I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.  ~John Locke

Well done is better than well said.  ~Benjamin Franklin

Between saying and doing many a pair of shoes is worn out.  ~Italian Proverb

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

The shortest answer is doing.  ~Lord Herbert

Trust only movement.  Life happens at the level of events, not of words.  Trust movement.  ~Alfred Adler

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing.  Action always generates inspiration.  Inspiration seldom generates action.  ~Frank Tibolt

A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is rain.  ~Arabian Proverb

An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.  ~Arnold Glasow

Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.  ~Brendan Francis

Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.  ~Peter Marshall

Never mistake motion for action.  ~Ernest Hemingway

Action is eloquence.  ~William Shakespeare

There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.  ~Mignon McLaughlin

Do it, and then you will feel motivated to do it.  ~Zig Ziglar

Note to self: finding a cool quote and writing it in your journal is not a substitute for Getting. It. Done.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

A barking dog is often more useful than a sleeping lion.  ~Washington Irving, adapted from a verse in the Bible

Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.  ~Oscar Wilde

Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action.  ~Walter Anderson, The Confidence Course, 1997

Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions.  You may have a heart of gold - but so does a hard-boiled egg.  ~Author Unknown

Never act until you have clearly answered the question: "What happens if I do nothing?"  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If ifs were gifts, every day would be Christmas.  ~Charles Barkley

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.  ~Edmund Burke

Talk doesn't cook rice.  ~Chinese Proverb

Be content to act, and leave the talking to others.  ~Baltasar Gracian

All know the way; few actually walk it.  ~Bodhidharma

Contemplation often makes life miserable.  We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.  ~Nicolas de Chamfort

The first step binds one to the second.  ~French Proverb

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on man unless they act.  ~G.K. Chesterton

If your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.  ~Henry J. Kaiser

There is no moment like the present.  The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards:  they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence.  ~Maria Edgeworth

Deliberation is a function of the many; action is the function of one.  ~Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs, 1960

Action is the antidote to despair.  ~Joan Baez

Ironically, making a statement with words is the least effective method.  ~Grey Livingston

Doing things is not the same as getting things done.  ~Jared Silver

The trick to getting things done is to list things to do in doable order.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

He liked to go from A to B without inventing letters between.  ~John McPhee

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.  Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures.  They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.  ~Ernest Newman

We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others, by their acts.  ~Harold Nicolson

A nod,
a bow,
and a tip of the lid
to the person
who coulda
and shoulda
and did.
~Robert Brault, "A Poem Missing the Word Woulda," www.robertbrault.com

The vision must be followed by the venture.  It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs.  ~Vance Havner

He who has made a thousand things and he who has made none, both feel the same desire:  to make something.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Don't find fault.  Find a remedy.  ~Henry Ford

When we commit to action, to actually doing something rather than feeling trapped by events, the stress becomes manageable.  ~Greg Anderson

What ought to have been done, and what shall be done, often stifle doing between them.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Success will never be a big step in the future, success is a small step taken just now.  ~Jonatan Mårtensson

Nature takes away any faculty that is not used.  ~William R. Inge

He that waits upon fortune is never sure of a dinner.  ~Benjamin Franklin

If I set for myself a task, be it so trifling, I shall see it through.  How else shall I have confidence in myself to do important things?  ~George Clason

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not be wise in words - be wise in deeds.  ~Jewish Proverb

One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness:  not to be a mere rushing on.  ~D.H. Lawrence

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.  ~Mark Twain

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.  ~James Baldwin

Action will remove the doubts that theory cannot solve.  ~Tehyi Hsieh

Now and then it's good to list all the things you regularly do for which there was once a good reason.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Men expect too much, do too little.  ~Allen Tate

When deeds speak, words are nothing.  ~African Proverb

As I grow older I pay less attention to what men say.  I just watch what they do.  ~Andrew Carnegie

All problems become smaller if you don't dodge them but confront them.  ~William F. Halsey

The best way out of a problem is through it.  ~Author Unknown

I believe half the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things.  ~William J. Lock

When it seems that something can't be done, start it, and see if the rest of it can be done.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do.  ~Lewis Cass

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.  ~Calvin Coolidge

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem.  Everything else is inconvenience.  ~Robert Fulghum

Pain is inevitable.  Suffering is optional.  ~M. Kathleen Casey

If you're going through hell, keep going.  ~Winston Churchill

We have no right to ask when sorrow comes, "Why did this happen to me?" unless we ask the same question for every moment of happiness that comes our way.  ~Author Unknown

A bend in the road is not the end of the road... unless you fail to make the turn.  ~Author Unknown

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.  ~William Shakespeare, Othello

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle.  I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.  ~Mother Teresa

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.  ~Harry Golden

We acquire the strength we have overcome.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can't run away from trouble.  There ain't no place that far.  ~Uncle Remus

Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round.  Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.  I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy.  But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

The healthy and strong individual is the one who asks for help when he needs it.  Whether he's got an abscess on his knee or in his soul.  ~Rona Barrett

Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.  ~Garth Brooks

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.  ~Garrison Keillor

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.  ~Erich Fromm

I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders.  ~Jewish Proverb

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?  ~Rose F. Kennedy

You have come into a hard world.  I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

If you want to forget all your other troubles, wear too tight shoes.  ~The Houghton Line, November 1965

Turn your wounds into wisdom.  ~Oprah Winfrey

Sometimes the littlest things in life are the hardest to take.  You can sit on a mountain more comfortably than on a tack.  ~Author Unknown

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere.  ~Frank A. Clark

As long as you keep getting born, it's alright to die some times.  ~Orson Scott Card

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.  ~Kenji Miyazawa

Bad is never good until worse happens.  ~Danish Proverb

It just wouldn't be a picnic without the ants.  ~Author Unknown

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.  ~Walt Disney

Adversity is like a strong wind.  It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.  ~Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold.  They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.  ~Barbara Bloom

There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.  ~Lou Reed, "Magic and Loss"

We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn that it is God who is shaking them.  ~Charles C. West

Things are never so bad they can't be made worse.  ~From the movie The African Queen

If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.  ~Mary Engelbreit

The problem is not that there are problems.  The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.  ~Theodore Rubin

Every path hath a puddle.  ~George Herbert, "Jacula Prudentum"

A bad grade is only one letter in the Essay of life.  ~Lee Drake

I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.  ~Agatha Christie

Sometimes in tragedy we find our life's purpose - the eye sheds a tear to find its focus.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.  ~Colette 

Sleep, riches, and health to be truly enjoyed must be interrupted.  ~Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Flower, Fruit, and Thorn

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.  ~African Proverb

There is no education like adversity.  ~Disraeli

We find comfort among those who agree with us - growth among those who don't.  ~Frank A. Clark

If you're in a bad situation, don't worry it'll change.  If you're in a good situation, don't worry it'll change.  ~John A. Simone, Sr.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

When written in Chinese the word "crisis" is composed of two characters - one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.  ~John F. Kennedy, address, 12 April 1959

The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.  ~Author Unknown

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.  ~Michel de Montaigne

Adversity introduces a man to himself.  ~Author Unknown

It's not easy taking my problems one at a time when they refuse to get in line.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant

Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight, 1931, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert

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.  ~James K. Feibleman

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

If you know someone who tries to drown their sorrows, you might tell them sorrows know how to swim.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.  ~John Steinbeck

Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.  ~Edwin Markham

Life didn't promise to be wonderful.  ~Teddy Pendergrass

Adversity is the first path to truth.  ~Lord Byron

Diseases can be our spiritual flat tires - disruptions in our lives that seem to be disasters at the time but end by redirecting our lives in a meaningful way.  ~Bernie S. Siegel

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.  ~John Updike

Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution.  If you don't have any problems, you don't get any seeds.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

Much of your pain is self-chosen.  ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.  ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1909

The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not bitter.  ~Author Unknown

A problem is a chance for you to do your best.  ~Duke Ellington

Suffering is above, not below.  And everyone thinks that suffering is below.  And everyone wants to rise.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

They say a reasonable amount 'o fleas is good fer a dog - keeps him from broodin' over bein' a dog, mebbe.  ~Edward Westcott

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.  ~O. Henry, The Gifts of the Magi

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.... [A]ccept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.... ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.  ~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929

I had a lover's quarrel with the world.  ~Robert Frost, The Lesson for Today, 1942

I owe much to my friends; but, all things considered, it strikes me that I owe even more to my enemies.  The real person springs life under a sting even better than under a caress.  ~André Gide

Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.  ~Author Unknown

Convert difficulties into opportunities, for difficulties are divine surgeries to make you better.  ~Author Unknown

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.  ~Horace

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.  ~Sophocles

Have the courage to face a difficulty lest it kick you harder than you bargained for.  ~Stanislaus I, Maxims

Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things.  ~Robert Service

Sometimes I think my life would make a great TV movie.  It even has the part where they say, "Stand by. We are experiencing temporary difficulties."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Damaged people are dangerous.  They know they can survive.  ~Josephine Hart

Yes, one must suffer, even in vain, so as not to have lived in vain.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Don't cry when the sun is gone, because the tears won't let you see the stars.  ~Violeta Parra

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.  ~Alexander Smith

Despair is anger with no place to go.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

What a pity human beings can't exchange problems.  Everyone knows exactly how to solve the other fellow's.  ~Olin Miller

Problems are messages.  ~Shakti Gawain

I guess if you take away the pain in life it means having no beauty to hope for.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

There is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.  ~Washington Irving, The Sketch Book, 1820

For fate has wove the thread of life with pain,
And twins ev'n from the birth are Misery and Man!
~Homer, Odyssey

People are resilient.  After all, every person born has recovered from nine months on life support.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.  ~Oscar Wilde

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them.  The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.  ~Voltaire

A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity 'til he has tasted adversity.  ~Sa'di

The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.  ~Bernard M. Baruch

A new wound makes all the old ones ache again.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.  ~Author Unknown

Thorns and stings
And those such things
Just make stronger
Our angel wings.
~Terri Guillemets

When life gives you lemons, please, just don't squirt them in other people's eyes.  ~J. Andrew Helt

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.  ~Max Lerner, The Unfinished Country, 1950

God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Calamity, n.  A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

There are sufferings that have lost their memory and do not remember why they are suffering.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills.  We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Everybody ought to do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.  ~William James

Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.  ~Helen Keller

He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.  ~Edmund Burke, The Revolution in France, 1790

The course of true anything never does run smooth.  ~Samuel Butler

Invite your melancholy outside for a walk.  Or read it a poem.  Or bake it chocolate chip cookies.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.  ~Steven Kloves, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (movie)

Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness.  Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.  Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.  ~August Wilson

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.  ~André Gide, L'immoraliste

If the thunder is not loud, the peasant forgets to cross himself.  ~Russian Proverb

Pain is sometimes the cost of a meaninful existence.  I can handle that.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.  ~Elizabeth Taylor

At times, challenges hit with the force of a roaring, rushing waterfall.  The true test, however, is whether you can put your arms up and enjoy the feel of the water.  ~Aviva Kaufman

Past and to come, seems best; things present, worse.  ~William Shakespeare, Henry IV

During the darkest indigo midnight, yet will countless stars blossom.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

People don't ever seem to relate that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.  ~William McFee, Casuals of the Sea, 1916

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater.  ~William Hazlitt

Allow yourself a moment of grief when life's misfortunes visit you.  However, do not spend your days building a monument in honor of them.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Better to lose count while naming your blessings than to lose your blessings to counting your troubles.  ~Maltbie D. Babcock

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.  ~Jean-Paul Sartre

I bear a little more than I can bear.  ~Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Angels and Earthly Creatures. One Person. Sonnet XVI

Every evil is some good spelt backwards, and in it the wise know how to read Wisdom.  ~Coventry Patmore

May you get what you wish for.  ~Old Chinese Curse

You'll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.  ~Walt Schmidt

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering - that is a fact.  ~Fyodor Dostoevsky

Watch a man in times of... adversity to discover what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off.  ~Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

"The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!"  "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it.  ~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1872

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

When life takes the wind out of your sails, it is to test you at the oars.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.  ~Billie Holiday

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Human suffering, while it is asleep, is shapeless.  If it is wakened it takes the form of the waker.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

There are times in everyone's life when something constructive is born out of adversity... when things seem so bad that you've got to grab your fate by the shoulders and shake it.  ~Author Unknown

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes, and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.  ~Francis Bacon

The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures.  ~William Hazlitt, Characteristics, 1823

Better bread with water than cake with trouble.  ~Russian Proverb

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.  ~Hugh Miller, Snow on the Wind

The darkest hour has only sixty minutes.  ~Morris Mandel

The gem cannot be polished without friction nor man without trials.  ~Confucius

God gave burdens, also shoulders.  ~Yiddish Proverb

But ah! disasters have their use;
And life might e'en be too sun-shiny.
~Charles Stuart Calverley, Disaster, after Moore

There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature.  A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.  ~Harry Crews

When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear.  That's how he finds that he can bear anything.  ~William Faulkner

The brook would lose its song if you removed the rocks.  ~Fred Beck

Would you touch a nettle without being stung by it? take hold of it stoutly.  Do the same to other annoyances, and hardly will any thing annoy you.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.  ~Winston Churchill

It is always in the midst, in the epicenter, of your troubles that you find serenity.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell

Tragedy is restful:  and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.  ~Jean Anouilh, Antigone, 1942

Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune.  He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power.  ~Seneca

My strength is made perfect in weakness.  ~II Corinthians

Problems are the price you pay for progress.  ~Branch Rickey

When you're feeling your worst, that's when you get to know yourself the best.  ~Leslie Grossman

The dark and the light are braided and bound.  ~Marc Ian Barasch

Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.  ~Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, Remembrance of Things Past

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.  ~Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought

The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.  ~Bernard M. Baruch

Like a plant that starts up in showers and sunshine and does not know which has best helped it to grow, it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me the most good.  ~Lucy Larcom

If all 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.  ~Socrates

Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing sooner than of war.  ~Homer, Iliad

There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.  ~Woody Hayes

It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.  ~Cicero

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.  ~Truman Capote

No man ought to lay a cross upon himself, or to adopt tribulation, as is done in popedom; but if a cross or tribulation come upon him, then let him suffer it patiently, and know that it is good and profitable for him.  ~Martin Luther

