Quotes

[This page is online dump of quotes collected over many many years - on scraps of paper and in unwieldy Word documents.

UPDATE: This page will no longer be updated and the collection here will be eventually moved to it's new home : The Quoteyard. You should pay the new blog a visit as it allows you to search for author or quote or even explore the quotes randomly.]

Abbey, Edward
•    May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

•    What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.

•    When the fight begins within himself, a man’s worth something.

Abley, Mark
•    Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.

Ackerman, Diane
•    I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it.

Adam, James Trulow
•    The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

Adams, Ansel
•    To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, 'There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.'

•    The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

•    Photography is a way of telling what you feel about what you see.

Adams, Douglas
•    I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

Adams, Henry Brooks

• No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

• They know enough who know how to learn.

Adams, John Quincy

•    The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality.

•    The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of one's self.

Adams, Scot
•    Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Addison, Joseph
•    The three essentials to happiness in life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.

•    Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honour is a private station.

•    What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.

Ade, George
•    Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.
Ade’s Law

Adenauer, Konrad
•    We all live under the same sky, but we do not all have the same horizon.

Adler, Alfred
•    It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

Adler, Mortimer
•    You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

•    There is no more irritating fellow than the man who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or liberty, by quoting from Webster.

•    In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Aeschylus
•    For the mighty, even to give way is grace.

Aesop
•    We often give our enemies the means of our destruction.

•    Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.

Agar, Herbert
•    The truth, which makes men free is, for the most part, the truth which men prefer not to see.

Agathon, Abba

• I have never gone to sleep with a grievance against anyone. And, as far as I could, I have never let anyone go to sleep with a grievance against  me.

Aiger, W.R.
•    Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.

Alberoni, Francesco
•    A friend is a person who shows us the way and walks a piece of the road with us.

Albright, Hem
•    A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

Alcott
•    One’s outlook is a part of one’s virtue.

Alcott, Louisa May
•    I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.

Alda, Alan
•    Begin by challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
•    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

•    Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.

•    I am a part of all that I have met.

•    Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

•    Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

Ali
•    The triumph of mediocre men brings down the elite.

Allen, Fred
•    You can only live once. But if you work it right, once is enough.

Allen, Gracie
•    When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.

Allen, Woody
•    I am not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

•    More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path
leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Amara, Roy

• We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

• The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes.

Andretti, Mario
•    If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.

Andrews, Julie
•    Love is not measured by how you feel, but how you make the other person feel.

Angelou, Maya
•    Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

•    We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

•    There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.

•    Jealousy in romance is like salt in food. A little can enhance the savor, but too much can spoil the pleasure and, under certain circumstances, can be life-threatening.

Anonymous
•    No dreamer is ever too small, no dream is ever too big.

•    The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
(From WIRED Magazine)

•    Knowledge is learning something every day. Wisdom is letting go of something every day.

•    There are no barriers that cannot be bridged except the ones men create in their own minds. (Zen Saying)

•    A gentleman is a man who can disagree without being disagreeable.

•    The good is often the enemy of the best.
(ad line for Mercedes Benz)

•    Learn as if you have to live forever, live as if you have to die tomorrow.

•    Unintended consequences outnumber intended consequences.

•    There is no reality. Only perceived reality.

•    Anyone can make a mistake. A fool insists on repeating it.

•    Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean,
And the pleasant land.

So the little minutes,
Humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages,
Of eternity.

•    Success is a journey, not a destination.

•    Sometimes you can only find your way by getting lost.

•    Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind; to forget the mistakes of the past and press on the greater achievements of the future. To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.

•    Never pay a compliment as though you expect a receipt.

•    You can learn much about life from a draughts game: surrender one to take two; don’t make two moves at one time; move up, now down; and when you reach the top, you may move as you like.
- A 19th century Hassidic Rabbi

•    Money isn’t everything; usually it isn’t even enough.

•    All things must pass
None of life’s strings can last
So, I must be on my way
And face another day.
- All Things Must Pass, 1970

•    The best way out of a difficulty is through it.

•    Never look back until you want to go that way.

•    We are just statistics born to consume resources.

•    Give fools their gold, and knaves their power;
Let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall;
Who sows a field, or trains a flower;
Or plants a tree, is more than all.
”A Harvest Song”

•    A wise man knows everything; a shrewd one everybody.

•    There is nothing so annoying as to have two people go right on talking when you’re interrupting.

•    Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

•    The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.

•    All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

•    Don’t confuse activity with achievement.
IBM Slogan

•    God will forgive me; that’s his business.

•    Nothing that can happen to you is as bad as being scared that something will.

•    The worst day shooting images is better than the best day at work.

•    It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.

•    Love is like playing the piano. First you learn to play by the rules, then you forget the rules and play from your heart.

•    Behind every successful man stands an amazed woman.

•    To him that you tell your secret you resign your liberty.

•    When your dreams turn to dust, vacuum.

•    Everyone hears what you say, friends listen to what you say, best friends listen to what you don’t say.

•    A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn’t like the tune.

•    Love me the most when I deserve it the least, that’s when I need it the most.

•    There are some times when silence has the loudest voice.

•    After all is said and done, usually more is said.

•    Devote each day to the object then on time and each day evening will find something done.

•    Being superstitious brings bad luck.

•    Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.

•    The Earth is a grain of sand, only bigger.

•    Adolescence is when children start bringing up their parents.

•    The problem with reality is the lack of background music.

•    Life is a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.

•    Don't judge a book by its movie.

•    I call a person rich when he can meet the requirements of his imagination.
(From the movie ‘The Portrait of A Lady’)

•    Every status has its symbol.

•    Others are not against you, there are merely for themselves.

•    A single rose given during one's lifetime is better than a bouquet of orchids placed over a grave.

•    The real measure of wealth is how much money you'd be worth if you lost all of your money.

Anthony, Robert
•    Moving fast is not the same as going somewhere.

•    Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.

Archer, Jeffrey
•    I want to be your stranger across a crowded room.

Aretino, Pietro
•    I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself.

Aristophanes
•    By words the mind is winged.

Aristotle
•    The quality of life is determined by its activities.

•    Dignity consists not in possessing honours, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.

•    Nature does nothing uselessly.

•    There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

•    There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.

•    We make war that we may live in peace.

•    Education is the best provision for the journey to old age.

•    Soulmates are people who bring out the best in you. They are not perfect but are always perfect for you.

•    All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

•    It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

•    Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always remain unaltered.

•    Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

•    The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Armour, Richard
•    Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
(on libraries)

Arnold, Mathew
•    Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Arts, G.J
•    Possessing knowledge has two advantages; you judge less and you judge better.

Asimov, Isaac

• Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

• Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

• No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Atwood, Margaret

•    A word after a word after a word is power.

Auden, W.H.
•    Propaganda is a monologue which seeks not a response but an echo.

•    He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.

•    And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

•    Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.

Auerbach, Berthold
•    Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Aurelius, Marcus
•    Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

•    All is ephemeral – fame and the famous as well.

•    I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.

Austen, Jane
•    A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

Ausubel, Kenny
•    Each of us has a spark of life inside us, and our highest endeavor ought to be to set off that spark in one another.

Bacon, Francis

• In taking revenge a man is but equal to his enemy, but in passing it over he is his superior.

• Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

• Virtue is a rich stone, best plain set.

• Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

• Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.

• Words, when written, crystallize history; their very structure gives permanence to the unchangeable past.

• Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

• If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.

• A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

• They are ill-discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

• A fertile soil, busy workshops, and easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place – these three things make a nation great and prosperous.

• 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.

• Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.

• Things alter for the worse spontaneously. If they be not altered for the better designedly.

• To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none.

Baez, Joan
•    You don’t get to choose how you are going to die or when, you can only decide how you are going to live now.

Bahcall, John N.
•    The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.

Baldwin, Faith
•    Time is a dressmaker specialising in alterations.

Baldwin, James
•    I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

•    Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Baldwin, Stanley
•    War would end if the dead could return.

Ball, Ivern
•    Never itch for anything you aren’t willing to scratch for.

•    Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it’s addressed to someone else.

Balzac, Honore de
•    Passion is universal humanity, without it religion, humanity, romance and art would be useless.

•    Modesty is the conscience of the body.

•    What is art? Nature concentrated.

•    When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.

•    Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

•    It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.

•    Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Bankhead, Tallulah
•    If I had to live my life again I’d make all the same mistakes – only sooner.

Banzai, Buckaroo
•    The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

Bardyaev, Nicholas
•    In a certain sense, every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.

Barney, Natalie Clifford
•    Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.

Barrie, James Mathew
•    Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.

Barron, Frank
•    The refusal to choose is a form of choice; disbelief is a form of belief.

Barry, Dave
•    You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.

•    People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

Barry, Philip
•    Love: Two minds without a single thought.

Barrymore, Ethel
•    The best time to make friends is before you need them.

Baruch, Bernard
•    Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

Bastiat, Frederic
•    The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

Bates, Marston
•    Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.

Bayley. Stephen
•    Style is the feather that helps the arrow fly, not the one you put in your hat.

Bazin, Herve
•    It’s not the river that runs, but the water. It is not time that passes but us.

Beaton, Cecil
•    Fashions are ephemeral, but fashion is enduring.

Bedbury, Scott

• A great brand is a story that’s never completely told.

Beecher, Henry Ward

• The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.

• Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.

• All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

• A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs - jolted by every pebble in the road.

Beerbohm, Max

• The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes.

Beethoven
•    Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Belloc, Hilaire
•    I have wandered all my life, and I have travelled; the difference between the two is this: we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.

Benchley, Robert

• Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.

Bennett, Jesse Lee

• Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.

Bergamin, Jose

• A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

Berger, Sally
•    The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Bergson, Henri
•    Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

Berlioz, Louis-Hector
•    The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.

Bernard, Claude
•    Art is I … science is we.

Bernanos, George
•    Hope is a risk that must be run.

•    It’s a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.

Bernard, Dorothy
•    Courage is fear that has said its prayers.

Bernbach, Bill
•    It’s not just what you say that stirs people. It’s the way you say it.

Bible, The
•    For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

•    We know in part, and we prophesy in part.

•    Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.
Job 38:11

Bierce, Ambrose

• Language, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

• Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it. An evidence of culture and a passport to polite society.

• Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

• Conversation, n. A fair to the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor. - ‘The Devil's Dictionary’

• War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

• Admiration: Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.

• The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavour upon the business known as gambling.

• To be positive : To be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

• Politics is a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

• Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.

• Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

• Appeal, v.t. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.

• Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

Billings, Josh

• Laughter is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one place.

• There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.

• Nature never makes any blunders; when she makes a fool she means it.

• There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

• Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

• Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.

• Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.

• 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.

• There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply.

Bismark, Otto van
•    A little caution outflanks a large cavalry.

•    Politics is the art of the possible.

•    Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

Black, August
•    Pride is tasteless, colourless and sizeless. Yet it is the hardest thing to swallow.

Blake, William
•    To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

•    In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

•    When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

•    A truth told with bad intent
beats all the lies you can invent.

•    No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

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

•    Always be ready speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

•    When nations grow old, the arts grow cold and commerce settles on every tree.

Bohr, Niels
•    An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

•    Never express yourself more clearly than you can think.

•    Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

•    Empty and be full.
Bend and be straight
Have much and be confused
Have little and gain everything.

