyes and the heart of the child.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self Reliance
Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - New England Reformers, 1844
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.

The first wealth is health.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Society and Solitude (1870)
As soon as there is life there is danger.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Natural History of Intellect (1893)
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Journals, 1839
The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

Imitation is suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Letters and Social Aims: The Comic, 1876
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.

Before we acquire great power, we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

People only see what they are prepared to see.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "The Rhodora"
If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

Children are all foreigners.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

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.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - quoting a friend
Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquility that religion is powerless to bestow.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays, First Series: Prudence, 1841
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples.

Work is victory.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon.

- George Aiken

Nihilism is best done by professionals.

What do you do with a lifetime of work? Face it in the morning.

- Iggy Pop

My girlfriend sleeps in a queen-sized bed and I sleep in a court jester-sized bed.
Steven Wright
Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.
Steven Wright - Standup Comedy Routine
I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time". So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
Steven Wright
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
Steven Wright - Standup Comedy Routine
I installed a skylight in my apartment. The people who live above me are furious!
Steven Wright
Cross-country skiing is great if you live in a small country.
Steven Wright
When I have a kid, I wanna put him in one of those strollers for twins, then run around the mall looking frantic.
Steven Wright
Today I met with a subliminal advertising executive for just a second.
Steven Wright
If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?
Steven Wright
Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect.
Steven Wright
If a word in the dictionary were mispelled, how would we know?
Steven Wright
If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happen if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?
Steven Wright
I have an existential map. It has "You are here" written all over it.
Steven Wright
Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.
Steven Wright
I have the worlds largest seashell collection. You may have seen it, I keep it spread out on beaches all over the world.
Steven Wright
They say the sun never sets over the British Empire, but it rises every morning. The sky must get awfully crowded.
Steven Wright
Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.
Steven Wright
Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.
Steven Wright
Black holes are where God divided by zero.
Steven Wright
If God dropped acid, would he see people?
Steven Wright
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
Steven Wright
The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
Steven Wright
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
Steven Wright
I was walking down the street wearing glasses when the prescription ran out.
Steven Wright - Standup Comedy Routine
I just bought a microwave fireplace. You can spend an evening in front of it in only eight minutes.
Steven Wright
If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happen if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?
Steven Wright
If God dropped acid, would he see people?
Steven Wright
Every now and then I like to lean out my window, look up and smile for a satellite picture.

- Steven Wright - I Have a Pony

Work is the curse of the drinking class.

It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give really unbiased opinions, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
Being natural is simply a pose.

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
Oscar Wilde - "De Profundis"
... Nature, whose sweet rains fall of just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undetected. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
Oscar Wilde - Foreward, The Picture of Dorian gray
The only excuse for creating something useless is that one admires it intensely.
Oscar Wilde - , in a letter to his friend, Frances Forbes-Robertson, who had invited him to her wedding in London, but Wilde was
Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
Oscar Wilde - The Model Millionaire, 1912
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Life imitates art more than art imitates life.
Oscar Wilde - A Picture of Dorian Grey - Preface
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, the preface
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their own peril.

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, preface
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.

The English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, 1891
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895, Act I
To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Ernest
The very essence of love is uncertainty.

Sometimes it takes courage to give into temptation.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
Oscar Wilde - The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Vile deeds like poison weeds bloom well in prison air, it is only what is good in man, that wastes and withers there.

Punctuality is the thief of time.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
Oscar Wilde - An Ideal Husband, 1893, Act I
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Oscar Wilde - Letter from Paris, dated May 1900
People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately.

A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.
Oscar Wilde - An Ideal Husband
The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women? merely adored.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

Dreamers can find their way by moonlight and their only punishment is that they see the dawn before the rest of the world.

I sometimes think that God, in creating man, overestimated His ability.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

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

The basis for optimism is sheer terror.

I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.

Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
Knowledge would be fatal, it is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things beautiful.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
Oscar Wilde - "An Ideal Husband"
To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, part 2, 1891
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Oscar Wilde - The Ballad of Reading Gaol
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
Oscar Wilde - The Canterville Ghost, 1882
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascinations. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, the preface
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Action: the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

I am not young enough to know everything.

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

Imagination is a quality given to man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humaor is provided to console him from what he is.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde - Jack from The Importance of Being Earnest
When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895, Act I
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

Action is the last refuge of those who cannot dream.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
She is a peacock in everything but beauty.

There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar; you will.

Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey
All art is quite useless.

It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, the preface
All art is quite useless.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Life is too important to be taken seriously.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.
Oscar Wilde - as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
Oscar Wilde - "The Remarkable Rocket"
The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
Oscar Wilde - Quoted in Ellmann
It often happens that the real tragedies in life occur in such an inarticulate manner that they hurt one by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
...my dear boy, no woman is a genius. They are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

My wallpaper and i are fighting a duel to death. One or the other has to go.

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling I have always cultivated.