Flowers never emit so sweet and strong a fragrance as before a storm.  When a storm approaches thee, be as fragrant as a sweet-smelling flower.  ~Jean Paul Richter

Having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting, it may not be logical but it is often true.  ~Mr. Spock, Star Trek

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.  ~William Stafford

I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead and some come from behind.
But I've bought a big bat.  I'm all ready you see.
Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!
~Dr. Seuss

The misfortunes of mankind are of varied plumage.  ~Aeschylus, The Suppliant Maidens

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled.  Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value.  Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.  ~Boris Pasternak

We must try not to sink beneath our anguish... but battle on.  ~J.K. Rowling

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.  ~Bertrand Russell

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.  ~James Russell Lowell, "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," Literary Essays

Bygone troubles are good to tell.  ~Yiddish Proverb

The cold is a good counselor, but it is cold.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary.  It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body.  It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.  ~Winston Churchill

Rock bottom is good solid ground, and a dead end street is just a place to turn around.  ~Buddy Buie and J.R. Cobb, "Rock Bottom" (song)

If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.  ~Latin Proverb

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to a Sky Lark"

In this world there are only two tragedies.  One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.  ~Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan, 1896

Count the garden by the flowers, never by the leaves that fall.  Count your life with smiles and not the tears that roll.  ~Author Unknown

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist:  it reduces him to his fighting weight.  ~Josh Billings

In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

But ne'er the rose without the thorn.  ~Robert Herrick

You never know what you've got until it's gone.  ~Author Unknown

That was rough.... Thing to do now is try and forget it.... I guess I don't quite mean that.  It's not a thing you can forget.  Maybe not even a thing you want to forget.... Life's like that sometimes... Now and then for no good reason a man can figure out, life will just haul off and knock him flat, slam him agin' the ground so hard it seems like all his insides is busted.  But it's not all like that.  A lot of it's mighty fine, and you can't afford to waste the good part frettin' about the bad.  That makes it all bad.... Sure, I know - sayin' it's one thing and feelin' it's another.  But I'll tell you a trick that's sometimes a big help.  When you start lookin' around for something good to take the place of the bad, as a general rule you can find it.  ~From the movie Old Yeller

God brings men into deep waters, not to drown them, but to cleanse them.  ~John Aughey

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.  ~William Shakespeare

There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable:  the damages of time and injustices of men.  ~Nicolas Chamfort



With no ads, who would pay for the media?  The good fairy?  ~Samuel Thurm


Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark.  You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.  ~Steuart Henderson Britt


What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising?  Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.  ~Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 1964


Advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease.  ~Author Unknown


It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.  ~R. Serling


When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50.  When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded.  ~Pat Brown, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985


I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.
~Ogden Nash, "Song of the Open Road," 1933


Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.  ~Stephen Butler Leacock, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political Quotations, 1982


Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read.  You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife.  Don't tell them to mine.  ~David Ogilvy


Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.  ~Marshall McLuhan, introduction to Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction: Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974


As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.  ~George Will, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations


Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it.  ~Will Rogers


It used to be that people needed products to survive.  Now products need people to survive.  ~Nicholas Johnson


Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.  ~George Orwell


You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.  ~Norman Douglas, South Wind


Advertising is a bit like playing make-believe.  ~Hartman Jule


The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.  ~Bill Cosby


Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.  ~J.B. Priestley


So long as there's a jingle in your head, television isn't free.  ~Jason Love


Advertising is the art of making whole lies out of half truths.  ~Edgar A. Shoaff


Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick.  ~Samuel Johnson


The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.  ~Leonard Bernstein


Advertising is only another form of statistics.  ~Hartman Jule


Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle.  ~Marya Mannes, But Will It Sell?, 1964


It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have.  ~B. Earl Puckett, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992


I have... had a disturbing dream in which I break through a cave wall near Nag Hammadi and discover urns full of ancient Coptic scrolls.  As I unfurl the first scroll, a subscription card to some Gnostic exercise magazine flutters out.  ~Colin McEnroe


In general, my children refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV.  ~Erma Bombeck


Our society's values are being corrupted by advertising's insistence on the equation:  Youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness.  ~John Fisher, The Plot to Make You Buy, 1968


Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.  ~Samuel Johnson


History will see advertising "as one of the real evil things of our time.  It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that."  ~Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988


When the historian of the Twentieth Century shall have finished his narrative, and comes searching for the subtitle which shall best express the spirit of the period, we think it not at all unlikely that he may select "The Age of Advertising" for the purpose.  ~Printers' Ink, 27 May 1915


Don't tell my mother I work in an advertising agency - she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.  ~Jacques Seguela


First we thought the PC was a calculator.  Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII - and we thought it was a typewriter.  Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television.  With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.  ~Douglas Adams


The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.  ~Louis Kronenberger


If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue.  ~Sears, Roebuck, and Co. Consumer's Guide, 1897




Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.  ~Erica Jong, How to Save Your Own Life, 1977


Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.  ~Gordon R. Dickson


When a man comes to me for advice, I find out the kind of advice he wants, and I give it to him.  ~Henry Wheeler Shaw, a.k.a. Josh Billings


The best advice is this:  Don't take advice and don't give advice.  ~Author Unknown


It is a good divine that follows his own instructions.  ~William Shakespeare


Old men are fond of giving good advice, to console themselves for being no longer in a position to give bad examples.  ~Franois La Rochefoucauld


When we ask advice we are usually looking for an accomplice.  ~Charles Varlet de La Grange, Pensées, 1872


The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others.  ~Author Unknown


Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


We hate to have some people give us advice because we know how badly they need it themselves.  ~Author Unknown


The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.  ~Hannah Whitall Smith


It is more easy to be wise for others than for ourselves.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld


In giving advice seek to help, not to please, your friend.  ~Solon


No one wants advice - only corroboration.  ~John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent


I never had a man come to me for advice yet, but what I soon discovered that he thought more of his own opinion than he did of mine.  ~Josh Billings


Sometimes I give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.  ~Mary Wortley Montagu


I always pass on good advice.  It's the only thing to do with it.  It is never any use to oneself.  ~Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1895


A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.  ~Edgar Watson Howe, Country Town Sayings, 1911


Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.  ~Cicero


The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.  ~Doug Larson

Age is a question of mind over matter.  If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.  ~Leroy "Satchel" Paige

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years.  We grow old by deserting our ideals.  Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.  ~Samuel Ullman

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.  ~Douglas MacArthur

Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.  ~Chili Davis

In youth the days are short and the years are long; in old age the years are short and the days long.  ~Nikita Ivanovich Panin

Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone.  ~Jim Fiebig

In a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.  ~E.B. White

The years teach much which the days never knew.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair.  ~Sam Ewing

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.  ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a crime to waste it on children.  ~George Bernard Shaw

There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.  ~John Mortimer

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.  ~Maurice Chevalier, New York Times, 9 October 1960

Old Time, that greatest and longest established ssockner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes.  ~Charles Dickens

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

A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life:  maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves.  A man's age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell

Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.  ~Robert Southey, The Doctor