•    The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.

Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas
•    Who is content with nothing possesses all things.

Bombeck, Erma
•    Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

•    People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.

Bonaparte, Napoleon
•    It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

•    From the sublime to the ridiculous, there’s only one step.

•    Those who failed to oppose me, who readily agreed with me, accepted all my views, and yielded easily to my opinions, were those who did me the most injury, and were my worst enemies, because, by surrendering to me so easily, they encouraged me to go too far... I was then too powerful for any man, except myself, to injure me.

•    Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

•    Courage is like love, it must have hope for nourishment.

•    Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

•    Courage isn’t having the strength to go on – it is going on when you don’t have the strength.

•    There are only two forces that unite men – fear and interest.

•    A leader is a dealer in hope.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich
•    If you board the wrong train, it’s no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

Borge, Victor
•    Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

Borges, Jorge Luis
•    I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.

•    A good actor does not make his entry before the theatre is built.

•    It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.

•    I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Bosco, Don
•    Nothing attracts the young so much as the sight of happiness which springs from a virtuous life.

Bovee
•    When all else is lost, the future still remains.

•    Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.

Bowerman, Bill
•    If you have a body, you are an athlete.

Boyle, Henry
•    The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway.

Bradbury, Ray
•    The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

Bradley, Omar
•    We need to learn to set our course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.

Bradstreet, Anne
•    Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.

Branden, Nathaniel
•    Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.

Braque, Georges
•    Truth exists. Only lies are invented.

•    Perspective is a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress.

Brecht, Bertholdt
•    Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled
For their slaves.

Bresson, Henri-Cartier
•    Photography is to put in the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

•    Shooting a picture is recognising an event and at the very instant and within a fraction of a second rigorously organising the forms you see to express and give meaning to that event. It is a matter of putting your brain, your eye and your heart in the same line of sight. It is a way of life.

Brilliant, Ashleigh
•    The closest thing we will ever come to an orderly universe is a good library.

Brisbane, Arthur
•    The fence around a cemetery is foolish, for those inside cannot come out and those outside don’t want to get in.

Bronte, Emily
•    If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts
be known by their results.

Brontes, Jacqui
•    Life’s full of complications. Even when you’re born, there’s a string attached.

Brooks Adams, Henry
•    They know enough who know how to learn.

Brooks, Phillips
•    Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks.

Brooks, Van Wyck
•    As against having beautiful workshops, studios, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

Brown Jr., H. Jackson
•    Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

Brown, Rita Mae

• One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.

• The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.

Brown, Sam
•    Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.

Browne, Sir Thomas

• All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.

Browning, Robert
•    Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?

Brunner, John
•    There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better."

Bryant, Paul
•    Winning isn’t everything, but it beats anything that comes second.

Brynner, Yul
•    Girls have an unfair advantage over men. If they can’t get what they want by being smart, they get it by being dumb.

Buck, Pearl S.
•    Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.

Buddha, The
•    He who has mastery over the mind is a monarch unto himself.

•    A man should first direct himself in the way he should go. Only then should he instruct others.

•    Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.

•    There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.

•    If you would be freed of greed, you have to leave egotism behind. The best mental exercise for relinquishing egotism is contemplating impermanence.

Buffet, Jimmy
•    We are the people our parents warned us about.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward
•    A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

•    Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.

Bunyan, John
•    A man there was, tho' some did count him mad
The more he cast away, the more he had.

Buonarroti, Michelangelo
•    Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

Burgess, Anthony
•    A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motorshow - full of potential, but temporarily inactive.

Burke, Billie
•    Age is of no importance unless you are a cheese.

Burke, Edmund
•    To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

•    The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.

•    Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

Burnett, Leo
•    When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.

Burns, Robert
•    Hope not sunshine every hour
Fear not clouds will always lower
Happiness is but a name
Make content and ease thy aim.

Burroughs, John
•    Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones.

Buscaglia, Leo
•    Perfect love is rare indeed - for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain.

Butler, Samuel
•    All the animals except man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.

•    Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

•    To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

•    Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value to its scarcity.

•    To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.

•    Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.

Byron, George Gordon
•    Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.

Byron, Lord
•    Smiles form the channels of a future tear.

•    The busy have no time for tears.

•    Words are things; and a small drop of ink
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

•    The dew of compassion is a tear.

•    There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture in the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more.

•    The drying up a single tear has more of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.

•    I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.

•    Words are things; and a small drop of ink
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Cage, John
•    The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation.

Cammarota, Aldo
•    Time is the best of all teachers, but it has the bad habit of killing its students.

Campbell, Joseph
•    The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

Camus, Albert
•    In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

•    Freedom is nothing else but chance to be better.

•    I want to know if I can live with what I know, and only that.

•    To live is, in itself, a value judgement. To breathe is to judge.

•    Absolute freedom mocks justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.

•    Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.

•    It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.

•    You know what charm is : A way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

•    Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

•    Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

•    Civilisation does not lie in a greater or lesser degree of refinement, but in an awareness shared by a whole people.

•    Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.

•    Do not walk in front of me I may not follow. Do not walk behind me I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

•    You willl never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

•    There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

•    By definition, a government has no conscience, sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

•    I love my country too much to be a nationalist.

•    We are all a product of the choices we make.

Canetti, Elias
•    History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened. 'The Human Province'

Carlyle, Thomas
•    Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

•    History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

•    Our main business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance but to do what lies clearly at hand.

•    Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

•    To a shower of gold, all things are penetrable.

•    The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.

Carradine, David
•    If you cannot be a poet, be the poem

Carroll, Lewis
•    When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra.

Casals, Pablo
•    The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.

Catherall
•    The three foundations of learning : seeing much, suffering much and studying much.

Cato The Elder
•    Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cecchi, Emilio
•    Ideas are nobody’s property; they belong to whoever expresses them best.

Celine, Louis-Fernand
•    Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.

Cervantes, Miguel de
•    Everyone is the son of his own works.

•    A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

Cervoni, Marie-Jose
•    If you don’t attack your work with a passion, it’s not worth doing.

Ch’Ai, Lu
•    The end of all method is to seem to have no method.

Chagall, Marc
•    In our life there is a single colour, as an artist’s palette; which express the meaning of life and art. It is the colour of love.

Chamfort, Nicolas

• Society is composed of two great classes: those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.

Channing, William Henry
•    To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common - this is my symphony.

Charlemagne
•    To know another language is to have a second soul.

Charron
•    He who receives a good turn should never forget it; he who does one should never remember it.

Chartier, Alain
•    Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it is the only one we have.

Chase, Edna Woolman
•    Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.

Chekov, Anton
•    Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

•    Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

•    If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

Cheney, John Vance
•    The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.

Chesterfield, Earl of
•    Be wiser than other people if you can, but do not tell them so.

Chesterfield, Lord
•    Virtue and learning, like gold, have their intrinsic value; but if they are not polished they certainly lose a great deal of their lustre; and even polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.

•    Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o'clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.

•    Style is the dress of thoughts.

•    An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.

Chesterton, G. K.

• People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

• All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

• Coincidences are spiritual puns.

• Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

• Truth is sacred and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

• Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.

• You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

• Half a truth is better than no politics.

• A good novel tells us the truth about it’s hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

• It hasn’t failed, it has simply never been practised. (on Christianity)

• It is always the secure who are humble.

• There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.

• They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind.

Chopra, Deepak
•    In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

Chuang-Tzu
•    Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech is cantankerous.

•    Men cannot see their reflection in running water, but only in still water.

Churchill, Winston
•    Without measureless and perpetual uncertainty the drama of human life would be destroyed.

•    We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

•    Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

•    A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

•    Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.

•    If you’re going through hell, keep going.

•    The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

•    Common sense is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

Ciardi, J
•    The day will happen whether you get up or not.

Cicero
•    To live long, it is necessary to live slowly.

•    He is rich who has such property that he desires nothing beyond.

•    A man of courage is also full of faith.

•    My precept to all who build, is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house to the owner.

•    Nothing troubles you for which you do not yearn.

•    A room without books is like a body without a soul.

•    We should measure affection, not like youngsters by the ardour of its passion, but by its strength and constancy.

•    My precept to all who build, is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house to the owner.

•    Advice is judged by results, not by intention.

•    The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

•    A man without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however, fertile, without cultivation.

•    Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

•    What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.

Clark, R
•    A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what cannot be taken from you.

Clarke, Arthur C
•    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

•    Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.

•    A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

•    It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

•    If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says it is impossible, he is probably wrong.

Clarke, James Freeman

• A politician is a man who thinks of the next election; while the statesman thinks of the next generation.

Claudian
•    He who strikes terror into others is himself in continual fear.

Clausewitz
•    War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.

Clockbum, Claud
•    Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.

Cocks, Barnett
•    A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

Cocteau, Jean
•    The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

•    We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

•    Fashion is what goes out of fashion.

Cohen, Andrew
•    If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language.

Cole, David

• Translation is the art of erasing oneself in order to speak in another's voice.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

• The best thing about being young is, if you had to do it all over again, you would still have time.

• The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on.

• Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

• I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose, - words in their best order; poetry, - the best words in their best order.

• Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.

• If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself.

• He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

• Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.

• The light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.

• wiki Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.

Collie, G. Norman
•    Every man has one thing he can do better than anyone else - and that usually is reading his own handwriting.

Collier, Jeremy
•    The abuse of a thing is no argument against the use of it.

Collins, Joan
•    The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.

Collins, John Churton
•    If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues?

Colton, Charles Caleb
•    Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.

•    As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.

Conan, Laure
•    Nothing is small in love. Those who wait for great occasions to demonstrate their tenderness don’t know how to love.

Confucius
•    For one who has no objective, nothing is relevant.

•    When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.

•    By looking at a man’s faults you know his character.

•    Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.

•    When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge.

•    Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others.

•    By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.

•    Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

•    He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.

•    When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

•    A superior man is distressed by his want of ability.

•    When prosperity comes, do not use all of it.

•    The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in actions.

•    Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.

•    To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness.

•    Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.

•    I hear and forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

•    It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.

•    Silence is the true friend that never betrays.

•    A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace.

•    A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

•    A picture is a poem without words.

Congereve, William
•    Defer not until tomorrow to be wise;
Tomorrow’s sun to thee may never rise.

Connolly, Cyril
•    Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

•    Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

Constable, John
•    I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, -- light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

Cooley, Charles Horton
•    An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

Coren, Alan
•    Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.

Cosby, Bill
•    I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.

Coubertin, Baron Pierre de
•    The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.

Coughlin, Lawrence C.
•    Coughlin’s Law: Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.

Cousins, Norman
•    Laughter is inner jogging.

•    Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

Cowley, Abraham
•    Nothing so soon the drooping spirits can raise / As praises from the men, whom all men praise.

Cowper, William
•    Oh, spare your idol ! think him human still
Charms he may have, but he has frailties too;
Dole, not too much, nor spoil what ye admire.

•    God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

•    A fool must now and then be right by chance.

Cox, Mercelene
•    Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet; there’s always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires.

Crane, Dr. George W.
•    Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade in public. Never clothe them in vulgar and shoddy attire.

Croft, Robert
•    I love you
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what you are making of me.
I love you
Because you have done more
Than anyone or anything
To make me happy.
You have done it without a word,
Without a touch, without a sign
You have done it
Just by being yourself.
After all,
Perhaps that is what love means.

cummings, e.e
•    The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

•    I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.

