Quotes are interesting to people because they resonate thoughts and feelings that they hold to be true. They are disparaged as intellectual shorthand, but many great people have been great aficionados. Churchill, Lincoln, Regan, and many others Were drawn to and great students of the quotations of great people. Here, in very eclectic order are some of the quotes that resonate my beliefs:
"Doing the day's work day by day, doing a little, adding a little, broadening our bases wanting not only for ourselves but for others also, a fairer chance for all people everywhere. Forever moving forward, always remembering that it is the things of the spirit that in the end prevail. That caring counts and that where there is no vision the people perish. That hope and faith count and that without charity, there can be nothing good. That having dared to live dangerously, and in believing in the inherent goodness of man, we can stride forward into the unknown with growing confidence."
John Gilbert Winant
Inscription on his tombstone
“Loneliness doesn’t always have much to do with being alone.”
-JGR
“Satan loves for us to magnify our small differences as a way of ignoring our greater similarities.”
-JGR
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is better to be a good man than a great man, and harder.
- JGR
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
- Michel de Montaigne
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
- George Bernard Shaw
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
- A. A. Milne
Sarcasm is exhausting
- JGR
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
The truth is more important than the facts.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
- Isaac Asimov
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
- Philip K. Dick
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath.
- Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
- Alfred North Whitehead
Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.
Sir William Osler
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
Sir William Osler
To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.
Sir William Osler
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
Sir William Osler, Aphorisms from his Bedside Teachings (1961) p. 105
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
Sir William Osler, In H. Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler (1925)
Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
Sir William Osler, to his students
Silence is the virtue of fools.
Men who never get carried away should be.
It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.
After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.
When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
- Peter Drucker
The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
- Oscar Wilde
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.
- Clarence Darrow
The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
- Daniel Webster
When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.
A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
- Segal's Law
The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
- Samuel Johnson
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
- Frank Tibolt
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
- G. K. Chesterton
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
- Henry David Thoreau
Don't you wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked 'Brightness,' but it doesn't work.
- Gallagher
None are so busy as the fool and knave.
- John Dryden
There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.
- Alice Thomas Ellis
I have often depended on the blindness of strangers.
- Adrienne E. Gusoff
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas A. Edison
Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew's Passion' on a ukulele.
- Bagdikian's Observation
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), "Man and Superman" (1903), act I
You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
Henry Ford (1863 - 1947)
A good name, like good will, is got by many actions and lost by one.
Lord Jeffery
Chase after truth like hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails.
Clarence Darrow (1857 - 1938)
Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'
Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.
Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC), The Way of Lao-tzu
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
Ovid (43 BC - 17 AD)
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841 - 1935)
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
Wilson Mizner (1876 - 1933)
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Albert Camus (1913 - 1960)
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963), "Texts and Pretexts", 1932
Life is not about what you do. It is about what you do about what you do.
JGR
Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.
Vernon Sanders Law
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
People forget how fast you did a job - but they remember how well you did it.
Howard Newton
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
James Boswell (1740 - 1795), Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791
It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
William Saroyan (1908 - 1981)
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington (1856 - 1915)
Be mild with the mild, shrewd with the crafty, confiding to the honest, rough to the ruffian, and a thunderbolt to the liar. But in all this, never be unmindful of your own dignity.
John Brown
There are two rules for success:
1) Never tell everything you know.
Roger H. Lincoln
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778), Discours en vers sur l'homme, 1737
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), (attributed)
It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Rhetoric
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.
Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC), The Way of Lao-tzu
To perceive is to suffer.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
But penance need not be paid in suffering...It can be paid in forward motion. Correcting the mistake is a positive move, a nurturing move.
Barbara Hall, A Summons to New Orleans, 2000
Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849)
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
Bill Vaughan
You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.
Saint Bernard (1090 - 1153), Epistle
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.
Abraham Lincoln
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln
I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
Abraham Lincoln
I will prepare and some day my chance will come.
Abraham Lincoln
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
Abraham Lincoln
It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.
Abraham Lincoln
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
Whatever you are, be a good one.
Abraham Lincoln
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Sir Francis Bacon
By far the best proof is experience.
Sir Francis Bacon
Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
Sir Francis Bacon
Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
Sir Francis Bacon
Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
Sir Francis Bacon
He of whom many are afraid ought to fear many.
Sir Francis Bacon
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
Sir Francis Bacon
In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.