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.  ~John Barrymore

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?  ~Satchel Paige

Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.  ~Muriel Spark

Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour.  With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.  ~Charles Dickens

The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.  ~Jerry M. Wright

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.  It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.  ~Mark Twain

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.  ~Bob Hope

Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.  ~Caryn Leschen

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.  ~Victor Hugo

Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age.  It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush to the net.  ~Franklin Adams

Everyone is the age of their heart.  ~Guatemalan Proverb

There is always a lot to be thankful for, if you take the time to look. For example, I'm sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don't hurt.  ~Author Unknown

Youth is a disease from which we all recover.  ~Dorothy Fulheim

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age - I missed it coming and going.  ~J.B. Priestly

I still have a full deck; I just shuffle slower now.  ~Author Unknown

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.  ~Tom Stoppard

By the time I have money to burn, my fire will have burnt out.  ~Author Unknown

There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

We are young only once, after that we need some other excuse.  ~Author Unknown

The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible.  ~Judith Regan

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.  ~Mark Twain

It's sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.  ~Brigitte Bardot

It's like this.  Father Time keeps pitching the years at us.  We swing and miss at a few.  We hit a few out of the park.  We try not to take any called strikes.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Grow old with me!  The best is yet to be.  ~Robert Browning

Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.  ~Herbert Asquith

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities.  It is the only pleasure I have left.  ~Voltaire

There's no such thing as too late.  That's why they invented death.  ~From the movie Out to Sea

I was wrong to grow older.  Pity.  I was so happy as a child.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

Age is opportunity no less,
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes  (Thanks Janice!)

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made.
~Edmund Waller

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years.  Your body changes, but you don't change at all.  And that, of course, causes great confusion.  ~Doris Lessing

There is still no cure for the common birthday.  ~John Glenn

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty - they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.  ~Martin Buxbaum

An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have:  the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.  ~Agatha Christie, news summaries, 9 March 1954

Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.  ~G. Norman Collie

You can't hide your true colors as you approach the autumn of your life.  ~Author Unknown

I don't believe one grows older.  I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.  ~T.S. Eliot

Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's important to have a twinkle in your wrinkle.  ~Author Unknown

When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange - my youth.
~Sara Teasdale

Who does not wish to be beautiful, and clever, and rich, and to have back, in old age, the time spent trying to be any of them.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.  ~Henry David Thoreau

I recently had my annual physical examination, which I get once every seven years, and when the nurse weighed me, I was shocked to discover how much stronger the Earth's gravitational pull has become since 1990.  ~Dave Barry

Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.  ~Quoted by Francis Bacon, Apothegm

To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.  ~Henri Amiel

We've put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.  ~Frank A. Clark

First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.  ~Leo Rosenberg

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

It is possible at any age to discover a lifelong desire you never knew you had.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When it comes to staying young, a mind-lift beats a face-lift any day.  ~Marty Bucella

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.  ~Saint Aurelius Augustine

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest.  You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.  ~T.S. Eliot, quoted in Time, 23 October 1950

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.  ~Charles Dickens

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

You know you've reached middle age when a doctor, not a policeman, tells you to slow down, all you exercise are your prerogatives and it takes you longer to rest than to get tired.  ~Author Unknown

We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.  ~Charles Lamb

It is autumn; not without
But within me is the cold.
Youth and spring are all about;
It is I that have grown old.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Autumn Within"

Life is one long process of getting tired.  ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks

Don't worry about avoiding temptation - as you grow older, it starts avoiding you.  ~Author Unknown

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.  ~Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Diary in Exile, 1935

At 20 years of age the will reigns; at 30 the wit; at 40 the judgment.  ~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac

The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained.  By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.  ~Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.  ~John Fischer

Everything slows down with age, except the time it takes cake and ice cream to reach your hips.  ~Attributed to John Wagner

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.  ~Oliver W. Holmes, Sr.

Old Time, who changes all below,
To wean men gently for the grave.
~Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.  ~Graham Greene

When you're a young man, Macbeth is a character part.  When you're older, it's a straight part.  ~Laurence Olivier

As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am.  ~Erma Bombeck

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.  ~Ogden Nash

They say that age is all in your mind.  The trick is keeping it from creeping down into your body.  ~Author Unknown

The other day a man asked me what I thought was the best time of life.  "Why," I answered without a thought, "now."  ~David Grayson

Like a lot of fellows around here, I have a furniture problem.  My chest has fallen into my drawers.  ~Billy Casper, about golf's Senior Tour

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.  ~Truman Capote

Never use the passing years as an excuse for old age.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.  ~Author Unknown

I spent my 30s fixing everything I broke in my 20s.  ~Eddie Murphy

A man is not old as long as he is seeking something.  ~Jean Rostand

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.  ~Madeleine L'Engle

You're never too old.  Unfortunately, you're always too young to know it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Youth disserves; middle age conserves; old age preserves.  ~Martin H. Fischer

One of the best parts of growing older?  You can flirt all you like since you've become harmless.  ~Liz Smith

Spiritual sloth, or acedia, was known as The Sin of the Middle Ages.  It's the sin of my middle age, too.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

We turn not older with years, but newer every day.  ~Emily Dickinson

In a dream you are never eighty.  ~Anne Sexton

Old men are fond of giving good advice, to console themselves for being no longer in a position to give bad examples.  ~Franois La Rochefoucauld

Middle age is when a narrow waist and a broad mind begin to change places.  ~Author Unknown

Middle age is youth without its levity, and age without decay.  ~Daniel Defoe

There must be a day or two in a man's life when he is the precise age for something important.  ~Franklin P. Adams

Where did the time go?  Yesterday, I was a girl, and today, I suddenly find myself in the autumn of my years with the cold winds of winter breathing down my neck.  ~Peggy Toney Horton

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all things that make you want to live to be a hundred.  ~Allen

I don't do alcohol anymore - I get the same effect just standing up fast.  ~Author Unknown

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
~Donald Justice, "Men at Forty"

Age is just a number.  Mine is unlisted.  ~Author Unknown

Age is a prison from which we cannot escape.  ~Morrow Bourne

I complain that the years fly past, but then I look in a mirror and see that very few of them actually got past.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.  ~Don Marquis

My diseases are an asthma and a dropsy and, what is less curable, seventy-five.  ~Samuel Johnson

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clasp its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
~William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

I'm not 40, I'm eighteen with 22 years experience.  ~Author Unknown

Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.  ~H.L. Mencken

Middle age is when you choose your cereal for the fiber, not the toy.  ~Author Unknown

Before thirty, men seek disease; after thirty, diseases seek men.  ~Chinese Proverb

Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly.  It's more often a succession of jerks.  ~Jean Rhys

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age.  Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.  ~Tom Wilson

We are always the same age inside.  ~Gertrude Stein

Old age ain't no place for sissies.  ~Bette Davis

The last birthday that's any good is 23.  ~Andy Rooney

At my age, you not only have bittersweet memories, you make bittersweet plans.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Middle age is having a choice between two temptations and choosing the one that'll get you home earlier.  ~Dan Bennett

I fear vastly more a futile, incompetent old age than I do any form of death.  ~William Allen White

Wrinkled was not one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up.  ~Author Unknown

Like our shadows, our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.  ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