•    Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

•    It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

•    Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Cuomo, Mario M.
•    You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

da Vinci, Leonardo
•    As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

•    Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

•    Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

•    Let proportion be found not only in numbers and measures, but also in sounds, weights, times, and positions, and what ever force there is.

•    In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Dali, Salvador
•    While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.

•    The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.

•    Have no fear of perfection – we’ll never reach it.

Daniel, Samuel
•    For ‘tis some ease our sorrows to reveal,
If they to whom we shall impart our woes,
Seem to feel a part of what we feel,
And meet us within a sigh, but at a close.

Dante Alighieri
•    Brother,
the world is blind, and you come from the world.
You living ones continue to assign
to heaven every cause, as if it were
the necessary source of every motion.
If it were so, then your free will would be
destroyed, and there would be no equity
in joy for doing good, in grief for evil....
- From ‘Divine Comedy Purgatorio,’

•    The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

Darwin, Charles Robert
•    A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

•    Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Dassault, Marcel
•    For a plane to fly well, it must be beautiful.

Daudet, Alphonse
•    Hatred - the anger of the weak.

Davis, Jefferson
•    Never be haughty to the humble; never be humble to the haughty.

Day, Clarence
•    Information’s pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.

Dean, James
•    Dream as if you’ll live forever; live as if you’ll die today.

Dean Martin, Everett

• Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance.

de Bono, Edward

•    Argument is meant to reveal the truth, not create it.

Defoe, Daniel
•    All men would be tyrants if they could.

de Gaulle, Charles
•    The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

de Gourmont, Remy
•    A little girl doesn’t expect declarations of affection from her doll: she loves it, that’s all. That is how love should be.

de Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat
•    Sad is his lot, who, once at least in his life, has not been a poet.

de Montaigne, Michel
•    A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

•    Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

•    We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

•    Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

•    I quote others only the better to express myself.

•    Don’t discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose; if you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.

De Quincey, Thomas
•    Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone

de Rois, Dr. Helen
•    Put yourself wholeheartedly into something, and energy grows. It seems inexhaustible. If, on the other hand, you are divided and conflicted about what you are doing, you create anxiety. And the amount of physical and emotional energy consumed by anxiety is exorbitant.

de Staël, Madame
•    Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end. Corinne

•    The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.

•    The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.

de Saint-Exupery, Antoine
•    You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

•    Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

•    He who would travel happily must travel light.

•    If you want to build a ship, don't drum up men to go to the forest to gather wood, saw it, and hail the planks together. Instead, teach them the desire for the sea.

de Saussure, Ferdinand
•    Time changes all things: there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.

de Vries, Peter
•    The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

Descartes, Rene
•    The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

•    The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

•    In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.

Desmoulins, C.
•    It is not the weathercock that changes; it is the wind.

Dewar, Thomas
•    Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open.

•    The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

Dickens, Charles
•    Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

•    A word in earnest is as good as a speech.

•    A word in earnest is as good as a speech.

Dickinson, Emily

• There is no frigate like a book
  To take us lands away,
  Nor any coursers like a page
  Of prancing poetry.

• They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.

• Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.
  ‘Because I Could Not Stop For Death’

• How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

• The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

Dinesen, Isak
•    Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.

Diogenes
•    We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.

Disraeli, Benjamin
•    Despair is the conclusion of fools.

•    It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

•    Amusement to an observing mind is study.

•    You fall in love with personality but you live with character.

•    Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

•    The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

D’Israeli, Isaac

• The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.

• While language is forming, writers are applauded for extending its limits; when established, for restricting themselves to them.

Ditka, Mike
•    You’re never a loser until you quit trying.

•    Success isn’t permanent, and failure isn’t fatal.

Dizick, Missy
•    Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you.

Doctorow, E.L.
•    Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way.

Donne, John
•    No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

•    It is never the shallower for the calmnesse. The Sea is a deepe, there is as much water in the Sea, in a calme, as in a storme.

Dostoevski, Fyodor
•    Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Dreiser, A
•    Religion is a bandage to protect a soul made bloody by cirsumstance.

Drummond, William
•    He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not, is a slave.

Dryden
•    A man is to be cheated into passion but to be reasoned into truth.

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt
•    A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself.

Duhamel, Georges
•    I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

Dumas, Alexandre
•    God fishes for souls with a line, the Devil fishes with a net.

•    All generalisations are dangerous, even this one.

Duncan, Sandy
•    There are things you have to do to support your dreams. I despise people who accept minor or secondrate roles and then are bitter about it. Even when I was doing silly stuff, I tries to infuse some energy into it, an enthusiasm.
Many people are unwilling to start at the beginning. They want to be a star before it’s time. But they are never going to succeed until they pay their dues and learn from their experiences.

Dunham, David
•    Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

Durant, Will

• Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

• To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

• History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

Dylan, Bob

•    You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.

•    All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

Earhart, Amelia

• Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

Eco, Umberto

• By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.

• Never fall in love with your own airship.

Eddington, Sir Arthur
•    Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.

Edison, Thomas Alva
•    Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Edwards, Jonathan
•    Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.

Einstein, Albert

• The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty and truth.

• Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

• Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

• The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

• To be a perfect sheep in a flock, first and foremost you have to be a sheep.

• Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterise our age.

• Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations, produced by enthusiastic and infinite labour in every country of the world. All this is put into your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honour it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the permanent things we create in common.

• If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

• Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

• There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

• The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

• Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

• It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.

• Physics should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

• I have no special talents. I am only passionately curios.

• Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.

• We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

• Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from that of their social environment.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

•    Plans are nothing, planning is everything.

Eleanor of Aquitaine
•    Trees are not known by their leaves, nor even by their blossoms, but by their fruits.

Eliot, George
•    Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

•    What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

•    You are never too old to be what you might have been.

•    I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.

•    Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

•    It’s them that take advantage that get advantage in this world.

Eliot, T.S.
•    Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

•    This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

Ellington, Duke
•    I don't need time. What I need is a deadline.

Ellis, Havelock
•    Jealousy is that dragon which slays love under the very pretence of keeping it alive.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

• We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.

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

• What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

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

• If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

• Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

• Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

• Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

• Fear always springs from ignorance.

• Money often costs too much.

• Man is a piece of the universe made alive.

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

• Hitch your wagon to a star.

• The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

• In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.

• Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

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

• Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man.

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

• The music than can deepest reach
  And cure all ill, is cordial speech.

• What you are thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

• Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

• You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

• Dictionary : The raw material of possible poems and histories.

• Every word was once a poem.

• 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.

• The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

• If a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider.

• Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

• No man has a prosperity so high or firm, but that two or three words can dishearten it; and there is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress.

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

• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

• We read often with as much talent as we write.

• The only gift is a portion of thyself. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his pictures.

• Every hero becomes a bore at last.

• Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

• Earth laughs in flowers.

• There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

• We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

• We do not quite forgive a giver.

• The true measure of a man’s wealth is in the things he can afford not to buy.

• Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; Some blunders and absurdities crept in; Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

• Language is fossil poetry.

• Always do what you are afraid to do.

• Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

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

• The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

• A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

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

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

• 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.

• God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.

• Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

• Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

• Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

• Language is the archive of history.

• A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Erskine, John
•    There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.

Ervin Jr., Samuel James
•    Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.

Epicetus
•    Nothing is to be had for nothing.

Epicurus
•    Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?

Ertz, Susan
•    Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Eschenbach , Marie Ebner von
•    We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for.

Estrada, Domencio Cieri
•    Time is a digestive.

Evers, Medgar
•    You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.

Fadiman, Cliff
•    When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.

Fallaci, Oriana
•    Only as an egg in the womb are we all equal.

Faulkner, William

• The past is not dead, it's not even past.

Feather, William

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

Feibleman, James Kern

• That some good can be derived from every event is a better proposition than that everything happens for the best, which it assuredly does not.

Fellini, Federico
•    A different language is a different version of life.

•    All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Fenelon, Francois
•    All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.

Feynman, Richard
•    To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty of nature. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.

Fielding, Henry
•    Worth begets in base minds, envy; in great souls, emulation.

Fields, W.C.
•    Women are like elephants to me: nice to look at, but I wouldn’t want to own one.

•    A man’s got to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink.

•    After two days in the hospital I took a turn for the nurse.

Fincher, Derwood
•    Experience allows us to repeat our mistakes with more finesse.

Flame, Phoenix
•    A mistake proves that someone stopped talking long enough to do something.

Flaubert, Gustave
•    As a rule the philosopher is a kind of mongrel being, a cross between scientist and poet, envious of both.

•    It's splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.

•    What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

•    Maximise the benefits of your environment, be regular and orderly in your life and then you can be violent and original in your work.

Fontaine, Jean de la
•    The pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.

•    Each believes easily what he fears and what he desires.

•    Nothing is more dangerous than a friend without discretion; even a prudent enemy is preferable.

Forbes, Malcom
•    There is never enough time, unless you are serving it.

•    Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

•    Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.

Ford, Henry
•    You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

•    Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

•    Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t – you are right.

•    Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

Ford, Norman
•    Never try to tell everything you know; it may take too short a time.

Foster, John W.
•    One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.

Fowles, John
•    All pasts are poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

France, Anatole
•    Dictionary: The universe in alphabetical order.

•    Never lend books -- nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.

•    Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.

•    A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

Frank, Anne
•    How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world?

Frankl, Viktor
•    Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

•    When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Franklin, Benjamin
•    Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

•    If Jack’s in love, he’s no judge of Jill’s beauty.

•    Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.

•    Poverty is said to be the last vice the good man gets clear of.

•    Whate’er’s begun in anger, ends in shame.

•    Wise men don’t need advice. Fools won’t take it.

•    Where there is marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.

•    Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

•    There was never a good war or a bad peace.

•    Fatigue is the best pillow.

•    Don't judge men's wealth or godliness by their Sunday appearance.

Frederik the Great

• Everything which the enemy least expects will succeed the best.

Freud, Sigmund
•    The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

•    When inspiration does not come to me, I go half way to meet it.

•    As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.

•    When you blame and criticise others, you are avoiding some truth about yourself.

Frost, Robert

• Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

• All the best things a poet ever uses are things he didn’t know he was getting when he was getting them.

• In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.

• The best way out is always through.

• A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom

• A poem begins with a lump in the throat.

• The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
  But I have promises to keep,
  And miles to go before I sleep
  And miles to go before I sleep.

• I shall be telling this with a sigh
  Somewhere ages and ages hence:
  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
  I took the one less traveled by,
  And that has made all the difference.

• Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

• The only way around is through.

• Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
  Not in position to look too close.

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

• Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

• I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

• A scholar is someone who sticks to things. A poet is someone who uses whatever sticks to him.

Frye, Northrop
•    Literature encourages tolerance - bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.

Fuller, Buckminster
•    When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

•    God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.

•    I look for what needs to be done.... After all, that's how the universe designs itself.

•    Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

•    Things not understood are admired.

•    I am passenger on Spaceship Earth.

Fuller, Margaret
•    If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

Fuller, Thomas
•    Nothing is easy to the unwilling.

•    If you have no enemies, it is a sign fortune has forgot you.

Gabirol, Ibn
•    In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence, the second listening, the third remembering, the fourth practicing, the fifth -- teaching others.