Sir Francis Bacon
Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
Sir Francis Bacon
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
Sir Francis Bacon
Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
Sir Francis Bacon
Silence is the virtue of fools.
Sir Francis Bacon
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Sir Winston Churchill
All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
Sir Winston Churchill
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
Sir Winston Churchill
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Sir Winston Churchill
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
Sir Winston Churchill
To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.
Sir Winston Churchill
We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.
Sir Winston Churchill
When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
Sir Winston Churchill
Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
Charles Dickens
Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens
It is no small thing when one so fresh from God loves us. (Regarding babies)
Charles Dickens
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.
Charles Dickens,
We need never be ashamed of our tears.
Charles Dickens,
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
Oscar Wilde
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde
Genius is born--not paid.
Oscar Wilde
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
Oscar Wilde
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Oscar Wilde
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
Oscar Wilde
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
Oscar Wilde
Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
James A. Forude
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
Gustave Flaubert
French realist novelist (1821 - 1880)
Always be nice to people on the way up; because you'll meet the same people on the way down.
Wilson Mizner
God help those who do not help themselves.
Wilson Mizner
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
Wilson Mizner
To my embarrassment I was born in bed, naked, with a lady.
Wilson Mizner
Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.
A. Sachs
He not busy being born is busy dying.
Bob Dylan (1941 - )
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.
George Burns (1896 - 1996)
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
George Bernard Shaw
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw
Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
George Bernard Shaw
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
George Bernard Shaw
The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
Eric Hoffer
It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
Eric Hoffer
It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
Eric Hoffer
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
Eric Hoffer
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
Eric Hoffer
Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
Eric Hoffer
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
Eric Hoffer
We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.
Eric Hoffer
We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Eric Hoffer
The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
Eric Hoffer,
The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)
We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)
It is easier to love humanity as a whole that to love one's neighbor.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
George Orwell,
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language", 1946
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
George Orwell,
An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
At age 50, every man has the face he deserves.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
They can make you say anything - ANYTHING - but they can't make you believe it.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950), 1984
Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950), 1984
Words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950), Politics and the English Language, 1946
In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
- Garrison Keillor
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
- Philip K. Dick
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
Steven Wright
I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.
Steven Wright
I was walking down the street wearing glasses when the prescription ran out.
Steven Wright
If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?
Steven Wright
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
Steven Wright
What's another word for Thesaurus?
Steven Wright
It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.
Malcolm Forbes
The best way out is always through.
- Robert Frost
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
- Ray Bradbury
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
James Thurber (1894 - 1961), New Yorker, Apr. 29, 1939 "The Owl who was God"
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Thomas Jones (1892 - 1969)
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
- Douglas Adams
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
- Robertson Davies
The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
- Sir Winston Churchill
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington
One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.
Booker T. Washington
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.
Booker T. Washington
There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
Booker T. Washington
There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.
- Alice Thomas Ellis
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
- Paul Valery
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
- Burt Bacharach
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The squeaking wheel doesn't always get the grease. Sometimes it gets replaced.
- Vic Gold
Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.
- Malcolm Forbes
My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.
- Rodney Dangerfield
Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution. So procrastinate now, don't put it off.
- Ellen DeGeneres
The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.
- Russell Green
Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.
- Edward Teller
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
- Bertrand Russell
The big thieves hang the little ones.
- Czech Proverb
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.
- Joan D. Vinge
I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.
- Harry S Truman
To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is.
- Ellen DeGeneres
Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
Mark Twain
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
Mark Twain
In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
Mark Twain
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Mark Twain
It is easier to stay out than get out.
Mark Twain
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Mark Twain
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Mark Twain
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Mark Twain
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
Mark Twain,
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Mark Twain,
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
Mark Twain,
A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
Benjamin Franklin
Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.
Benjamin Franklin
If you would be wealthy, think of saving as well as getting.
Benjamin Franklin
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin,
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
- Rene Descartes
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault.
- Henry Kissinger
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
- Thomas Mann
We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
- Ray Bradbury
Be as innocent as doves but as shrewd as snakes.
- Jesus Christ
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
Thomas Mann
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), (attributed)
War is not nice.
Barbara Bush (1925 - )
Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose.
Evan Esar
When you have perfected love, then you can judge. Until then, judgment is mine.
God
A husband is like a fire, he goes out when unattended.
Evan Esar
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.
Evan Esar
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
Evan Esar
The girl with a future avoids a man with a past.