Don't let aging get you down.  It's too hard to get back up.  ~Attributed to John Wagner

As we grow older, our capacity for enjoyment shrinks, but not our appetite for it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M.D. after them.  ~Arnold Palmer

You spend 90% of your adult life hoping for a long rest and the last 10% trying to convince the Lord that you're actually not that tired.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It's hard to feel middle-aged, because how can you tell how long you are going to live?  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.  ~Jennifer Yane

Middle age is when we can do just as much as ever - but would rather not.  ~Author Unknown

In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber.  So long as it receives a message of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage - so long are you young.  When the wires are all down and our heart is covered with the snow of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, are you grown old.  ~Douglas MacArthur

Is that a birthday? 'tis, alas! too clear;
'Tis but the funeral of the former year.
~Alexander Pope

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Zeal, n.  A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced.  ~Ambrose Bierce

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.  ~Zora Neale Hurston

The elderly don't drive that badly; they're just the only ones with time to do the speed limit.  ~Jason Love

It's a mere moment in a man's life between an All-Star Game and an Old-timers' Game.  ~Vin Scully

It seems no more than right that men should seize time by the forelock, for the rude old fellow, sooner or later, pulls all their hair out.  ~George Dennison Prentice, Prenticeana, 1860

At another year
I would not boggle
Except that when I jog
I joggle.
~Ogden Nash, "Birthday on the Beach"

All diseases run into one, old age.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not by the gray of the hair that one knows the age of the heart.  ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.  I grow older.
~Li Po

In dog years, I'm dead.  ~Author Unknown

Middle age:  The time when you'll do anything to feel better, except give up what is hurting you.  ~Robert Quillen

If youth but know,
And old age only could.
~Henri Estienne

Old age puts more wrinkles in our minds than on our faces.  ~Michel de Montaigne

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.  ~Mark Twain

The arctic loneliness of age.  ~S. Weir Mitchell

Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once.  ~Dave Barry, "Your Disintegrating Body," Dave Barry Turns 40, 1990

The true way to render age vigorous is to prolong the youth of the mind.  ~Mortimer Collins

A man is as old as he's feeling,
A woman as old as she looks.
~Mortimer Collins

When the problem is not so much resisting temptation as finding it, you may just be getting older.  ~Author Unknown

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  ~Henry Ford

I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all.  ~Jawaharlal Nehru

Sometimes age succeeds, sometimes it fails.  It depends on you.  ~Ravensara Noite

The best thing about getting old is that all those things you couldn't have when you were young you no longer want.  ~L.S. McCandless

I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth.  I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it.  ~Bernard Berenson

Middle age is when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.  ~Author Unknown

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.  ~Wilma Rudolph

When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.  ~Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we're the grown-ups.  ~Margaret Atwood

There is only one cure for gray hair.  It was invented by a Frenchman.  It is called the guillotine.  ~P.G. Wodehouse

Life is like a roll of toilet paper.  The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.  ~Author Unknown

Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.  ~Harold Coffin

Old age is a lot of crossed off names in an address book.  ~Ronald Blythe

You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather.  Later he played my father and finally he played my husband.  If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother.  That's the way it is in Hollywood.  The men get younger and the women get older.  ~Lillian Gish

Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.  ~Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711

It well becomes a man who is no longer young to forget that he ever was.  ~Seigneur de Saint-Evremond, 1696

Age is like the newest version of a software - it has a bunch of great new features but you lost all the cool features the original version had.  ~Carrie Latet

When I was 40, my doctor advised me that a man in his 40s shouldn't play tennis.  I heeded his advice carefully and could hardly wait until I reached 50 to start again.  ~Hugo L. Black

In youth we are plagued by desire; in later years, by the desire to feel desire.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

You get to an age when there are really just two reasons to get up in the morning - for goodness sake and for heaven's sake.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.  ~Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711

They talk about the economy this year.  Hey, my hairline is in recession, my waistline is in inflation.  Altogether, I'm in a depression.  ~Rick Majerus

Few people know how to be old.  ~Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

We are only young once.  That is all society can stand.  ~Bob Bowen

There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.  ~Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

I am getting to an age when I can only enjoy the last sport left.  It is called hunting for your spectacles.  ~Edward Grey

The lost leaves measure our years; they are gone as the days are gone.  ~Richard Jefferies, The Life of the Fields, 1908

Regular naps prevent old age, especially if you take them while driving.  ~Author Unknown

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.  ~William Butler Yeats

I don't know how you feel about old age... but in my case I didn't even see it coming.  It hit me from the rear.  ~Phyllis Diller

Growing old is a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.  ~Andre Maurois

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.  ~Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby

You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.  ~George Burns

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.  ~Voltaire

You can't turn back the clock.  But you can wind it up again.  ~Bonnie Prudden

The trick is growing up without growing old.  ~Casey Stengel

It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are.  ~Quoted by Raymond A. Michel in The Leaf

The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable.  I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.  ~Leon Edel

The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face.  ~Jack Nicklaus

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.  ~Timothy Leary

It takes a long time to become young.  ~Pablo Picasso

The problem with beauty is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer.  ~Joan Collins

I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.
~Robert Frost

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Our bodies are the burial grounds of dead time.  ~T.A. Sachs, to "Time! where didst thou those years inter, Which I have seene decease?" by William Habington

Middle age is when your classmates are so gray and wrinkled and bald they don't recognize you  ~Bennett Cerf

I am old enough to see how little I have done in so much time, and how much I have to do in so little.  ~Sheila Kaye-Smith

There is always some specific moment when we realize our youth is gone; but years after, we know it was much later.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable.  There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.  ~Victor Hugo

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve.  Middle age is when you're forced to.  ~Bill Vaughn

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.  ~Kurt Vonnegut

To the loved ones with snowy crowns, I bequeath the happiness of old age, the love and gratitude of their children until they fall asleep.  ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Williston Fish

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

Never lose sight of the fact that old age needs so little but needs that little so much.  ~Margaret Willour

The idea is to die young as late as possible.  ~Ashley Montagu

Stay busy, get plenty of exercise, and don't drink too much.  Then again, don't drink too little.  ~Herman "Jackrabbit" Smith-Johannsen

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk.  That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.  ~Ernest Hemingway

A hangover is the wrath of grapes.  ~Author Unknown

I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk.  ~John Marcellus Huston

If you must drink and drive, drink Pepsi.  ~Author unknown, as seen on a bumper sticker

Draft beer, not people.  ~Author Unknown

The first thing in the human personality that dissolves in alcohol is dignity.  ~Author Unknown

Wine is bottled poetry.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

When the wine goes in, strange things come out.  ~Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, The Piccolomini, 1799

If drinking is interfering with your work, you're probably a heavy drinker.  If work is interfering with your drinking, you're probably an alcoholic.  ~Author Unknown

If you know someone who tries to drown their sorrows, you might tell them sorrows know how to swim.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!  ~William Shakespeare, Othello

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.  ~Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.  ~Raymond Chandler

If four or five guys tell you that you're drunk, even though you know you haven't had a thing to drink, the least you can do is to lie down a little while.  ~Joseph Schenck

This is one of the disadvantages of wine:  it makes a man mistake words for thought.  ~Samuel Johnson