I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Eduaction is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

The only charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Oscar Wilde - as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
Oscar Wilde - A Woman of No Importance, Act 3
The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.
Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, part 2, 1891
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Genius is born--not paid.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Oscar Wilde - A Picture of Dorian Grey
Live the wonderful life that is in you.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey
Philanthropic people lose all sense of Humanity, it is their distinguishing characteristic.

Science is the record of dead religions.

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, chapter 6
When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex.

Art is the most intense form of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Philanthropy is the refuge of rich people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

Experience...is simply the name we give our mistakes.

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Divorces are made in heaven.

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
A grand passion is the privelege of people who have nothing to do.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 3
Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.

I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest
I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, 1891
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.
Oscar Wilde - Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, 1882
Only the shallow know themselves.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde - "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

The problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common!
Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, 1891
But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.
Oscar Wilde - upon being told the cost of an operation
I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means.
Oscar Wilde - In Life of Oscar Wilde, H. Pearson
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
Oscar Wilde - An Ideal husband, 1893
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well worth remembering from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.

About foxhunting: The unspeakable chasing the uneatable.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship; and it is by far the best ending for one.

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude.

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

Chastity is the greatest form of perversion.
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest
He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, Prologue
All art is quite useless.
Oscar Wilde - As he passed through customs
I have nothing to declare but my genius.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same thing. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.
Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

- Oscar Wilde

In rivers and bad governments, the lightest things swim at the top.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

A penny saved is a penny earned.

A democracy is two wolves and a small lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Freedom under a constitutional republic is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.

He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

Beware of the young doctor and the old barber.

He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

Dost thou love life? Than do not squander time, for it is the stuff life is made of.

Pride breakfasted with plenty, dined with poverty, and supped with infamy.

Drive thy business or it will drive thee.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.

He that is good at making excuses is seldom good at anything else.

Beware of the young doctor and the old barber.

Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Critics are our friends, they tell us our faults.

Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.

When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. Sell not liberty to purchase power.

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.
Benjamin Franklin - In response to the situation of the colonists
Passion governs, and she never governs wisely.

We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall hang separately.

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.
Benjamin Franklin - Letter to Jean Baptiste Le Roy (1789)
But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

At 20 years of age the will reigns, at 30 the wit, at 40 the judgment.

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.

Lost time is never found again.

Distrust and caution are the parents of security.

To follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.

I believe I shall,in some shape or other,always exist; and, with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine, hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.

If you would be loved, love and be lovable.

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are rotten,
either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing.

He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.

God heals, and the doctor takes the fees.

If you would be wealthy, think of saving as well as getting.

To the generous mind the heaviest debt is that of gratitude, when it is not in our power to repay it.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Benjamin Franklin - Card
Tell me....And I Forget,
Teach me.....And I Learn,
Involve Me.....And I Remember.

Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to get leisure.
Benjamin Franklin - ?
To be proud of virtue is to poison oneself with the antidote.

They that will not be counseled, cannot be helped. If you do not hear reason she will rap you on the knuckles.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that? Nobody.

Well done is better than well said.

If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.

We must hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

You may delay, but time will not.

Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy. He that rises late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night, while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.

The first mistake in public business is the going into it.

An investment in knowledge still yields the best returns.

A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over.

Rules too soft are seldomly followed; rules too harsh are seldomly executed.

The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.

Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.

All cats are gray in the dark.

He that would live in peace and at ease, must not speak all he knows nor judge all he sees.

God heals, and the doctor takes the fee.

Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way. That was a true proverb of the wise man, rely upon it; "Better is little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure, and trouble therewith."

He who multiplies riches multiplies cares.

Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.

Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.

Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.

If you wouldst live long, live well, for folly and wickedness shorten life.

Glass, china and reputation are easily cracked, and never well mended.

Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.

Think what you do when you run into debt; you give another power over your liberty.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.

Whoever feels pain in hearing a good character of his neighbor, will feel a pleasure in the reverse. And those who despair to rise in distinction by their virtues, are happy if others can be depressed to a level of themselves.

He that has done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

He that can have patience can have what he will.

The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.

He is ill clothed that is bare of virtue.

I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it.

Three people can keep a secret so long as two of them are dead.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.
Benjamin Franklin - 1759
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!

I am in the prime of senility.

All would live long, but none would be old.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting,

Early morning hath gold in its mouth.

Our critics are our friends; they show us our faults.

Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defense as that 10,000 men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

He that blows the coals in quarrels that he has nothing to do with, has no right to complain if the sparks fly in his face
Benjamin Franklin - Poor Richard?s Almanac (1758)
Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Energy and persistence conquer all things.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

To lengthen thy Life, lessen thy meals

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to get leisure.

Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.

Read much, but not many books.

For the want of a nail, the shoe was lose; for the want of a shoe the horse was lose; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail.

The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice.
Benjamin Franklin - letter to David Hartley, December 4, 1789
God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: "This is my country."
Benjamin Franklin - Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

A penny saved is a penny earned.

The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

You may delay, but time will not.