Gabor, Zsa Zsa
•    Getting divorced just because you don’t love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.

•    He taught me housekeeping; when I divorce I keep the house.

Galbraith's Law
•    Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

Galelei, Galileo
•    Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.

•    The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

•    I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.

•    In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Galsworthy, John
•    Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flowers or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild.

•    The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

•    Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.

Gambetta
•    Great ability without discretion comes almost invariably to a tragic end.

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand
•    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.

•    You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

•    I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.

•    Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

•    Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

•    Western civilization? I think it would be a good idea.

•    A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.

Gardner, John
•    When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.

Gardner, Paul
•    A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.

Garfield, James A.
•    If wrinkles must be written upon our brow, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

Gaston Pierre Marc, Duc de Levis
•    Time wears away error and polishes truth.

Gautier, Francois
•    Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on the open sea of thought.

Gautier, Theophile
•    To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.

•    Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

Gay, John
•    Shadow owes its birth to light.

George, David Lloyd
•    Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.

Getty, Paul
•    My formula for success is rise early, work late, and strike oil.

Gibbon
•    Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

•    I was never less alone than when by myself.

Gibran, Khalil

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

• In every winter’s heart there is a quivering spring, and behind the veil of each night there is a smiling dawn.

• Let there be spaces in your togetherness
  And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

• Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

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

• The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?

• We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

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

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

• Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness.

• Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert.

• Generosity is giving more than you can; pride is taking less than you need.

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

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

• When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.

• A traveller am I and a navigator, and every day I discover a new region within my soul.

• Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection. Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood,

• Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

• Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

• A root is a flower that disdains fame.

Gibson, William
•    The future's already arrived; it's just not evenly distributed yet.

Gide, André

• Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens. We have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

• It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

• Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Gill, Vince
•    Success is always temporary. When all is said and done, the only thing you'll have left is your character.

Giovanni, Nikki
•    We love because it's the only true adventure.

Glasow, Arnold
•    Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to.

•    Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.

•    The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion.

•    A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.

Glien, Germain G

• The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much.

Goethe, Johann Wolgang Von
•    We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

•    He who is firm in will moulds the world to himself.

•    Belief is not the beginning but the end of all knowledge.

•    Each indecision brings its own delays and days are lost lamenting over lost days… What you can do or dream you can, begin it; boldness has genius and magic in it; only engage and then the mind grows heated. Begin and the work will be completed.

•    One ought everyday at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and if possible, speak a few reasonable words.

•    This is the true measure of love when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.

•    We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

•    Life is the childhood of our immortality.

•    If you cannot be free, be free as you can.

•    Talent is nurtured in solitude; character is farmed in the stormy billows of the world.

•    No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

•    Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

•    Nature is the living visible garment of God.

•    Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Understanding is not enough; we must do. Knowing and understanding in action make for honour.

•    Nothing should be prized more highly than the value of each day.

•    One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

•    Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.

•    Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

•    Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.

•    There’s nothing more odious than the majority.

•    For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.

•    Unlimited activity, of whatever kind, must end in bankruptcy.

•    Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.

•    Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.

•    He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

•    Colours are light's suffering and joy.

•    All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is still my won.

•    He alone deserves liberty and life who daily must win them anew.

•    In all things it is better to hope than to despair.

•    None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are  free.

Gogh, Vincent Van
•    One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.

•    I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

Golden, Arthur
•    A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory.

Golding, William
•    Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

Goldsmith
•    People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy after.

Goldwyn, Sam
•    Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

Gracian, Baltasar
•    We live by information, not by sight.

•    Celerity is the mother of good fortune. He has done much who leaves nothing till tomorrow.

•    Trust the friends of today as if they will be enemies tomorrow.

•    Silence is frequently misinterpreted, but it is never misquoted.

•    Those who insist on the dignity of their office show they have not deserved it.

•    A beautiful woman should break her mirror early.

Graham, Katherine
•    Truth and news are not the same thing.

Gray, Thomas
•    The boast of hearldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth ever gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour,
The paths of glory, lead but to the grave.

Green, Dennis
•    The secret to success is to start from scratch and keep on scratching.

Grenfell, Joyce
•    There is no such thing as pursuit of happiness, there is only the discovery of joy.

Griswold, Whitney
•    The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.

Gropius, Walter
•    The mind is like an umbrella - it functions best when open.

Guest, Edgar

• I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day; I'd rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.

Guiterman, Arthur
•    Don’t tell your friends about your indigestion; ‘How are you?’ is a greeting, not a question.

Guitry, Sacha
•    You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.

•    A man must marry only a very pretty woman in case he should ever want some other man to take her off his hands.

Gusoff, Adrienne
•    Living in a vacuum sucks.

Hale, Edward Everett
•    Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.

Hall, Stuart
•    Politics does not reflect majorities. It constructs them.

Halsey, Margaret
•    In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.

Hamilton, Alexander
•    Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.

Hamilton, Scott
•    The only disability in life is a bad attitude.

Hammerstein, Oscar
•    Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I beautiful because you love me?

Hand, Learned
•    Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.

Handy, Charles
•    Learning is not just knowing the answers. That is Mastermind learning at best... learning is measured only by a growth experience... learning is not finding out what other people already know, it is solving our own problems for our own purposes...

Hansen, Grace
•    Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.

Hardy, Thomas
•    That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Harrigan, John
•    People need loving the most when they deserve it the least.

Harris, Sydney J
•    Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.

Hartley, L.P.
•    The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Hartog, Jan de

• Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind, you have failed.

Hassan, Ihab
•    Unknowingly, we plough the dust of stars, blown about us by the wind and drink the universe in a glass of rain.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel
•    Easy reading is damned hard writing.

Hazlitt, William
•    The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.

•    Life is the art of being well deceived.

•    We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.

•    The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

•    Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.

Heller, Joseph
•    When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

Hellman, Lillian
•    People change and forget to tell each other.

•    It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their finest hour.

Helps, Arthur
•    Tolerance is the only real test of civilisation.

•    Experience is the extract of suffering.

Hemingway, Ernest
•    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Hepburn, Katherine
•    Do not make reasons for him to stay, only reasons for him to return.

Heraclitus
•    There is nothing permanent except change.

•    No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Herbert, George
•    The best mirror is an old friend.

Herodotus
•    Force has no place where there is need of skill.

Herzog. Emile
•    If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

Hien, Piet
•    A bit beyond perception's reach
I sometimes believe I see
that life is two locked boxes
each containing the other's key.

Hirschfeld, Al
•    Life isn’t a science; we make it up as we go along.

Hirshfield, Tom
•    If you hit every time the target is too near or too big.

Hitchcock, Alfred
•    There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Hoban, Russell
•    After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hobbes, John Oliver
•    To love is to know the sacrifices which eternity extracts from life.

Hoffer, Eric

• 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.

• You can discover what your enemy fears the most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

• Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.

Hoffman, Hans
•    The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Hofmannsthaal, Hugo von
•    Perception of the strange is hindered by strangeness; recognition of the familiar is prevented by familiarity.

Holderlin
•    Man, a god when he dreams, barely a beggar when he thinks.
Hyperion

Holland, Lady
•    Troubles, like babies, grow larger by nursing.

Holmes, John Andrew
•    It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

• Man has his will – but woman has her way.

• There's nothing that keeps its youth,
  So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

• A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

• The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.

• Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

• When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.

• Man's mind, stretched with a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

• Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

• How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made?

• The ultimate good is better reached by free trade of ideas.

Holmes, W
•    Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used till they are seasoned.

Hood, Thomas
•    The average woman, would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.

Hook, Sidney
•    I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.

Hooker, Richard
•    Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.

Hope, Bob
•    I love flying. I've been to almost as many places as my luggage.

Horace

• Seize today, and put as little trust as you can in the morrow.

• When things are steep, remember to stay level headed.

• Whatever advice you give, be short.

• He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

• Adversity reveals genius and prosperity conceals it.

• He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

• Men ever had, and ever will have leave,
  To coin new words well suited to the age,
  Words are like Leaves, some wither every year,
  And every year a younger Race succeeds.

• Words are like leaves, some wither each year.

• Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

• He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

Horowitz, Stanley
•    Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.

Howe, Edgar Watson
•    A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.

Howell, James
•    Words are the soul's ambassadors, who go
Abroad upon her errands to and fro.

Howells, William Dean
•    The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested.

Hoyle, Sir Fred
•    Science is not made by what communities think, but by what the universe is.

Hubbard, Elbert
•    We are not punished for our sins, but by them.

•    Every man is a damned fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

•    Gossip is vice enjoyed vicariously.

•    Don't lose faith in humanity; think of all the people in the United States who have never played you a single nasty trick.

Hubbard, Kim
•    Live so that you can at least get the benefit of the doubt.

•    Some fellows pay a compliment like they expected a receipt.

Hughes, Charles Evans
•    A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.

Hugo, Victor
•    My tastes are aristocratic; my actions democratic.

•    There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

•    I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat threadbare, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.

•    There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

•    The supreme happiness in life the conviction that we are loved.

•    He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

•    A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

•    A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

•    A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

•    Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

Humphrey, Hubert
•    It is not what life takes away from you that counts. It’s what you make of what is left with you.

Hunt, Leigh
•    To receive a present handsomely and in a right spirit, even when you have none to give in return, is to give one in return.

•    When moral courage feels that it is in the right, there is no personal daring of which it is incapable.

Hurst, Fannie
•    Some people think they are worth a lot of money just because they have it.

Hutchins, Robert Maynard
•    The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Huxley, Aldous

• Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the pillars of western prosperity.

• The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

• Death - it’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarising.

• Happiness is coke - something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

• Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only consistent people are the dead.

• Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

• A man has need to keep pure and unalloyed his core of gold, that little centre of perfection with which all, even in this declination of time, are born. All other metal, though it be as tough as steel, as shining hard as brass, will melt before the devouring bitterness of life. Hatred, lust, anger - the vile passions will corrode your will of iron, the warlike pomp of your front of brass. It needs the golden perfection of pure love and pure knowledge to withstand them. The Death of Lully.

• Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

• Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

• Orthodoxy is the death of intelligence.

• Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

• To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

• After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

• The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

• Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

• To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

• Every man's memory is his private literature.

• The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Huxley, Thomas Henry

• If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has as much as to be out of danger.

• The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

• Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to presume to go about unlabelled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.

Illich, Ivan D.
•    We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

•    Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.

Inge, W.R.
•    Many people believe that they are attracted by God or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.

•    A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours.

•    The aim of education is the knowledge not of fact but of values.

•    The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.

•    We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

•    Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.

Ingersoll, Robert Green
•    In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.

Inman, Ray
•    Happiness, like an old friend is inclined to drop in unexpectedly - when you’re working hard on something else.

Ionescu
•    Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

Irving, Washington
•    Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.

•    Great minds have purposes, little minds have wishes.

James, Andrew Lloyd
•    A language is never in a state of fixation, but is always changing; we are not looking at a lantern-slide but at a moving picture.

James, Henry
•    I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.

•    In art, economy is always beauty.

James, William

• An idea to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.

• Reality is what we bump against.

• The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

• Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

Jameson, Storm
•    It is an illusion to think that more comfort means more happiness. Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to be needed.

Jefferey, Francis
•    Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.

Jefferson, Thomas

• I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

• Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

• Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.

• Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.

• Information is the currency of democracy.