One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time.  ~Lady Astor

A man who was fond of wine was offered some grapes at dessert after dinner.  "Much obliged," said he, pushing the plate aside, "I am not accustomed to take my wine in pills."  ~Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.  ~W.C. Fields

It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.  ~Thomas de Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1856

It takes 8,460 bolts to assemble an automobile, and one nut to scatter it all over the road.  ~Author unknown, as seen on a bumper sticker

The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.  ~H.L. Mencken, Prejudices, Fourth Series, 1924

Your body is a temple, but keep the spirits on the outside.  ~Author Unknown

You don't have to be a beer drinker to play darts, but it helps.  ~Author Unknown

Here's to a long life and a merry one
A quick death and an easy one
A pretty girl and an honest one
A cold beer and another one!
~Author Unknown

I like liquor - its taste and its effects - and that is just the reason why I never drink it.  ~Thomas Jackson

Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed.  Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams.  If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered.  Then I say to myself, it is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.  ~Jack Handey

When the wine is in, the wit is out.  ~Proverb

I feel sorry for people who don't drink.  When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.  ~Frank Sinatra

What's drinking?
A mere pause from thinking!
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Deformed Transformed

I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.  ~W.C. Fields

Woman first tempted man to eat; he took to drinking of his own accord.  ~Four Hundred Laughs: Or, Fun Without Vulgarity, compiled and edited by John R. Kemble, 1902

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer.  Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.  ~Dave Barry

Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony.  ~Robert Benchley

The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

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

Remember:  "I" before "E," except in Budweiser.  ~Author Unknown

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.  It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.  ~Graham Greene

I'll stick with gin.  Champagne is just ginger ale that knows somebody.  ~M*A*S*H, Hawkeye, "Ceasefire," 1973

No animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.  ~Lord Chesterton

Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.  ~Jean Kerr

We borrowed golf from Scotland as we borrowed whiskey.  Not because it is Scottish, but because it is good.  ~Horace Hutchinson

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.  ~Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

It's like an angel crying on your tongue.  ~The Mentalist, "My Bloody Valentine," written by Bruno Heller and Tom Szentgyorgyi, spoken by the character Patrick Jane, about alcohol

Everybody should believe in something; I believe I'll have another drink.  ~Author Unknown

Wine gives a man nothing... it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.  ~Samuel Johnson

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.  ~George Burns

I don't think I've ever drunk champagne before breakfast before.  With breakfast on several occasions, but never before before.  ~From the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1961, screenplay by George Axelrod, based on the novella by Truman Capote, spoken by the character Paul Varjak

A man ought not never to get drunk above the neck.  ~Author Unknown

If life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade.  And try to find somebody who's life is giving them vodka, and have a party.  ~Ron White

Wine is sunlight, held together by water.  ~Galileo

If you wish to keep your affairs secret, drink no wine.  ~Author Unknown

They speak of my drinking, but never think of my thirst.  ~Scottish Proverb

[H]uman feet are conspicuously absent from beer making.  ~Steve Mirsky, "Ale's Well with the World," Scientific American, May 2007

Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune.  ~Giuseppe Garibaldi

A woman drove me to drink and I never even had the courtesy to thank her.  ~W.C. Fields

Zen martini:  A martini with no vermouth at all.  And no gin, either.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Beer is the cause and solution to all of life's problems.  ~Homer Simpson

What is it about a beautiful sunny afternoon, with the birds singing and the wind rustling through the leaves, that makes you want to get drunk?  ~Jack Handey

The drunk mind speaks the sober heart.  ~Author Unknown

Hefeweizen.  Never drink something you can't spill.  ~Steve Miller, www.born-today.com/Choose_bDay.htm

I'm going to be around until the Atomic Energy Commission finds a safe place to bury my liver.  ~Phil Harris

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.  ~Seneca

Whoever takes just plain ginger ale soon gets drowned out of the conversation.  ~Kin Hubbard

If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.  There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall in to this vice.  The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and generosity.  ~Abraham Lincoln, address to the Washington Temperance Society, Springfield, Illinois, 22 February 1842

Not all chemicals are bad.  Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.  ~Dave Barry

I drink only to make my friends seem interesting.  ~Don Marquis

Be wary of strong drink.  It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.  ~Robert Heinlein

I'd prefer to have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.  ~Frank Nicholson, attributed

Why don't you slip out of those wet clothes and into a dry Martini?  ~Robert Benchley

Where ever I go, there I am.  Drunk.  ~Rita E. Torres

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.  ~Henny Youngman

My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses.  Drinks right out of the bottle.  ~Henny Youngman

A drunken man is fitly named: he has drank, till he is drunken: the wine swallows his consciousness, and it sinks therein.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.  ~Winston Churchill

Of the demonstrably wise there are but two:  those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied by drink.  ~Mark Twain, Note-Book, 1935

Teetotallers lack the sympathy and generosity of men that drink.  ~W.H. Davies

Brandy, n.  A cordial composed of one part thunder-and-lightning, one part remorse, two parts bloody murder, one part death-hell-and-the-grave and four parts clarified Satan.  ~Ambrose Bierce

Take life with a grain of salt, a slice of lime, and a shot of tequila.  ~Author Unknown

Drink the first.  Sip the second slowly.  Skip the third.  ~Knute Rockne

Candy is dandy
But liquor is quicker.
~Ogden Nash, Reflection on Ice-Breaking

If you drink, don't drive.  Don't even putt.  ~Dean Martin

Wine gives courage and makes men more apt for passion.  ~Ovid

Life's a waste of time, time's a waste of life so let's all get wasted and have the time of our life.  ~Author Unknown

Health - what my friends are always drinking to before they fall down.  ~Phyllis Diller

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.  ~Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires

Everyone who drinks is not a poet.  Some of us drink because we're not poets.  ~From the movie Arthur

How come if alcohol kills millions of brain cells, it never killed the ones that made me want to drink?  ~Author Unknown

One martini is all right.  Two are too many, and three are not enough.  ~James Thurber

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin

Never cry over spilt milk.  It could've been whiskey.  ~"Pappy" Maverick, in Maverick

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.  ~James Baldwin

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.  ~James T. Farrell

America is a tune.  It must be sung together.  ~Gerald Stanley Lee, Crowds

What is the essence of America?  Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom "to" and freedom "from."  ~Marilyn vos Savant, in Parade

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag; wash it.  ~Norman Thomas

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.  ~Paul Sweeney

What the people want is very simple.  They want an America as good as its promise.  ~Barbara Jordan

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," Essays, Second Series, 1844

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.  ~William J. Clinton

This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.  ~Elmer Davis

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing.  America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.  ~Max Lerner, Actions and Passions, 1949

America, for me, has been the pursuit and catching of happiness.  ~Aurora Raigne

This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.  ~Woodrow Wilson

America is great because it has as much diversity in geographies as it does in peoples.  ~Aurora Raigne

America is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!... The real American has not yet arrived.  He is only in the crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races.  ~Israel Zangwill

America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.  ~James Michener

When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea.  He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.  ~Adlai Stevenson

If you take advantage of everything America has to offer, theres nothing you cant accomplish.  ~Geraldine Ferraro

If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace.  ~Hamilton Fish

We cannot reform the world.... Uncle Sugar is as dangerous a role for us to play as Uncle Shylock.  ~John F. Kennedy

To me, being an American means feeling safe.  ~Currielene Armstrong

Only Americans can hurt America.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

We dare not forget that we are the heirs of that first revolution.  ~John F. Kennedy

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.  ~Bill Vaughan

America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States.  Ask any Indian.  ~Robert Orben

Sometimes people call me an idealist.  Well, that is the way I know I am an American.  America is the only idealistic nation in the world.  ~Woodrow Wilson

Star-spangled happiness
and banner waves of pride.
~Cherishe Archer

My favorite thing about the United States?  Lots of Americans, one America.  ~Val Saintsbury

Of all the supervised conditions for life offered man, those under U S A's constitution have proved the best.  Wherefore, be sure when you start modifying, corrupting or abrogating it.  ~Martin H. Fischer

America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole.  ~Bobcat Goldthwaite

We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.  ~Robert J. McCracken

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, "Ours."  ~Vine Deloria, Jr.