- Benjamin Franklin

Springtime is the land awakening. The March winds are the morning yawn.

- Lewis Grizzard

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.

I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.

I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.

I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.

A dollar saved is a quarter earned.

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.

So little time and so little to do.

The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.

Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.

Marriage is a triumph of habit over hate.

I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on.

When you give up drinking, you have to deal with that wonderful personality that started you drinking in the first place.

Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel.

I am no more humble than my talents require.

I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.

I knew her before she was a virgin.

So little time, so little to do.

- Oscar Levant

Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.

- Edwin Teale

It is slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body.

The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reaches us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personalities.

If indeed you must be candid, be candid beautifully.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Kahlil Gibran - Essay on Robert Frost, quoted in N. Y.. Times: Obit-Editorial, April 1982
Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief, But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily, when good is hungry is seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Love is know the pain of too much tenderness.

Marriage is the golden ring in a chain, whose beginning is a glance and whose ending is eternity.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prohpet, 1923
You give but little when you give of your posessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.

Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

They deem me mad for I will not sell my days for gold; I deem them mad for they think my days have a price.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and the sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite.

Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolutions.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
Give your hearts, but not into each other?s keeping,
For only the hand of God can contain your hearts.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

You give little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

God made Truth with many doors to welcome every believer who knocks on them.

If indeed you must be candid, be candid beautifully.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
That which seems most feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to do.

You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
Kahlil Gibran - The Broken Wings
I am one of those who believe that spiritual progress is a rule of human life, but the approach to perfection is slow and painful. If a woman elevates herself in one respect and is retarded in another, it is because the rough trail that leads to the mountain peak is not free of ambushes of thieves and lairs of wolves.

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.

The significance of a man is not in what he attains, but rather what he longs to attain.
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

- Kahlil Gibran

What a beautiful morning.

- John Hancock - to Sam Adams at the Battle of Lexington

Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious.

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor.

Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.

Not a tenth of us who are in business are doing as well as we could if we merely followed the principles that were known to our grandfathers.

Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go

Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious.

Setting a good example for children takes all the fun out of middle age.

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

- William Feather

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

- Edward Thomas - Poems (1917) "Early One Morning"

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.

There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance.

It is funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it.

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
There will always be one who loves, and one who lets himself be loved.

Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.
W. Somerset Maugham - "Our Betters", 1923
It was such a lovely day I thought it was a pity to get up.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
W. Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham - "Of Human Bondage", 1915
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
W. Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence
Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
W. Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

- W. Somerset Maugham

The worst prison would be a closed heart.

We are drowning in information and starved for knowledge.

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.

Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

Success always occurs in private and failure in full public view.

Life is like a piano... what you get out of it depends on how you play it.
Unknown - Polish Slogan
Never lose hope.

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

Women remember the first kiss, men remember the last.

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

The human brain is like a railroad freight car -- guaranteed to have a certain capacity but often running empty.

I always knew i would look back on my tears and laugh but i never tought i would look back on the laughter and cry

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

Words lead to deeds.... They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.
Unknown - Latin Legal Phrase
He is not deemed to give consent who is under a mistake.

Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can do is take a complete rest.

May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows your dead

Never deprive someone of hope -- it may be all they have.

After all is said and done, a lot more will be said than done.

May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
the rains fall soft upon your fields and,
until we meet again may god hold you in the palm of his hand

In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it.

Psychiatry is the care of the id by the odd.

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.

It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.
Unknown - Legal Maxim
An act against my will is not my act.

A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is of it wrong.

Dedication is not what others expect of you, it is what you can give to others.

He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.
Unknown - Buckaroo Banzai, from the film
And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

Life has no rehearsals, only performances.

Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves for we shall never cease to be amused.

Discretion is being able to raise your eyebrow instead of your voice.

The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television.

What I said never changed anyone. What they understood did.

What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.

If debugging is the art of removing bugs, then programming must be the art of inserting them.

A friend is one to whom you can pour out the contents of your heart, chaff and grain alike. Knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

There are people who make things happen,
those who watch what happens,
and those who wonder what happened.

An Irishman is the only man in the world who will step over the bodies of a dozen naked women to get to a bottle of stout.

It is with a word as with an arrow - once let it loose and it does not return.

The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television.

Any new venture goes through the following stages: enthusiasm, complication, disillusionment, search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent, and decoration of those who did nothing.

Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many.

Usability is like oxygen -- you never notice it until it is missing...

Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.

If you listened hard enough the first time, you might have heard what I meant to say.

Programming today is a race between software engineers stirring to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.

My Karma ran over your dogma.

Whoever does not love his work cannot hope that it will please others.

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top.

If you make the world a little better, then you have accomplished a great deal.

If it is to be, it is up to me.

Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who decided to stand their ground.

To err is human, to blame the next guy even more so.

Man is a gregarious creature, more so in mind than in body. He may like to go alone for a walk but he hates to stand alone in his opinion.
Unknown - Popular Mechanics, March 1949
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang the best.