Jerome, Jerome K.
•    It is always the best policy to speak the truth – unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

•    It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

•    Let your boat of life be light, packed only with what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to love and to love you, a cat, a dog, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink – for thirst is a dangerous thing.

•    Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it.

Johnson, Philip

• Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Johnson, Samuel ::

• He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything.

• Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.

• Men have been wise in very different modes; but they have always laughed in the same way.

• A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

• What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

• Words are but the signs of ideas.

• Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

• God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?

• Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought; our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

• The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.

• It’s too late to look for instruments when the work calls for executions.

• Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

• Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

• Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

:: Johnson, Samuel

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jones, L.E.
•    The sheer babyhood of the human race against the background of incalculable time makes anything but a questing agnosticism presumptuous.

Jong, Erica
•    You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

Jordan, David S.
•    The world steps aside to let any man pass if he knows where he is going.

Joubert, Joseph

• Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.

• When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come.

• Words, like eyeglasses, obscure everything they do not make clear.

• The spectacle has changed, but our eyes are the same.

• A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.

• Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

Jowett, Benjamin

• Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door.

Joyce, James
•    A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

•    History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.

Jung, C.G.
•    A man who hasn’t passed through the inferno of his passions hasn’t overcome them.

•    The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

•    Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

•    Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.

•    Even a lie is a psychic fact.

•    The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Juvenal
•    No man ever became very wicked all at once.

•    This is his first punishment, that by the verdict of his own heart no guilty man is acquitted.

Kafka, Franz
•    Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

Kaiser, Henry
•    I always view problems as opportunities in work clothes.

Kalidasa
•    Please subdue the anguish of your soul. Nobody is destined only to happiness or to pain. The wheel of life takes one up and down by turn.

Kant, Immanuel
•    Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Karr, Alphonse
•    Every man has three characters, that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.

•    Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns. I am thankful that thorns have roses.

Karsh, Yousuf
•    Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.

Katz’s Law
•    Men and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Kauffman, Jean-Paul
•    The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.

Kay, Alan
•    The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Keats, John
•    The only way of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

•    There is a budding tomorrow in midnight.

•    Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.

•    Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keillor, Garrison
•    It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.

Keller, Helen
•    Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.

Kempton, Sally
•    It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.

Kennedy, John
•    If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.

•    Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

•    The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

•    Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Kepler, Johannes
•    Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

Kettering, C.F.
•    No one ever would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.

Keynes, J. Maynard
•    Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for the reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

•    In the long run we are all dead.

•    Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

Khayyam, Omar
•    A bottle of wine beneath the bough, a book of verses and thou.

•    The bird of time has but a little way to flutter - and the bird is on the wing.

Kierkegaard, Soren Aabye
•    People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought they avoid.

•    Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste they hurry past it.

King Jr., Martin Luther
•    Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate causes man to confuse the true with the false.

•    The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

•    Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude.

•    In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.

King, Stephen
•    Only enemies speak the truth; friends lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

Kipling, Rudyard
•    Borrow trouble for yourself, if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbours.

•    I keep six honest serving men,
They taught me all I knew,
Their names What and Why and When,
and How and Where and How.

•    He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

Kissinger, Henry
•    The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvellously.

•    Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternising with the enemy.

•    The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between experience and vision.

Koestler, Arthur
•    If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely meant us to stick it out.

•    Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.

•    Scientists … peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

•    Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.

•    A pun is two strings of thought tied with an acoustic knot.

•    Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Korzybski, Alfred
•    The map is not the territory.

Kraus, Karl
•    Science is spectrum analysis; art is photosynthesis.

Krierkegaard, Søren
•    Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Kronenberger. Louis
•    Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

Kuban, Karla
•    Without darkness there are no dreams.

Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth
•    People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.

Kupferberg, Tuli
•    When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.

Kurosawa, Akira
•    To be artists means never to look away.

La Byuyere, Jean de
•    A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position.

Lababidi, Yahia

• A good listener helps us overhear ourselves.

• Wars are the side-effects of nationalism.

• To hurry pain is to leave a classroom still in session. To prolong pain is to remain seated in a vacated classroom and miss the next lesson.

• Like cars in amusement parks, our direction is often determined through collisions.

Ladman, Cathy

• All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.

Lamb, Charles

• Not many sounds in life exceed in interest a knock at the door.

• The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.

• Presents, I often say, endear absents.

• My motto is: contented with little, yet wishing for more.

Lang, Andrew
•    He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination.

Lange, Dorothea
•    The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Langley, Edward
•    What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.

Lao-Tze

• Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish (don’t overdo it).

• Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.

• Clay is moulded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognise the utility of what is not.

• A journey of a thousand miles starts in front of your feet.

• To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

• Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.

• The wise man does not lay up treasure. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.

• Being loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone gives you courage.

• He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.

• Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.

• What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.

• The living are soft and yielding; the dead are rigid and stiff. Living plants are flexible and tender; the dead are brittle and dry.

Larson, Doug
•    A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

Laurent, Yves St.
•    Fashions fade; style is eternal.

Le Carre, John
•    A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.

Lec, Stanislaw J.
•    Some people like to understand what they believe in, while others like to believe in what they understand.

•    Is it progress is a cannibal uses a knife and fork?

Lescarbeau, Mike
•    A big idea is like a nuclear bomb. It does not have to land on target to be effective.

Levant, Oscar
•    I am no more humble than my talents require.

•    A politician is a man who will doublecross that bridge when he comes to it.

Lewis, C.S.
•    It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird : it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

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

Liebling, A.J

• Freedom of the press is guaranteed o  nly to those who own one.

Liberman, Anatoly

• Compared to the drama of words, Hamlet is a light farce.

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph

• One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

• Nothing contributes more to a person’s peace of mind than having no opinion at all.

• Everyone is a genius at least once a year.

• It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

Liebling, AJ

• Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

Lincoln, Abraham
•    Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.

•    The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.

•    Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

•    Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

•    It is best not to swap horses while crossing the river.

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow
•    Him that I love, I wish to be free - even from me.

Linn, Walter
•    It is surprising what a man can do when he has to, and how little most men will do when they don't have to.

Lionni, Leo
•    I'm not afraid of death. I think it's a terrible waste of time.

Lobel, Arnold
•    It is the high and mighty who have the longest distance to fall.

Locke, John
•    No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

•    We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas, and not for things themselves.

•    So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.

•    To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

•    New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

Lombardi, Vince
•    Winning is not everything. It is the only thing.

Lombroso, Cesare
•    The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
•    Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

•    The heights of great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upwards in the night.
“The Ladder of Saint Augustine”

•    We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

•    Oh, fear not in a world like this
And thou shalt know ere long -
That how sublime a thing it is,
To suffer and be strong.

•    Talk not of wasted affection. Affection never was wasted.

•    To persevere in one’s duty and to be silent is the best answer to calumny.

•    Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

•    Every dewdrop and raindrop had a whole heaven within it.

•    Let us, then, be up and along.
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.

•    Thy fate is the common fate of all
Into each life some rain must fall.
'The Rainy Day'

•    Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone.

•    And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like Arabs,
And silently steal away.

•    Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare think.

•    If I’m not worth the wooing, I am surely not worth the winning.

Loos, Anita
•    Fate keeps on happening.

Loren, Sophia
•    Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.

Lorenz, Konrad
•    It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young. 'The So-called Evil'

Lorimer, George H.
•    It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven't lost the things that money can't buy.

Love, Ruth B.
•    If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Lowell, James Russell
•    One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

•    Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

•    A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lumet, Sidney
•    Style that shows is only decorating, not style.

Luxembourg, Rosa
•    Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Lytton Bulwer, Henry
•    A timid question will always receive a confident answer.

Macaulay , Thomas Babington
•    The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

•    As civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Machiavelli, Niccolo
•    If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

•    Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.

•    The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Madan, Geoffrey

• The dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset.

Maeda, John
•    A book is a human-powered film projector (complete with feature film) that advances at a speed fully customized to the viewer's mood or fancy. This rare harmony between object and user arises from the minimal skills required to manipulate a bound sequence of pages. Each piece of paper embodies a corresponding instant of time which remains frozen until liberated by the act of turning a page. (The Reactive Square)

Maetrelinck, Maurice
•    We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.

Mahabharatha, The
•    The man poised in the quietude of the self turns out the maximum work with minimum effort.

•    No one is anyone’s friend, no one is anybody’s enemy; it is circumstance that creates enemies and friends.

Mahfouz, Naguib
•    You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

Maistre, Joseph de
•    Every nation has the government that it deserves.

Malamud, Bernard
•    If your train’s on the wrong track, every station you come to is the wrong station.

Malesherbes

• A new maxim is often a brilliant error.

Mallarme, Stephen
•    Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

Manilius
•    We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning.

Mann, Thomas

• Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

• We are no more than God’s curiosity about himself.

• Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

• We should know how to inherit, because inheriting is culture.

Marquis, Don
•    An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

Marston, Ralph
•    Your goals, minus your doubts, equal your reality.

Martial

• Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.

Marx, Groucho
•    Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

•    Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

•    Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes?

•    I never forget a face, but I'll make an exception in your case.

Marx, Karl
•    The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

•    Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

•    If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.

Masefield, John
•    I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

Maslov, Abraham
•    If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Massey, Gerald
•    Not by appointment do we meet delight.

Mathew XXII.14
•    For many are called but few are chosen.

Matisse, Henri
•    Exactitude is not truth.

Maugham, Somerset
•    Growing old has many disadvantages, but it has this compensation, that sometimes it gives you the opportunity of seeing what was the outcome of certain events you had witnessed long ago.

•    It’s not the seven deadly virtues that make a man a good husband, but the three hundred pleasing amiablities.

•    You can’t learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

•    Like everything else which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infintely more interesting and significant that any romance however passionate.

•    The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

•    At a dinner party eat wisely but not too well; talk well but not too wisely.

•    Anyone can tell the truth, but very few of us can make epigrams.

•    Perfection is what American women expect to find in their husbands… but English women only hope to find in their butlers.

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

•    The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

•    People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

•    We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

•    Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

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

•    Death doesn’t affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn’t concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

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

•    Love is what happens to a man and woman who don’t know each other.

Maurois, Andre
•    In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.

McCord, David
•    A handful of sand is an anthology of the universe.

McDonnell, John
•    A cliché is a bankrupt idea.

•    Grey hair unlock closed doors.

McLaughlin, Mignon

• Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
• It's impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time.
• True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive.
• The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing.

McLuhan, Marshall
•    Only the vanquished remember history.

•    Art is anything you can get away with.

•    Money is just the poor man’s credit card.

•    Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

•    There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

•    Tomorrow is our permanent address.

•    This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.

•    We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Mearns, Hughes
•    As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

Melville, Herman

• It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Mencken, H.L.
•    Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both becomes a piety.

•    It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

•    A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friends just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.

•    A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small haemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

•    If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

•    Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

•    Love is like war; easy to begin but very hard to stop.

•    No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.

•    The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

•    Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

•    Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

•    Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

•    A cynic is a man who, when smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

•    A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

•    You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

Menger, Fred
•    If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.

Menninger, Karl

• Illness is in part what the world has done to a victim, but in a larger part it is what the victim has done with his world.

Merton, Robert King
•    Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.

Michelangelo
•    The best of artists hath no thought to show
which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
doth not include; to break the marble spell
is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

•    I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Mill, John Stuart
•    If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind.