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.  ~John Gunther

We need an America with the wisdom of experience.  But we must not let America grow old in spirit.  ~Hubert H. Humphrey

Don't forget to stop every once in a while and actually thank God for blessing America - he gets a lot of requests, you know.  ~Carrie Latet

It is the flag just as much of the man who was naturalized yesterday as of the men whose people have been here many generations.  ~Henry Cabot Lodge

Not merely a nation but a nation of nations.  ~Lyndon B. Johnson

We sleep peacefully at night, cradled by the big strong hands of America.  ~Val Saintsbury

What we need are critical lovers of America - patriots who express their faith in their country by working to improve it.  ~Hubert H. Humphrey

The United States is the only country with a known birthday.  ~James G. Blaine

Oh, it's home again and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that's westward bound to plough the rolling sea
To the blessed land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
~Henry Van Dyke

America is not just a country but a way.  ~Carrie Latet

What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.  ~Will Rogers

If you can speak three languages you're trilingual.  If you can speak two languages you're bilingual.  If you can speak only one language you're an American.  ~Author Unknown

Very little is known about the War of 1812 because the Americans lost it.  ~Eric Nicol

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.  ~Georges Clemenceau

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.  ~Walter Lippman

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.  ~Peter Alexander Ustinov

America is much more than a geographical fact.  It is a political and moral fact - the first community in which men set out in principle to institutionalize freedom, responsible government, and human equality.  ~Adlai Stevenson

May I never wake up from the American dream.  ~Carrie Latet

I love my freedom.  I love my America.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.  ~Herman Melville

What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.  ~Margot Asquith

Rachel:  The pilgrims came here to escape persecution from the British.
Elizabeth:  Yes, so they could go about persecuting the Indians.
~ER, "Great Expectations"

Aborigines, n.:  Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country.  They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

If America ever passes out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone:  America died from a delusion she had Moral Leadership.  ~Will Rogers

America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.  ~Marshall McLuhan

I will never admit that the beloved flag is to me merely the symbol of a land where I can live in rich content and make money.  ~Henry Cabot Lodge

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.  ~Benjamin Harrison, address to Congress, 1888

The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic - have always blown on free men.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

The pilgrims were kicked out of England, quarreled with the Dutch, alienated the Indians, and had an evil reputation among the turkeys.  ~Dave Beard

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.  ~Francis Bellamy, The Youth's Companion, 8 September 1892  (Thank you, Anna.)

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.  ~Gloria Steinem

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth.  ~Charles Luckman 

America is a place where Jewish merchants sell Zen love beads to agnostics for Christmas.  ~John Burton Brimer

The metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading.  A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.  ~Carl N. Degler

America did not invent human rights.  In a very real sense... human rights invented America.  ~Jimmy Carter

What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public.  ~From the movie Tommy Boy

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals.  The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.  ~G.K. Chesterton

Despite the goings-on in Congress, I don't believe the USA is bordering on madness.  I believe Mexico and Canada are.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.  ~Alexis de Tocqueville

America:  Where a man can say what he thinks, if he isn't afraid of his wife, his boss, his customer, his neighbors, or the government.  ~Joe Moore

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites.  We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay.  In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.  ~Saul Bellow, about America

America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there.  ~Laurence J. Peter

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.  ~Thomas Wolfe

I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him "father."  ~Will Rogers

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.  ~H.L. Mencken

Americans like fat books and thin women.  ~Russell Baker

We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us.  We must get away from the idea that America is to be the leader of the world in everything.  She can lead in some things.  The old "manifest destiny" idea ought to be modified so that each nation has the manifest destiny to do the best it can - and that without cant, without the assumption of self-righteousness and with a desire to learn to the uttermost from other nations.  ~Francis John McConnell

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.  ~Hunter S. Thompson

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.  ~Gore Vidal

I just don't know why they're shooting at us.  All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread.  Transplant the American dream.  Freedom.  Achievement.  Hyperacidity.  Affluence.  Flatulence.  Technology.  Tension.  The inalienable right to an early coronary sitting at your desk while plotting to stab your boss in the back.  ~Hawkeye, M*A*S*H, "O.R."

I pledge allegiance to the earth and to the flora, fauna and human life that it supports, one planet indivisible, with safe air, water & soil, economic justice, equal rights and peace for all.  ~Author unknown, proposed new Pledge of Allegiance, as seen on a button at evolvefish.com

America is a large friendly dog in a small room.  Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.  ~Arnold Toynbee

We have the Bill of Rights.  What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.  ~Bill Maher

It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers.  ~Chauncey Depew, at an 1881 New England Society meeting in New York

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.  ~Hansell B. Duckett

The Constitution of the United States of America, Article V, Section 1:  There shall be a National Anthem containing incomprehensible words and a high note that normal humans cannot hit without risk of hernia.  ~Dave Barry

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate.  Being here in America doesn't make you an American.  Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.  ~Malcolm X

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
~George Carlin

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.  ~John Updike

States!... Go put your creed into your deed.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered.  I myself would say that it had merely been detected.  ~Oscar Wilde

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them.  There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.  ~John Wayne

...a "land of the free" that struggles under the incredible burden of limitless taxes and laws; the home of the "brave" who stay silent to keep their jobs and avoid scrutiny by the IRS or the police.  ~Fred Woodworth, The Match!, No. 74

The fact is that Americans are not a thoughtful people; they are too busy to stop and question their values.  ~William Ralph

Every American carries in his bloodstream the heritage of the malcontent and the dreamer.  ~Dorothy Fuldheim

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.  ~Red Cloud

I hate American simplicity.  I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.  If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it. ~Henry James

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied:  America is always on the move.  She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.  ~e.e. cummings

America is a great big heart attack.  ~Carrie Latet

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?  ~Jack Kerouac

The American experiment is the most tremendous and far reaching engine of social change which has ever either blessed or cursed mankind.  ~Charles Francis Adams

There is a malaise that exists in your land - what appears to many as the sudden and tragic disappearance of the American dream which, in some ways, has turned to nightmare.  ~J.J. Greene