Evan Esar
You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
Evan Esar
Be not too hasty either with praise or blame; speak always as though you were giving evidence before the judgement-seat of the Gods.
Seneca
Be silent as to services you have rendered, but speak of favours you have received.
Seneca
Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.
Seneca
Dangerous is wrath concealed. Hatred proclaimed doth lose its chance of wreaking vengeance.
Seneca
Delay not; swift the flight of fortune's greatest favours.
Seneca
Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
Seneca
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
Seneca
Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.
Seneca
Fate rules the affairs of mankind with no recognizable order.
Seneca
He who spares the wicked injures the good.
Seneca
He will live ill who does not know how to die well.
Seneca
I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge.
Seneca
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
Seneca
If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favourable to him.
Seneca
If virtue precede us every step will be safe.
Seneca
It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity.
Seneca
It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence.
Seneca
- More quotations on: [Silence]
It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.
Seneca
- More quotations on: [Passion]
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
Seneca
It is pleasant at times to play the madman.
Seneca
It is rash to condemn where you are ignorant.
Seneca
It is the sign of a weak mind to be unable to bear wealth.
Seneca
- More quotations on: [Wealth]
It should be our care not so much to live a long life as a satisfactory one.
Seneca
Let tears flow of their own accord: their flowing is not inconsistent with inward peace and harmony.
Seneca
He who does not know how to be silent will not know how to speak.
Ausonius
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.
Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)
Oppression can only survive through silence.
Carmen de Monteflores
I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.
Cato the Elder (234 BC - 149 BC)
Silence is more musical than any song.
Christina Rossetti (1830 - 1894)
A fair request should be followed by the deed in silence.
Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321), The Divine Comedy
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964)
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Back to Methuselah (1921) pt. 5
With silence favor me.
(Favete Linguis)
Horace (65 BC - 8 BC)
A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill, requires only our silence, which costs nothing.
John Tillotson (1630 - 1694)
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
Josh Billings (1818 - 1885)
The most profound statements are often said in silence.
Lynn Johnston (1947 - ), For Better or For Worse, 01-15-04
In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
Martin Fraquhar Tupper
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968)
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968)
In silence man can most readily preserve his integrity.
Meister Eckhart
Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer.
Muhammad Ali (1942 - ), "More Than a Hero"
Not merely an absence of noise, Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws from the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary.
Peter Minard
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
Publilius Syrus (~100 BC), Maxims
It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.
Pythagoras (582 BC - 507 BC)
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894)
Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant.
Saadi (1184 - 1291)
Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)
It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence.
Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD)
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881)
A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
Thomas Hardy
Of those who say nothing, few are silent.
Thomas Neill
Silence is one of the great arts of conversation, as allowed by Cicero himself, who says, 'there is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.' A well bred woman may easily and effectually promote the most useful and elegant conversation without speaking a word. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.
Tom Blair
There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.
William Penn (1644 - 1718)
Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Much Ado about Nothing", Act 2 scene 1
The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)
My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.
Bette Davis (1908 - 1989), The Lonely Life, 1962
He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)
Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.
Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784)
The worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit, is to be joyless.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957), Gaudy Night
Waste no more time talking about great souls and how they should be. Become one yourself!
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 AD - 180 AD)
When the habitually even-tempered suddenly fly into a passion, that explosion is apt to be more impressive than the outburst of the most violent amongst us.
Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost, 1934
Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
- Alexandre Dumas
The least of learning is done in the classrooms.
- Thomas Merton
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
- Samuel Johnson
The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.
- Paul Johnson
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
- Robert X. Cringely
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
- H. L. Mencken
I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
- Robert Orben
Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
- Frank Zappa
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
- Søren Kierkegaard
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
Soren Kierkegaard
- More quotations on: [Laziness]
In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love.
Soren Kierkegaard
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Soren Kierkegaard
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Soren Kierkegaard
- More quotations on: [Freedom]
Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855)
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
No one can earn a million dollars honestly.
- William Jennings Bryan
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
- Thomas Jefferson
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
- G. K. Chesterton
What luck for rulers when men do not think.
- Adolf Hitler
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
- Sir William Drummond
The scientific name for an animal that doesn't either run from or fight its enemies is lunch.
- Michael Friedman
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
- H. L. Mencken
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
- Jack London
Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.
- Barbara Tober
By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
- Socrates
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
- Steven Weinberg
We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