•    In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.

Miller, Arthur
•    A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.

•    An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

•    Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

•    Without alienation, there can be no politics.

Miller, Henry
•    The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

•    The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.

•    Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

•    One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

Miller, Olin
•    To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Milosz, Czeslaw
•    Language is the only homeland.

Milton, John
•    His words, like so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command.

Mistinguett
•    A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That’s the basic spelling that very woman ought to know.

Mitchell, Margaret
•    Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.

Mizner, Wilson
•    A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.

•    In the battle of existence, talent is the punch; tact is the clever footwork.

Mohn, Edgar J.
•    A lie has speed but truth has endurance.

Moliere
•    It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.

Montaigne, Michel de

• No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly.

• It’s better a head well made, than a head well full.

• Even on the most exalted throne in the world a man sits on his own bottom.

• I cannot keep a record of my life through my actions; fortune has buried them too deep: I keep it through my fantasies.

• A speech belongs half to the speaker and half to the listener.

Montesquieu
•    The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.

•    What the great orators want in depth, they give you in length.

•    Republics are brought to their ends by luxury, monarchies by poverty.

•    Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

•    Author : A fool who not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come.

Monroe, Marilyn
•    I've been on a calendar, but never on time.

Moore
•    Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.

Morgentstern, Christion
•    Home is not where you live but where they understand you.

Morley, Christopher

• There are three ingredients to the good life : learning, earning and yearning.

• My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

• Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.

• The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.

• Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

• There's no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

Morley, John
•    You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

Morris, Joseph F.
•    Dictionary: Spell binder.

Morrow, Dwight
•    Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for drought.

Muggeridge, Malcolm
•    Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

Muir, John
•    When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

Murray, Gilbert
•    Experience dulls the edges of all our dogmas.

Naguib
•    You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

Napoleon

• The human race is governed by its imagination.

• Ability is of little account without opportunity.

• Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the latter. Space we can recover; lost time time never.

Narayan, R.K.
•    You become writer by writing. It is a yoga.

Nash, Ogden

• To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up.

• The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

Nathan, George Jean
•    Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

Nehru, Jawaharlal
•    One should never visit America for the first time.

•    Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.

•    Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

•    The test of a country’s advance is how it is utilising modern techniques. Not just in getting a tool and using it. Modern technique follows modern thinking. You cannot get hold of a modern tool and have an ancient mind.

Newman, John Henry Cardinal
•    Calculation never made a hero.

Newton, Isaac
•    I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Nicholson, Harold
•    We are inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.

•    The secret of a succcessful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters.

Niebuhr, Reinhold
•    Man’s capacity for evil makes democracy necessary and man’s capacity for good makes democracy possible.

•    God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Nielsen, Leslie

• Doing nothing is very hard to do - you never know when you're finished.

Nietzche, Friedrich
•    There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

•    Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics - they desire our blood, not our pain.

•    Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you.

•    The value of a man can only be measured with regard to other men.

•    Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule.

•    Necessity is not a fact but an interpretation.

•    The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

•    Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

•    One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

•    In the mountains of truth you never climb in vain.

•    We are so fond of being out among nature, because it has no opinions about us.

•    The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

•    Talking about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

•    We have art to save ourselves from the truth.

•    When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

•    In heaven all the interesting people are missing.

•    Woman was God’s second mistake.

•    Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

•    Is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s blunders?

•    Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

•    The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

•    I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

•    Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.

•    The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

•    Who has not for the sake of his reputation sacrificed himself?

Nin, Anais
•    People do not live in the present always, at one with it. They live at all kinds of and manners of distance from it, as difficult to measure as the course of planets. Fears and traumas make their journeys slanted, peripheral, uneven, evasive.

•    We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

•    Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

•    Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country.

Nizer, Louis
•    A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

•    True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.

Norman, Jean Mary
•    Art is the difference between seeing and identifying.

Occam, William of
•    What can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more.

O’Casey, Sean
•    All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

O’Keefe, Georgia
•    I hate flowers. I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

Ochs, Phil
•    In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.

Ogilvy, David
•    Every advertisement is a long-term investment in the image of the brand.

Oliver, Jose Garcia
•    Justice, I firmly believe, is so subtle a thing that to interpret it one has only need of a heart.

Oppenheim, James
•    The foolish person seeks happiness in the distance; the wise person grows it under his feet.

•    Man’s the bad child of the universe.

Orben, Robert
•    To you it may be your motor that’s knocking. To a mechanic its opportunity.

Orwell, George
•    No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. - Why I Write

•    Fortune and love befriend the bold.

•    If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.

•    If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

•    The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

•    It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a window-pane.

Paige, Satchell
•    Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.

•    Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

Paine, Thomas
•    The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.

Pancoast, Mal
•    The odds of hitting a target go up dramatically when you aim at it.

Parker, Dorothy
•    If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

•    By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying –
Lady make note of this :
One of you is lying.
“Unfortunate Coincidence”

•    They sicken of the calm that know the storm.

•    There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Parker, John F.
•    Flatterers say to your face that which they would never think of saying behind your back.

Parker, Joseph
•    Never throw mud. You may miss your mark; but you must have dirty hands.

Parkinson, C. Northcote
•    The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.

Parton, Dolly
•    If you want a rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

Pascal, Blaise
•    If you want people to think well of you, do not speak well of yourself.

•    A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.

•    Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

•    Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

•    Words differently arranged have different meanings, and meanings differently arranged have a different effect.

•    Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.

Patton, General G.C.
•    The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

Pauli, Wolfgang
•    I don't mind that you think slowly but I do mind that you are publishing faster than you think.

Pauling, Linus
•    The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Pearson, Lester
•    Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way.

Peguy, Charles
•    A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Penney, Alexandra
•    The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.

Perez, Alejandro
•    To have a place in someone’s heart is to be never alone.

Pericles
•    Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.

Persius
•    When tomorrow comes, yesterday’s tomorrow will have already been spent, and another tomorrow will be eating away our years, each just beyond our grasp.

Peter, Laurence J
•    In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
– Peter Principle

•    The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.

•    Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.

Phillips, Norah
•    I have found that people are usually much more moved by economics than by morals.

Picasso, Pablo

• Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints, not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

• I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.

• God … invented the giraffe, the elephant, the cat… He has no real style. He just goes on trying things.

• Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

• Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction.

• A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.

Pickford, Mary

• If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is  not falling down but the staying down.

Pinter, Harold

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

Pio, Eric
•    A book is a story for the mind. A song is a story for the soul.

Plato
•    The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.

•    Time is the movement of eternity.

•    No human thing is of serious importance.

Plautus
•    Spice a dish with love and it pleases every palate. (Ubi amar condimentum inerit, cuivis placituram escam) - Casma

•    In everything the middle course is best: all things in excess bring trouble to men.

Plomp, John J.
•    You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.

Poincare, Jules Henri

• Science is built with facts as a house is with stones - but a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Pope, Alexander
•    Learn of the little nautilus to sail,
Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale.

•    When much dispute has past we find our tenets just the same as last.

•    Know thyself ! Presume not God to scan; the proper study of mankind is man.

•    Trust not yourself, but your defects to know,
make use of every friend and every foe.

•    Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate. All but the page prescribed their present state.

•    All other goods by Fortune’s hand are given;
A wife is the peculiar gift of heaven.

•    It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out. It’s the grain of sand in your shoe.

•    Too dear I prized a fair enchanting face;
Beauty unchaste is beauty in disgrace.

•    For forms of government let fools contest,
Whate’er is best administered is best.

•    Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

•    Good nature & good sense must ever join,
To err is human, to forgive divine.

•    Honour and shame from no condition arise
Act thy part well; and there all the honour lies.

•    Fools are quick to admire, but men of sense approve.

•    Be thou the first true merit to befriend, his praise is lost who stays till all commend.

Popper, Karl
•    We may become the makers of our own fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.

Postman, Neil
•    Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.

Potter, Dennis
•    The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

Pound, Ezra
•    The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

•    A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

•    A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

• What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

Powell, John
•    The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

Priestly, J.B.
•    The three basic requirements for a tolerably satisfying life are someone to care, somewhere to live and something worthwhile to do.

Pritchard, Michael
•    Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.

Proctor, Adelaide A.
•    No star is ever lost we once have seen. We always may be what we might have been.

Proverbs
•    "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind..."
11:29

Pruden, Bonnie
•    You can’t turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again.

Puccini
•    Music is noise subjected to order by wisdom.

Puig, Manuel
•    The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you’ll never feel unhappy again.

Pushkin, Alexander
•    I’ve lived to bury my desires,
And see my dreams corrode with rust;
Now all that’s left are fruitless fires
That burn my empty heart to dust.

Quant, Mary
•    Having money is rather like being a blonde. It’s more fun, but not vital.

Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus)
•    The perfection of art is to conceal art.

Quixote, Don
•    I am plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

Radhakrishnan, S.
•    Poetry is the echo in the human heart of the melody of the universe.

Rand, Ayn
•    Civilisation is the progress toward a society of privacy.

Ray, John
•    He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.

Raymond, Eric

• Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Reik, Theodor
•    The love is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.

Renard, Jules

• The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.

• As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more.

• Words are the small change of thought.

Renkel, Ruth
•    Never fear shadows. They simply mean there’s a light shining somewhere nearby.

Renoir, Jean
•    We are surrounded by screens… the artist is the one who pulls them down.

Repplier, Agnes
•    There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.

Reynolds, Joshua
•    The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.

Reznikoff, Charles
•    The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly.

Richter, Jean Paul

•    A timid person is frightened before a danger, a cowward during the time, and a courageous person afterwards.

Rickey, Branch
•    Luck is the residue of design.

Rivarol, Antoine de

• It has truly been said that a mob has many heads but no brains.

• The most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliancy.

Robinson, Edward Arlington
•    A word has its use,
Or, like a man, it will soon have a grave.

Rochefoucauld, Duc de La

• As rare as true love is, true friendship is still rarer.

• Hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue.

• We seldom attribute common sense except to those who agree with us.

• The mind cannot long act the role of the heart.

• The serenity of the wise is merely the art of imprisoning their agitation in the heart.

• We are never so happy, nor so unhappy, as we suppose ourselves to be.

• There is no disguise that can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.

• To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.

• We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them.

• We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire.

• The qualities we have do not make us so ridiculous as those we affect to have.

• Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favours.

• Everyone calls himself a friend, but only a fool relies on it; nothing is commoner than the name, nothing rarer than the thing.

• Good advice is what a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

• We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.

• In their early passions women are in love with the lover, later they are in love with love.

• We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

• In daily life we are more often liked for our defects than for our qualities.

Rockefeller, J.D.
•    A smile, resting on a foundation of sincerity, is one of the most valuable things in the world.

Rodin, Auguste
•    Patience is also a form of action.

Rogers, Will
•    Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll still get run over if you just sit there.

•    Rumour travels faster, but it doesn’t stay put as long as truth.

•    We can’t all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

Rohn, Jim
•    Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.

Roosevelt, Eleanor
•    You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

•    Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

•    Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.

Roosevelt, Theodore
•    Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

•    When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

Roshi, Yasutani (Zen Master)

• The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Rosten, Leo
•    A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

Rousseau

•    Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have the right to expect.