All power corrupts, but we need the electricity.

A healthy family is sacred territory.

Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.

In every fat book there is a thin book trying to get out.

If we deny love that is given to us, if we refuse to give love because we fear pain or loss, then our lives will be empty, our loss greater.

The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience.

Courage atrophies from lack of use.

In the sixties, the world was normal and people took acid to make it weird. Nowadays the world is weird and people take prozac to make it normal.
Unknown - US Navy Wisdom
Good seamanship is recovering from an incident at sea. Great seamanship is avoiding an incident at sea.

Never make anything simple and efficient when a way can be found to make it complex and wonderful.

What most people need to learn in life is how to love people and use things instead of using people and loving things.

Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold -- but so does a hard-boiled egg.
Unknown - The Bhagavad Gita
For the uncontrolled there is no wisdom. For the uncontrolled there is no concentration, and for him without concentration, there is no peace. And for the unpeaceful how can there ever be happiness?

Love is not blind, it sees more not less; But because it sees more it chooses to see less.

He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.

Lie: A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one discovered to date.

Confidence in nonsense is a requirement for the creative process.

Use the talents you possess -- for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except for the best.

Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell.

Teach children to be polite and courteous in the home, and, when he grows up, he will never be able to edge his car onto a freeway.
Unknown - Tuskegee Airman motto during World War II
We do not hate those we fight; we do not love those we defend.

"Reality" is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.
Unknown - Suggested book title
J.F.K.--The Man and the Airport

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt.

Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty.

Immortality lies not in the things you leave behind, but in the people your life has touched.

Many an opportunity is lost because a man is out looking for four-leaf clovers.

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

A library is an arsenal of liberty.

Education is what you get from reading the fine print. Experience is what you get from not reading it.
Unknown - Army Magazine of Preventive Maintenance
A slipping gear in your M203 grenade launcher can cause it to fire when you least expect it. This could make you very unpopular with what is left of your unit.

Take only pictures, steal only time, leave only footprints.

If you begin the day with love in your heart, peace in your nerves, and truth in your mind, you not only benefit by their presence but also bring them to others, to your family and friends, and to all those whose destiny draws across your path that day.

On Thanksgiving Day all over America, families sit down to dinner at the same moment - halftime.

Most people rust out due to lack of challenge. Few people rust out due to overuse.

Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but some abuse the privilege.

True friendship is seen through the heart not through the eyes.

The greatest oak was once a little nut who held its ground....

DISCLAIMER: A society where such disclaimers are needed is saddening.

Every big problem was at one time a wee disturbance.

Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
Unknown - UNESCO Constitution
Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defence of peace must be constructed.
Unknown - The Ultimate Law
All general statements are false.

Between the wish and the thing life lies waiting.

He who thinks by the inch and talks by the yard deserves to be kicked by the foot.

If we deny love that is given to us, if we refuse to give love because we fear pain or loss, then our lives will be empty, our loss greater.

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.

After all is said and done, a lot more will have been said than done.

Fools rush in where fools have been before.

Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.

The more you run over a dead cat, the flatter it gets.

Those who stare at the past have their backs turned to the future.

Not all those who wonder are lost.
Unknown - Epitaph on headstone of actor John Wayne (author unknown)
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight, very clean. When it arrives it is perfect. It puts itself in our hands. It hopes we learned something from yesterday.

The one whose judgment counts most in your life is the one staring back in the glass.

Fashion is something that goes in one year and out the other.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

The wages of sin are unreported.

It is difficult for sorrow to intrude on a busy life.

A chinese philosopher once had a dream that he was a butterfly. From that day on, he was never quite certain that he was not a butterfly, dreaming that he was a man.
Unknown - epitaph for a loved one
Love is my Sword,
Goodness my Armor,
And Humor my Shield.

If you laid all of the lawyers in the world, end to end, on the equator ---- It would be a good idea to just leave them there.

Everything you do or say is public relations.

Feelings are real and legitimate; children behave and misbehave for a reason, even if adults cannot figure it out.

Perhaps one day this too will be pleasant to remember.

Socrates seems to be the philosophical napkin with which the ensuing cultural thinkers of history wipe their mouths of pedantic ooze.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered -- either by themselves or by others.

The really happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery when on a detour.

Mahatma Gandi was what wives wish their husbands were: thin, tan and moral.

An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.

The words you speak today should be soft and tender. . . for tomorrow you may have to eat them.

If you fear nothing, you love nothing. If you love nothing, what joy can there be in life?

Blessed is the person who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night.

That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly.

Beware of the half truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.

Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of.

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.

Fishing gives you a sense of where you fit in the sceme of things - Your place in the universe...I, mean, here I am, one small guy with a fishing pole on this vast beach and out there in the blue expanse of ocean are these hundreds of millions of fish...laughing at me.

This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an actual life, you would have received further instructions as to what to do and where to go.
Unknown - Often attributed to Abraham Lincoln
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

The whole world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going.

Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain.

A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move a body.

A stitch in time would have confused Einstein.

The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius is limited.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging the future but by the past.

It is twice as hard to crush a half-truth as a whole lie.

The atom, being for all practical purposes the stable unit of the physical plane, is a constantly changing vortex of reactions.

How to win a case in court: If the law is on your side, pound on the law; if the facts are on your side, pound on the facts; if neither is on your side, pound on the table.
Unknown - Sign on a restaurant tip jar
If you fear change, leave it here.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.

A diplomat is a man who says you have an open mind, instead of telling you that you have a hole in the head.

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top .

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

The only real failure in life is the failure to try.

Accident, n.: A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of body is better.

A novel is a piece of prose of a certain length with something wrong with it.

Adolescence is the stage between infancy and adultery.

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.

If a pessimist is always right, is he a realist?

Use soft words and hard arguments.

An Irishman is the only man in the world who will step over the bodies of a dozen naked women to get to a bottle of stout.

Ideals are like stars. You will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But, like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides and following them you will reach your destiny.

A life spent making mistakes is not only most honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.

The wages of sin are unreported.

There is only one success- to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Unknown - quoted by Jim Horning
Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

The heart is wiser than the intellect.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.

- Unknown

Mornings are wonderful! The only drawback is that they come at such an inconvenient time of day!
Glen Cook - Shadow Games
I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled toward absolute honesty, one person whose good opinion of us becomes a substitute for the broader opinion of the world.
Glen Cook - The Black Company
Evil is relative?You can?t hang a sign on it. You can?t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.

- Glen Cook - Sweet Silver Blues

I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered, what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?

Weather forcast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.

Life.....is a series of dogs.

Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot, but anyone going faster is a maniac?

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.
George Carlin - George Carlin: You Are All Diseased
Hobbies cost money but interests are free.
George Carlin - From his book - Brain Droppings
Eventually, alas, I realized the main purpose of buying cocaine is to run out of it.

As a matter of principle, I never attend the first annual anything.

Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

When someone asks you, A penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?
George Carlin - Napalm and Silly Putty
The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other going in opposite directions.

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
George Carlin - You Are All Diseased
You have to be realistic about terrorism. Certain groups of people, certain groups, Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and just plain guys from Montanta, are going to continue to make life in this country very interesting for a long, long time.

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, "You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I?m just not close enough to get the job done."

Keep thy religion to thyself.

"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?

If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

Why is the man (or woman) who invests all your money called a broker?

- George Carlin

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen --- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery --- just stark me.

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem, or saying a prayer.

The most exhausting thing you can do is to be inauthentic.

I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.

If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Let the minor genius go his light way and enjoy his life - the great nature cannot so live, he is never really in holiday mood, even though he often plucks flowers by the wayside and ties them into knots and garlands like little children and lays out on a sunny morning.

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.
W. B. Yeats - the second coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcone cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
W. B. Yeats - Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen
O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

- W. B. Yeats

There is no accountability in the public school system - except for coaches. You know what happens to a losing coach. You fire him. A losing teacher can go on losing for 30 years and then go to glory.
Ross Perot
If we did not have such a thing as an airplane today, we would probably create something the size of N.A.S.A. to make one.

- Ross Perot - The Dallas Morning News, March 11, 1984

Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
Pearl Buck - quoted in O Magazine, May 2003
Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same.

Teaching is as sacred as priesthood. If one has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and artist, he must not teach.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then, Life is dull without it.

At my age the bones are water in the morning until food is given them.

There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream - whatever that dream might be.

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
Pearl Buck - The Joy of Children, 1964
The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

- Pearl Buck

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw - "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

What is virtue but the trades unionism of the married.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience.

Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw - The Apple Cart (1930)
I never resist temptation because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) act 1
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
George Bernard Shaw - Major Barbara (1907) act 3
He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

An institution which is populare because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

Do you know what a pessimist is? A person who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself and hates them for it.

All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.
George Bernard Shaw - "Man and Superman" (1903), act I
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
George Bernard Shaw - Major Barbara (1907) act 2
Alcohol is a very necessary article... It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.

Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) act 3
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.
George Bernard Shaw - when asked on his deathbed, ?What would you do if you could live your life over again?
I?d like to be the person I could have been but never was.

The 100% American is 99% an idiot.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

A pessimist thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
George Bernard Shaw - An Unsocial Socialist (1887) ch. 5
"Do you know what a pessimist is?" "A man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it."

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

It is most unwise for people in love to marry
George Bernard Shaw - Candida (1898) act 1
Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die; any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman, 1903
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.
George Bernard Shaw - Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1911) "Limits to Toleration"
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than saying a drunken man is happier than a sober man.

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

Take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity.

Life is a disease; and the only diference between one another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.
George Bernard Shaw - Caesar and Cleopatra (1901) act 4
He who has never hoped can never despair.

He who can, does. He who cannot teaches.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
George Bernard Shaw - Annajanska (1919)
All great truths begin as blasphemies.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing.

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903), Maxims for Revolutionists
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

The love of money is the root of all virtue.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

The fickleness of the women whom I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

All my life, affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion (1916) preface
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage -- it can be delightful.

To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.
George Bernard Shaw - "St. Joan"
The Churches must learn humility as well as teach it.
George Bernard Shaw - Major Barbara (1907) act 2
I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw - Caesar and Cleopatra (1901)
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Nothing ever is done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) act 3
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman, Epistle Dedicatory
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 - "Metamagical Themas" by Douglas Hofstadter
You see things, and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were, and say "Why not?

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman
Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

Nobel prize money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
George Bernard Shaw - "Man and Superman" (1903), act I
A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

He who has never hoped can never despair.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.

Success covers a multitude of blunders.
George Bernard Shaw - Back to Methuselah (1921) pt. 5
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw - "Answers to Nine Questions"
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.
George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion (1916) preface
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

The chief objection of playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.

A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.

Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols, or bombs without incurring any penalties.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw - The Philanderer (1898) act 2
The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Make money and the whole nation will conspire to call you a gentleman.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
George Bernard Shaw - Candida (1898) act 1
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.
George Bernard Shaw - Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898)
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned, for it must be bad.

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a footrule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

England and America are two countries seperated by the same language.

A man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

This is the true joy in life -- being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one...

Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.

- George Bernard Shaw

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it but as I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
Henry David Thoreau
I have lived some thirty years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
Henry David Thoreau - Civil Disobience
The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.
Henry David Thoreau - WALDEN: Or, Life in the Woods
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
Henry David Thoreau
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
Henry David Thoreau
Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.
Henry David Thoreau
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are the richest.
Henry David Thoreau
A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
Henry David Thoreau - Jan. 3, 1861
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Henry David Thoreau - "An Essay on Civil Disobedience," 1849.
Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden: Economy, 1854
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.
Henry David Thoreau
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he imaged, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Henry David Thoreau
Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
Henry David Thoreau
As if there were safety in stupidity alone.
Henry David Thoreau
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, how ever measured or far away.

Petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality.
Henry David Thoreau
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden," the Conclusion
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.
Henry David Thoreau
[Water is] the only drink for a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish fill the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
Henry David Thoreau
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
Henry David Thoreau
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau - Wednesday, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.
Henry David Thoreau - Journal, July 25, 1839
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry David Thoreau
Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden; Where I Lived, And What I Lived For
I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake his neighbours up.
Henry David Thoreau
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society.
Henry David Thoreau
I stand in awe of my body.
Henry David Thoreau
We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.
Henry David Thoreau
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau
Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
Henry David Thoreau
Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, Conclusion, 1854
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Henry David Thoreau
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, 1854
I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
Men have become the tools of their tools
Henry David Thoreau
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
Any fool can make a rule,
and any fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.
Henry David Thoreau
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry David Thoreau
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
Henry David Thoreau
Heroes are often the most ordinary of men.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, cattle, barns, and farming tools, for these are more easily acquired than gotten rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in.
Henry David Thoreau
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau - ?
Many go fishing without knowing it is fish they are after.
Henry David Thoreau
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden (1970)
Things do not change; we change.
Henry David Thoreau
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
Henry David Thoreau - Vol. 2, p.318 Houghton Mifflin
Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, 1854
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden"
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau
To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden: Higher Laws, 1854
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
Henry David Thoreau - Simplify Simplify
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. any truth is better than make-Believe!
Henry David Thoreau - Walden (1854)
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
Henry David Thoreau
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden", 1854
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Henry David Thoreau
One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then
Henry David Thoreau - "Where I Live"
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Henry David Thoreau
My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
Henry David Thoreau
Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
Henry David Thoreau - simplify Simplify
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden: Reading, 1854
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden", 1854
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
In the long run you only hit what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.
Henry David Thoreau
Men are born to succeed, not fail.
Henry David Thoreau
It takes two to speak the truth--one to speak and the other to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.
Henry David Thoreau
Water is the only drink for a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, Chapter 1: Economy
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Henry David Thoreau
All good things are wild, and free.
Henry David Thoreau
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Henry David Thoreau
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your success.
Henry David Thoreau - Journal, January 21, 1838
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Henry David Thoreau
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.
Henry David Thoreau
Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.
Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Henry David Thoreau
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau - Simplify simplify
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.
Henry David Thoreau
Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life
Henry David Thoreau
Be not simply good - be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
It is never too late to give up your prejudices.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden", pp. 323- 324
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
In the long run, you hit only what you aim at: Therefore aim high.
Henry David Thoreau
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Henry David Thoreau - Walking (1862)
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau - Simplify Simplify
How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!
Henry David Thoreau - in Walden, "Economy"
What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
Henry David Thoreau
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau - "Resistance to Civil Government"
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
Henry David Thoreau
What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
Henry David Thoreau
I have learned this at least by my experiment: if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau - "Resistance to Civil Government"
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
Henry David Thoreau
Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
Henry David Thoreau
In wilderness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau - O Magazine, May 2004
Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.
Henry David Thoreau
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau
We falsely attribute to men a determined character - putting together all their yesterdays - and averaging them - we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support - it is worse than a large family - he is the silent poor indeed.
Henry David Thoreau
Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.
Henry David Thoreau
It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden (1854)
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, Economy.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Henry David Thoreau
In solitude especialy do we begin to appreciate the advantage of living with someone who can think.
Henry David Thoreau - book
The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
Henry David Thoreau
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
Henry David Thoreau
It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.
Henry David Thoreau
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or faraway.
Henry David Thoreau
I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.