Rowland, Helen
•    Why is it that when your cup of happiness is full, somebody always jogs your elbow?

Rowling, J.K.
•    It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

Roy, Claude
•    Lasting love for another, sometimes shaken when the going is calm, gathers strength during a storm.

Rudner, Rita
•    When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.

Rumi
•    There is a field beyond all notions of right and wrong. Come, meet me there.

Rushdie, Salman
•    What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

•    A poet’s work is to name the name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

•    Our lives teach us who we are.

•    What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

•    Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

Ruskin, John
•    Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.

•    What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

Russell, Bertrand
•    Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.

•    Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

•    The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.

•    War does not determine who’s right – only who’s left.

•    I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

•    Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do so.

•    No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

•    Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

Ruth, Babe
•    I have only one superstition. I touch all the bases when I hit a home run.

Ruthman, Todd
•    Sometimes you earn more by doing the jobs that pay nothing.

Saadi
•    Kings stand more in need of the company of the intelligent than the intelligent do of the society of kings.

Sagan, Carl
•    If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Sagan, Francoise
•    Art must take reality by surprise.

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin
•    Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.

Saki
•    A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

Samuel, Herbert
•    A library is thought in cold storage.

Sandburg, Carl
•    Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work. Nothing wrong with words in tie and suit but sometimes only slang can do the job."

•    Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine, how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.

Santayana, George

• Truth is like a diamond cut with many faces, each of which can be cut, polished and set to advantage.

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

• Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

• There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

• There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar;  it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

Sapirstein, Milton R.
•    There is nobody as enslaved as the fanatic, the person in whom one impulse, one value, has assumed ascendancy over all others.

Saroyan, William
•    Every man in the world is better than someone else. And not as good as someone else.

Sarton, May

• One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

Sartre, Jean Paul
•    Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

•    Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

•    The world can survive very well without literature. But it can survive more easily without man.

•    Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

•    Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

•    Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you.

Saul, John Ralston
•    Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order.

Schiller
•    Disappointments are to the soul what a thunderstorm is to the air.

•    He that is overcautious will accomplish little.

Schiller, Friedrich
•    The universe is one of God’s thoughts.

Schnabel, Artur
•    The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes -- ah, that is where the art resides.

Schopenhauer, Arthur
•    We forfeit 3/4 of ourselves in order to be like other people.

•    With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

•    Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

•    Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

•    The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

Schulz, Charles
•    The only real way to look younger is not to be born so soon.

•    Don't worry about the world coming to an end today… It's already
tomorrow in Australia.

•    No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it.

•    A good education is the next best thing to a pushy mother.
Never lie in bed at night asking yourself questions you can’t answer.
The best trips are the kind where you can be home by noon.
I’m always sure about things that are a matter of opinion.
Life is easier if you dread one day at a time.
All the best coaches are in the stands.
Life is like an ice-cream cone; you have to learn to lick it.
- ‘Things I learned After It Was Too Late (And Other Minor Truths)’

Schurz, Carl
•    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.

Schwatrz, Jerry
•    Live every day as if it were your last, because one of these days, it will be.

Schweitzer, Albert

• An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... The truly wise person is color-blind.

• To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.

• Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

• As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

• Happiness is nothing more than good health and bad memory.

• Do something for somebody every day for which you do not get paid.

Scott, Sir Walter
•    The will to do, the soul to dare.

Seinfeld, Jerry
•    It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

Seneca
•    After death there is nothing and death itself is nothing.

•    Let wickedness escape as it may at the bar, it never fails of doing justice upon itself; for every guilty person is his own hangman.

•    It is often better not to see an insult than to avenge it.

•    Men learn when they teach.

•    If one does not know to which port he is sailing, no wind is favourable.

•    Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labour does the body.

Service, Robert
•    Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.

Seymour, Richard
•    The future approaches us at 60 minutes an hour.

Shah, Idries
•    When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge. (The Book of the Book)

Shain, Merle
•    The friends in your life are like the pillars on your porch. Sometimes they hold up, and sometimes they lean on you. Sometimes it is just enough to know they’re standing by.

Shakespeare, William
•    The silence often of pure innocence
Persuades when speaking fails.

•    Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

•    Heat not a furnace for your foe
So hot that it do singe thyself.

•    And when Love speaks, the voice of all the Gods
Make Heaven drowsy with the harmony.
”Love’s Labour Lost, Act iv; sc. 3 ; l. 344 “

•    Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgement.

•    There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

•    Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
”As You Like It”

•    Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.
”Romeo & Juliet “

•    There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be now, tis not to come. If it be not to come
It will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come.
The readiness is all.
”Hamlet”

•    Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

•    The glorious sun,
Stays in his course and plays the alchemist,
Turning with splendour of his precious eye,
The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold.

•    Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.

•    As flies to wanton boys, are we to Gods.
They kill us for their sport.

•    What’s past, and what’s to come is strew’d with husks and formless ruin of oblivion.

•    Everyone can master a grief except he that has it.

•    There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads to a fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

•    I am a true labourer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness; glad of other men’s good, content.
“As You Like It”

•    Or in the night, imagining some fear
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

•    The ripest fruit first falls.

•    And when the mind is quicken’d, out of doubt,
The organs, though defunct and dead before,
Break up their drowsy grave and newly move
With casted slough and fresh legerity.
”Henry V”

•    For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings
How some have been deposed; some slain in war;
Some haunted by ghosts they have deposed;
Some poisoned by their wives; some sleeping killed;
All murdered: For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court.
“Richard II”

•    The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.

•    One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

•    Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

•    Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven.
”All’s Well That Ends Well”

•    I could be well mov’d if I were as you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me;
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumber’d sparks,
They are all fire and everyone doth shine,
But there’s but one in all doth hold his place;
So, in the world; ‘tis furnish’d well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshak’d of motion; and that I am he,
Let me a little show it…
”Julius Caesar”

•    Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.

•    And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n forth of holy writ,
And seem a saint when most I Play the devil.
”Richard III”

•    Every why hath a wherefore.

•    Nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain’d from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied
And vice sometime’s by action dignified.
”Romeo & Juliet “

•    Jesters do often prove prophets.

•    I to myself am dearer than a friend.

•    I am wealthy in my friends.

•    Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
”Merchant of Venice”

•    Ripeness is all.

•    He’s mad that trusts in tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love or a whore’s oath.

•    What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?
Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just
And he but naked, though locked in steel
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.

•    Though justice be they plea,
Consider this,
That in the course of justice
None of us
Should see salvation.

•    Let your own discretion be your tutor; suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

•    The devil can cite scripture for his purposes.

•    To gild refined gold, to paint the lily
To throw a perfume on the violet
To smooth the ice or to add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
”King John”

•    There is no such sport as sport by sport overthrown,
To make theirs ours and ours none but our own.

•    Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured.

•    I am tied to the stake, and I must stand my course.

•    The evil that men do lives after men; the good is oft interred with their bones.

•    A peace is of the nature of a conquest;
For then both parties are nobly subdued,
And neither party loser.

•    Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.

•    One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

•    How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees.

•    If she be made of white and red,
Her fault will never be known,
For blushing cheeks by faults are bred
And fears by pale white shown:
Then if she fear or be to blame,
For still her cheeks possess the same
Which native she doth owe.

•    What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

•    Hear the meaning within the word.

•    When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

•    The course of true love never did run smooth.

•    But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

•    All the world's a stage,
And the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

•    Oftentimes excusing of a fault
Doth make the fault the worse by th' excuse.

•    Action is eloquence.
‘Corialanus’

•    Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.
‘The Rape of Lucrece’

•    We are such stuff/As dreams are made/of; and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.

•    I wish you all the joy that you can wish.

•    Violent delights have violent ends.
‘Romeo & Juliet’

•    What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief.

•    Be great in act, just as you have been in your thought.

•    Wise men never sit and wail their loss, but cheerily seek how to redress their harms.

•    Have more than thou showest,
Peak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.
‘King Lear’

•    There is nothing either good or bad,
But thinking makes it so.

•    He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.

•    When beggars die there are no comets seen
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

•    And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n out of holy writ
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

•    Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.

• A good heart's worth gold.

Shaw, George Bernard

• Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

• Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

• The great secret is not having bad manners or good manners, or any sort of manners, but having the same manners for all human souls.

• He who has never hoped can never despair.

• Hell is full of musical amateurs.

• An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

• Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

• It is unwise to do unto others as you would that they do unto you. Their tastes might not be the same.

• Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

• Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

• My library
  Was dukedom large enough.

• But man, proud man,
  Dressed in a little brief authority, ...
  Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
  As make the angels weep.

• Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

• Assassination: The extreme form of censorship.

• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

• He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

• In this world, there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

• The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

• A critic is one who leaves no turn unstoned.

• When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

• Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

• Beware of a learned man’s false knowledge : it is more dangerous than ignorance.

• 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.

• If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

• Everyone dies, but not everyone fully lives. Too many people are having a near-life experience.

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

• Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.

• Dancing : The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalised by music.

• Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

• I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

• When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited abnormal and exhausting condition continuously until death do them apart.

• We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Shaw, HW
•    Common sense is instinct, enough of it is genius.

Shedd, John A.
•    A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Shelley, Mary
•    Nothing contributes so much to tranquilising the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe
•    Kings are like stars – they rise and set, they have
The worship of the world, but no repose.

Sherman, John
•    The best prophet of the future is the past.

Signoret, Simone
•    Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.

Simpson, Homer
•    You can't keep blaming yourself. Just blame yourself once, and move on.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis
•    Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

Singh, Charan
•    Man's life does not commence in the womb and never ends in the grave.

Sockman, Ralph W.
•    The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

Socrates
•    Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

•    If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

•    Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

•    Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.

Solon
•    Laws are the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.

Solus’ Solution
•    If you do a job too well, you will get stuck with it.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
•    When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.

Sontag, Susan
•    Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Sophocles
•    The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.

South, Robert
•    Defeat should never be a source of discouragement but rather a fresh stimulus.

Southey, Robert
•    It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

Spellman, Francis Cardinal
•    Pray as if everything depended on God, and work as if everything depended on man.

Spencer, Herbert
•    Reading is seeing by proxy.

Spender, Dale
•    Language is not neutral. It is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas. It is itself a shaper of ideas.

Spinoza, Baruch
•    The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.

Stanhope, Philip Dormer
•    Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading man, and studying all the various editions of them.

Starck, Phillipe
•    I am my brain's publisher.

Starr, Anthony

• Sport is imposing order on what was chaos.

Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle)
•    Beauty is the promise of happiness.

•    I do not feel I have the wisdom enough to love what is ugly.

•    The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.

Stein, Gertrude
•    I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

Steinbeck, John
•    Maybe the whole world need Russians. I bet Russians need Russians also. Maybe they call them Americans.

•    A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

•    Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Steinem, Gloria
•    A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Stern, Bill
•    Our elections are free, it's in the results where eventually we pay.

Stevens, Wallace
•    Realism is a corruption of reality.

Stevenson, Adlai
•    A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.

•    A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.

•    He who slings mud generally loses ground.

•    In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.

•    An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.

Stevenson, Robert Louis
•    For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake, the great affair is to move. 'Travels with a Donkey'

•    No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable.

•    The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

•    The cruellest lies are often told in silence.

•    Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.

Stoddard, Alexandra
•    What we do today, right now, will have an accumulated effect on all our tomorrows.