- Henry David Thoreau - Walden

That ready wit, which you so partially allow me, ... may create many admirers; but, take my word for it, it makes few friends. It shines and dazzles like the noonday sun, but, like that, too, it is very apt to scorch, and therefore is always feared. The milder morning and evening light and heat of that planet soothe and calm our minds. Never seek for wit; if it present itself, well and good; but even then, let your judgement interpose, and take care that it be not at the expense of anybody.

- Philip Dormer Stanhope - 4th earl of Chesterfield, 1749

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

- Cousin Woodman

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. - speech, October 3, 1952
Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. - Speech during 1952 Presidential Campaign
I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
Patriotism is not a short outburst of emotion, but is the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
Newpaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. - quoted by Human Behavior, May 1978
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. - speech to Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Illinois, July 21, 1952
Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
When you sling mud, you lose ground.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
I believe that if we really want human brotherhood to spread and increase until it makes life safe and sane, we must also be certain that there is no one true faith or path by which it may spread
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that he sometimes has to eat them.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that he sometimes has to eat them.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
There is a New America every morning when we wake up. It is upon us whether we will it or not.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. - retort to a heckler asking him to state his beliefs, Time, November 1, 1963
I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. - Speech in Detroit, 7 Oct. 1952
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
Let us talk sense to the American people. Let us tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains.

- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. - speech at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, October 8, 1952

I believe that freedom is the deepest need of every human soul.
George W. Bush - http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/05/20050524-3.html
See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
George W. Bush - Speech to UN General Assembly, September 21, 2004
For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability. Oppression became common, but stability never arrived. We must take a different approach. We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom, and strive to build a community of peaceful, democratic nations.
George W. Bush
America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.
George W. Bush - Inaugural address, 2001
America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.
George W. Bush - September 7, 2003
We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.
George W. Bush - Speech to UN General Assembly, September 21, 2004
The advance of liberty is the path to both a safer and better world.
George W. Bush
Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or justice to our enemies, justice will be done.
George W. Bush - Speech to the United Nations, September 12, 2002
By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand.
George W. Bush - State of the Union address, January 20, 2004
I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again.
George W. Bush - speech, November 19, 1999
American foreign policy must be more than the management of crisis. It must have a great and guiding goal: to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace.
George W. Bush - September 20, 2001
Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
George W. Bush - Speech to UN General Assembly, September 21, 2004
We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. We know that oppressive governments support terror, while free governments fight the terrorists in their midst. We know that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies.
George W. Bush - Speech (2005)
The agenda of the roadblock is the philosophy of the stop sign.
George W. Bush - September 2, 2004, The Republican National Convention, N.Y.
I respect every soldier, from every country, who serves beside us in the hard work of history. America is grateful, and America will not forget.
George W. Bush - Robin Williams, Live on Broadway
Most of our imports come from other countries.
George W. Bush
History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy.
George W. Bush - Speech to UN General Assembly, September 21, 2004
The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.
George W. Bush - speech, November 19, 1999
America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused ? preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.
George W. Bush - Klein, J. (2004). The perils of a righteous president. Time, May 17: 25.
God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands.
George W. Bush - Gov. of Texas, state leading in executions
States should have the right to enact... laws...particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.
George W. Bush - BBC/CNN
Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him!
(said after capture of Saddam)
George W. Bush - speech, November 19, 1999
In the defense of our nation, a president must be a clear-eyed realist. There are limits to the smiles and scowls of diplomacy. Armies and missiles are not stopped by stiff notes of condemnation. They are held in check by strength and purpose and the promise of swift punishment.
George W. Bush - speech, November 19, 1999
The case for trade is not just monetary, but moral. Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.
George W. Bush - On his meeting with John McCain, Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000
I think we agree, the past is over.
George W. Bush
America will never run... And we will always be grateful that liberty has found such brave defenders.
George W. Bush - Inaugural address, 2001
The peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history, yet common in our country. With a simple oath, we affirm old traditions and make new beginnings.
George W. Bush - September 20, 2001
Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.
George W. Bush - On TV, about his passing out eating a pretzel
Chew before you swallow.
George W. Bush
Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and love have no end.
George W. Bush
If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.
George W. Bush - Speech after 9/11 attacks
We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.

- George W. Bush - Press Conference, White House, Tuesday, April 13, 2004

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
Harry S Truman - in Look, Apr. 3, 1956
I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.

If you cannot convince them, confuse them.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.
Harry S Truman - Lecture at Columbia University, 28 Apr. 1959
Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

Take a two-mile walk every morning before breakfast.

We can never tell what is in store for us.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
Harry S Truman - August 8, 1950
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
Harry S Truman - Letter to his sister, Nov. 14, 1947
All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
Harry S Truman - quoted by Time, June 9, 1975
I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.

- Harry S Truman

I feel sorry for people who do not drink. When they wake up in the morning it is as good as they are going to feel all day.
Frank Sinatra
When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.
Frank Sinatra
I can honestly say to you, slaves of the press, that if I had as many love affairs as you have given me credit for, I would now be speaking to you from a jar at the Harvard Medical School.

- Frank Sinatra - Quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me they are wonderful things for other people to go on.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.

Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he _becomes_ polite.

- Jean Kerr

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you.

A good listener is usually thinking about something else.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

One of the simple but genuine pleasures in life is getting up in the morning and hurrying to a mousetrap you set the night before.

Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

A woman will buy anything she thinks the store is losing money on.

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Of all the unbearable nuisances, the ignoramus that has travelled is the worst.

Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.

The safest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it in your pocket.

The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you.

A good listener is usually thinking about something else.

- Kin Hubbard

I have always felt that the moment when first you wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours.

- Monica Baldwin

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
E. B. White - New Yorker, July 3, 1944
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E. B. White - Some Remarks on Humor, introduction
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

Weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society -- things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.

- E. B. White

In the long run you only hit what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your success.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, 1854
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

We falsely attribute to men a determined character - putting together all their yesterdays - and averaging them - we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support - it is worse than a large family - he is the silent poor indeed.

All good things are wild, and free.

Men are born to succeed, not fail.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it but as I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden; Where I Lived, And What I Lived For
I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake his neighbours up.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Henry David Thoreau - Walking (1862)
In wildness is the preservation of the world.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden", 1854
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, how ever measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, Economy.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.
Henry David Thoreau - "Where I Live"
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden," the Conclusion
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden: Economy, 1854
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.

Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau - O Magazine, May 2004
Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden (1854)
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden (1970)
Things do not change; we change.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden: Higher Laws, 1854
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden"
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

As if there were safety in stupidity alone.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau - Simplify Simplify
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. any truth is better than make-Believe!

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
Henry David Thoreau - Simplify simplify
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

In the long run, you hit only what you aim at: Therefore aim high.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, cattle, barns, and farming tools, for these are more easily acquired than gotten rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in.

Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.

It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Henry David Thoreau - WALDEN: Or, Life in the Woods
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, Chapter 1: Economy
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

I have lived some thirty years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or faraway.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he imaged, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau - ?
Many go fishing without knowing it is fish they are after.

It takes two to speak the truth--one to speak and the other to hear.

Any fool can make a rule,
and any fool will mind it.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden
Petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden", 1854
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Heroes are often the most ordinary of men.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish fill the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.

I stand in awe of my body.

Men have become the tools of their tools

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Henry David Thoreau - in Walden, "Economy"
What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.
Henry David Thoreau - Civil Disobience
The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are the richest.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

In solitude especialy do we begin to appreciate the advantage of living with someone who can think.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden
Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

My friend is one... who take me for what I am.

The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.
Henry David Thoreau - book
The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, 1854
I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden (1854)
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
Henry David Thoreau - Vol. 2, p.318 Houghton Mifflin
Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, Conclusion, 1854
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau - "Walden", pp. 323- 324
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau - simplify Simplify
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Be not simply good - be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau - Jan. 3, 1861
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then
Henry David Thoreau - "An Essay on Civil Disobedience," 1849.
Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
Henry David Thoreau - Simplify Simplify
How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.

[Water is] the only drink for a wise man.

We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.

I have learned this at least by my experiment: if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.
Henry David Thoreau - Wednesday, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.
Henry David Thoreau - "Resistance to Civil Government"
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
Henry David Thoreau - Journal, January 21, 1838
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

It is never too late to give up your prejudices.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden: Reading, 1854
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau - Journal, July 25, 1839
There is no remedy for love but to love more.

In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau - "Resistance to Civil Government"
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

- Henry David Thoreau

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

- Stephen Jay Gould

I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.
Rodney Dangerfield - monologue
My mother had morning sickness after I was born.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.

My wife is always trying to get rid of me. The other day she told me to put the garbage out. I said to her I already did. She told me to go and keep an eye on it.

- Rodney Dangerfield

You wake me up early in the morning to tell me I am right? Please wait until I am wrong.
John von Neumann
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
John von Neumann
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

- John von Neumann - on being phoned at 10 a.m.

I improve on misquotation.

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can.

I improve on misquotation.

- Cary Grant