Stone, W C
•    When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package.

Stoppard, Tom
•    It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

•    Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

St. Augustine
•    The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.

•    Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.

•    People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea , at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

•    The mind commands the body and the body obeys. The mind commands itself and finds resistance.

•    Anger is a weed; hate is a tree.

Straczynski, J Michael
•    The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.

Stravinsky, Igor
•    Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

•    Just as appetite comes by eating so work brings inspiration.

Strunk, William
•    Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Sun Tzu

• All warfare is based on deception.

• It is imperative to contest all factions for complete victory. This is the law of strategic siege.

• Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

• Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

• Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.

Swid, Stephen
•    Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.

Swift, Jonathan
•    Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

•    Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse.

Syrus, Publilius
•    A miser is as much in want of what he has as of what he has not.

•    Confession of our faults is the next best thing to innocence.

Szasz, Thomas
•    Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius
•    The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

•    Reason and judgement are the qualities of a leader.

•    It is human nature to hate the man whom you have hurt.

Tagore, Rabindranath

• A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

• The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of his tail.

• The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.

• When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

• Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

• In death the many become one; in life the one become many.

Talmud, The
•    When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.

Tao Te Ching
•    Be humble, and you will remain entire.
Be bent, and you will remain straight.
Be vacant, and you will remain full.
Be worn, and you will remain new.

•    The great rulers - the people do not notice their existence. The lesser ones they attach to and praise them. The still lesser ones - they fear them. The still lesser ones - they despise them. For where faith is lacking it cannot be met by faith.

Tartakower, Savielly

• Tactics is what you do when there’s something to do, strategy what you do when there’s nothing to do.

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

Teasdale, Sara
•    My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain.

•    When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange – my youth.

Thackeray, William Makepeace
•    People hate, as they love, unreasonably.

•    There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

•    The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

Thales
•    Hope is the poor man’s bread.

Thatcher, Margaret
•    Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

Thiruvalluvar
•    The only gift is giving to the poor;
All else is exchange.

Thomas, Dylan
•    Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thompson, Hunter S.
•    Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

Thoreau, Henry David

• The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till the other is ready.

• What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter.

• How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character.

• The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.

• Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

• None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

• How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live.

• It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is what are we busy about.

• Things don’t change. We do.

• Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

• The perception of beauty is a moral test.

• Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

• I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

• 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.

• Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

• Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.

• Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. – ‘Walden'

• Spring is a natural resurrection, an experience in immortality.

• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.

• Why has every man a conscience, then? It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

• To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor 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.

• There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

• Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

• Everything beautiful impresses us as sufficient to itself.

• 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.

• He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul’s estate.

• Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

• I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

• The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

• 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.

• That government is best which governs least.

• Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each… some men think that they are not well in spring, or summer, or autumn, or winter; it is only because they are not well in them.

• Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place.

• Nature is slow, but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance.

• Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

• A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

• We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and bones.

• Men have become the tools of their tools.

• The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

Every natural form - palm leaves and acorns, oak leaves and sumach and dodder - are untranslatable aphorisms.

• My greatest skill has been to want but little.

Thurber, James
•    Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else.

Tolkien, J.R.R.

• All that is gold does not glitter,
  Not all those who wander are lost
  The old that is strong does not wither,
  Deep roots are not reached by frost.
  “The Lord Of The Rings”

• It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.

• Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home.

Tolle, Eckhart
•    Realise deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.

Tolstoi, Count Lev
•    Everybody thinks of changing humanity, but nobody thinks of changing himself.

•    The means to gain happiness is to throw out from oneself like a spider in all directions an adhesive web of love, and to catch in it all that comes.

•    All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

•    What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

•    The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.

•    There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

Tonybee, Arnold
•    Civilisation is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.

Trevelyan, G.M.
•    Education … has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

Trollope, Anthony
•    I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.

Trudeau, Gary
•    America, the only country in the world where failing to promote yourself is regarded as being arrogant.

Truman, Harry S.
•    Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Tuchman, Barbara W.
•    Books are the carriers of civilization…They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Turgenev, Ivan
•    The courage to believe in nothing.

Twain, Mark

• All emotion is involuntary when genuine.

• We despise no source that can pay us pleasing attention.

• We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen we do possess.

• I never let my schooling interfere with my education.

• Thunder is good; thunder is impressive. But it is lightning that does the work.

• Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

• Golf is a good walk spoiled.

• It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

• History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

• Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

• Always do right. This will gratify some – and astonish the rest.

• You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

• The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

• I have studied it often, but I never could discover the plot. (on the dictionary)

• There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.

• If you can tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

• Familiarity breed contempt – and children.

• Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

• The man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

• Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

• There are three things men can do with women : love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.

• A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

• Be careful of reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

• I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

• Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

• Man – a figment of God’s imagination.

• A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

• Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

• Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

• We don't throw old habits out the window – we walk them down the stairs very slowly.

• Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

• A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

• Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

• Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

• The report of my death was an exaggeration

• Buy land. They’ve stopped making it.

• Every generalisation is dangerous, especially this one.

• I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

• 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 to practice neither.

• I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Tyler Moore, Mary
•    Pain nourishes courage. You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.

•    Let us endeavour so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Ustinov, Peter
•    I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

•    Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

•    Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.

•    Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

Valéry, Paul
•    History is the science of what never happens twice.

•    A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

•    Man is absurd in what he seeks, great through what he finds.

•    The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

•    Two dangers constantly threaten the world : order and disorder.

Vanbrugh, John
•    Once a woman has given you her heart you can never get rid of the rest of her.

van Buren, Abigail
•    The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.

van der Rohe, Mies
•    God is in the details.

van Dyke, Henry
•    Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

Van Gogh, Vincent
•    A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

•    It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

Vaughn, Bill
•    A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.

Vidal, Gore
•    Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

•    Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they are scraping the top of the barrel.

Vincent, J. H.
•    There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm.

Virgil
•    Practice and thought might gradually forge many an art.

Vitti
•    Art is the combination of a vocation and a technique.

Voltaire
•    Paradise is where I am.

•    Common sense is in spite of, not the result of education.

•    Appreciation is a wonderful thing; it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

•    Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.

•    There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.

•    Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.

•    He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.

•    The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him.

•    The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

•    It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.

•    Appreciation is a wonderful thing; it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

•    God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

•    I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

•    Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

•    One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth.

•    Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.

•    It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.

•    The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

von Bonstetten, Karl Viktor
•    To resist the frigidity of old age one must combine the body, the mind and the heart - and to keep them in parallel vigour one must exercise, study and love.

Von Braun, Wernher

• Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.

• We can lick gravity. but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

Von Herder, Johann Gottfried
•    Say oh wise man how you have come to such knowledge? Because I was never ashamed to confess my ignorance and ask others.

von Humboldt, Baron
•    A language makes infinite use of finite means.

von Mises, Ludwig
•    The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

Von Oech, Roger
•    If you don't execute your ideas, they die.

Vonnegut, Kurt

• Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Wain, John Barrington
•    Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

Walpole, Horace
•    Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.

Walsch, Neale Donald
•    People won’t remember what you did. People won’t remember what you said. But, people will remember how you made them feel.

Wang XI
•    Skillful warriors are able to allow the force of momentum to seize victory for them without exerting their strength.

Ward, William Arthur
•    Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you.

•    Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

•    Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.

Washington, George
•    Associate with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

•    Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

Washington, Booker T
•    Success is not measured by the position one has reached in life, rather by the obstacles overcome while trying to succeed.

Watson, Thomas J
•    Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?

Webster, Daniel

• Failure is frequent from want of energy than want of capital.

• There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.

Weekley, Ernest
•    Stability in language is synonymous with rigor mortis.

Weinbaum, Dave
•    The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings.

Weinreich, Max
•    A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.

Weiss, Paul
•    Each one of us is a unique being confronting the rest of the world in a unique fashion.

Wells, H.G.
•    Human history is in essence a history of ideas.

•    Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

West, Mae
•    When women go wrong, men go right after them.

•    It is better to be looked over than overlooked.

Westheimer, Frank H.
•    A couple of months in the laboratory can save a couple of hours in the library.                         (Also referred to as Westheimer's Discovery)

Wharton, Edith
•    There are two ways of spreading light : to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Whately, Richard
•    Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.

White, Bryan
•    We never really grow up. We only learn how to act in public.

White, E.B.
•    The best writing is rewriting.

Whitehead, Alfred North
•    The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

•    Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

•    We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Whitman, Walt
•    Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

•    Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, when I give I give myself.

Whitteir, John Greenleaf
•    For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, "It might have been."

Wiener, Norbert

• We are not stuff that abides but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

Wiesel, Elie

•    There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

•    Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.

Wilcox, Collen
•    Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
•    So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.

Wilde, Oscar

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

• Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

• Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

• Those who find the beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

• Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

• No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

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

• The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.

• The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.

• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

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

• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

• Fashion is a form of ugliness that we have to alter every six months.

• Scandal is only gossip made tedious by morality.

• Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

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

• For he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die.

• A woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends up blocking his retreat.

• To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

• Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

• I like talking to a brick wall, it’s the only thing in the world that never contradicts me.

• The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

• Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

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

• One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

• Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

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

• I can resist anything but temptation.

• A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.

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

• I feel an irresistible desire to wander, and go to Japan where I will pass my youth, sitting under an almond tree, drinking amber tea out of a blue cup and looking at a landscape without perspective.

• Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.

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

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

• Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Williams, Robin
•    Love is a gift. If you receive it, try and appreciate it. If not, don’t worry. Someone is wrapping it for you.

Wilson, Earl
•    Etc is a symbol used to make others believe we know more than we do.

Wilson, Edmund
•    No two persons ever read the same book.

Winkler, Henry
•    Assumptions are the termites of relationships.

Winters, Shelley
•    All marriages are happy. It's trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig
•    The thing which expresses itself in language, we cannot represent by language.

•    Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it.

•    Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be quiet.

•    The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Wolf, David T
•    Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.

Wolfe, Thomas
•    Is not this the true romantic feeling – not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Woolf, Virginia
•    Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Wordsworth, William
•    Wisdom is often nearer when we stoop than when we soar.

•    What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.

Wright, Frank Lloyd
•    I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

•    TV is chewing gum for the eyes.

•    The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.

Wright, Stephen
•    I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

X, Malcolm
•    The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.

Xenocrates
•    I have often regretted my speech, but never my silence.

Yahya, b. Mu’ad al-Razi
•    Paradise is the prison of the sage, just as the world is the prison of the believer.

Yeats, William Butler
•    Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

•    Land of Heart’s Desire,
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song.

•    Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

•    The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Yoshida, Kenko
•    To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is a pleasure beyond compare.

Young, Edward
•    Woes cluster. Rare are solitary woes
They love a train, they tread each other’s heel.

•    We are all born originals – why is it so many of us die copies?

Youngman, Henny
•    I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.

•    You can't buy love, but you can pay heavily for it.

Yutang, Lin
•    Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

Ziegler, Mel
•    By seeing the seed of failure in every success, we remain humble. By seeing the seed of success in every failure we remain hopeful.

Zimmerman
•    Beauty is worse than wine; it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder.

Zipf's Law
•    The more frequently an expression is used the more likely it will be replaced by a shorter equivalent.

Zukav, Gary
•    The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.

Zwaing, Carl
•    Duct tape is like the Force. It has a dark side, it has a light side, and it holds the Universe together.