Being an American is a spectator sport.  ~Brock Fiant

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.  ~Thomas Jefferson

It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.  ~Alistair Cooke

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.  ~Sigmund Freud

America! half-brother of the world!
With something good and bad of every land.
~Philip James Bailey

You have to be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.  ~Charles De Gaulle, Time, 8 December 1967

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.  ~Dave Barry

[T]he American is a gentle guy; but don't pressure him; if you do he turns toad and squirts poison.  ~Martin H. Fischer

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind.  There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.  ~Peter Kroptkin, speech, 1891

He only salutes the flag with one finger.  ~The Simpsons

I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.  ~Eldridge Cleaver

America is the best half-educated country in the world.  ~Nicholas Murray Butler

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.  ~Alexis de Tocqueville

Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American Eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.  ~H.G. Wells

In America, with all its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun.  But we do not know yet whether the sun is rising or setting for our country.  ~Dick Gregory, 1964

Americans always try to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.  ~Winston Churchill

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.  ~Sigmund Freud

We're Americans - with a capital A!  And do you know what that means?  Do you?  It means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.  ~From the movie Stripes

I love America.  It's Americans I can't stand.  ~Attributed to both Charles Shultz and Bill Maher

We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost.  We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.  ~Walter Lippmann

One characteristic of Americans is that they have no tolerance at all of anybody putting up with anything.  We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed.  ~Margaret Mead

Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four-hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt.  ~Eldridge Cleaver

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.  ~Woodrow Wilson

Let America realize that self-scrutiny is not treason.  Self-examination is not disloyalty.  ~Richard Cardinal Cushing

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.  ~Sinclair Lewis

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.  ~George Elliot

The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.  ~G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"

The Angels were all singing out of tune,
And hoarse with having little else to do,
Excepting to wind up the sun and moon
Or curb a runaway young star or two.
~Lord Byron

Be an angel to someone else whenever you can, as a way of thanking God for the help your angel has given you.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God alone.  ~William Blake

Angels have no philosophy but love.  ~Terri Guillemets

It is not known precisely where angels dwell - whether in the air, the void, or the planets.  It has not been God's pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.  ~Voltaire

Pay attention to your dreams - God's angels often speak directly to our hearts when we are asleep.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

The soul at its highest is found like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him.  That is all an angel is:  an idea of God.  ~Meister Eckhart

Angels descending, bring from above,
Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.
~Fanny J. Crosby

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.  ~Luciano de Crescenzo

Life is a tapestry:  We are the warp; angels, the weft; God, the weaver.  Only the Weaver sees the whole design.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

We trust in plumed procession
For such the angels go -
Rank after Rank, with even feet -
And uniforms of Snow.
~Emily Dickinson

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.  ~John Keats

All God's angels come to us disguised.  ~James Russell Lowell

God not only sends special angels into our lives, but sometimes He even sends them back again if we forget to take notes the first time!  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth 
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
~John Milton, Paradise Lost

Insight is better than eyesight when it comes to seeing an angel.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

The guardian angels of life fly so high as to be beyond our sight, but they are always looking down upon us.  ~Jean Paul Richter

The wings of angels are often found on the backs of the least likely people.  ~Eric Honeycutt

Angels fly at light speed, because they are servants of the Light.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.  ~Jean Cocteau

We're all kissed by angels but some of us never think to pucker.  ~Terri Guillemets

He spake well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Man was created a little lower than the angels, and has been getting lower ever since.  ~Josh Billings

Angels are all around us, all the time, in the very air we breathe.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

It comes down to whether you believe in seven miraculous escapes a week or one guardian angel.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A pillow for thee will I bring,
Stuffed with down of angel's wing.
~Richard Crashaw

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.  ~George Bernard Shaw

An angel can illuminate the thought and mind of man by strengthening the power of vision.  ~St Thomas Aquinas

When babies look beyond you and giggle, maybe they're seeing angels.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

If we were all like angels, the world would be a heavenly place.  ~Author Unknown

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

If trouble hearing Angels song with thine ears, try listening with thy heart.  ~Terri Guillemets

Angels shine from without because their spirits are lit from within by the light of God.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Evangeline"

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.  ~Thomas Carlyle

Angels can fly because they carry no burdens.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

I guess I have never really doubted that we are all born to our guardian angel.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I'm no angel, but I've spread my wings a bit.  ~Mae West

Sometimes even the flight of an angel hits turbulence.  ~Terri Guillemets

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words.  They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.  ~Lydia M. Child

In every Heart...awaits Your Angel.  ~Michael, @WhereAngelsCome

Angels are direct creations of God, each one a unique Master's piece.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Angels deliver Fate to our doorstep - and anywhere else it is needed.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Everyone entrusted with a mission is an angel.  ~Moses Maimonides

All forces that reside in the body are angels.  ~Moses Maimonides

Angels are quite ample cause to cry... ~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com

Make yourself familiar with the angels, and behold them frequently in spirit; for, without being seen, they are present with you.  ~St Francis of Sales

If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
~Richard Lovelace

Children often have imaginary playmates.  I suspect that half of them are really their guardian angels.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
~Richard Purdy Wilbur

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.  ~Michelangelo

Whether we are filled with joy or grief, our angels are close to us, speaking to our hearts of God's love.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

We should pray to the angels, for they are given to us as guardians.  ~St Ambrose

Around our pillows golden ladders rise,
And up and down the skies,
With winged sandals shod,
The angels come, and go, the Messengers of God!
~Richard Henry Stoddard

Angels can fly directly into the heart of the matter.  ~Author Unknown

When a man dies they who survive him ask what property he has left behind.  The angel who bends over the dying man asks what good deeds he has sent before him.   ~The Koran

O welcome, pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!
~John Milton, Comus

If angels rarely appear, it's because we all too often mistake the medium for the Message.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Ever felt an angel's breath in the gentle breeze?  A teardrop in the falling rain?  Hear a whisper amongst the rustle of leaves?  Or been kissed by a lone snowflake?  Nature is an angel's favorite hiding place.  ~Terri Guillemets

Angels are never too distant to hear you.  ~Author Unknown

I believe we are free, within limits, and yet there is an unseen hand, a guiding angel, that somehow, like a submerged propeller, drives us on.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

Let us not be justices of the peace, but angels of peace.  ~Saint Theresa of Lisieux

When our mortal eyes close on this world for the last time, our angels open our spiritual eyes and escort us personally before the face of God.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Angels sail back to God on the sea of joy.  ~Terri Guillemets

A baby is an angel whose wings decrease as his legs increase.  ~Author Unknown

The magnitude of life is overwhelming.  Angels are here to help us take it peace by peace.  ~Levende Waters

If you can't hear the angels, try quieting the static of worry.  ~Terri Guillemets

While we are sleeping, angels have conversations with our souls.  ~Author Unknown

A demon holds a book, in which are written the sins of a particular man; an Angel drops on it from a phial, a tear which the sinner had shed in doing a good action, and his sins are washed out.  ~Alberic, Monk of Monte-Cassino

How wonderful it must be to speak the language of the angels, with no words for hate and a million words for love!  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Friends are kisses blown to us by angels.  ~Author Unknown

When we worship God, our angels add their prayers and turn our single voices into hundred-part harmony.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Anyone can be an angel.  ~Author Unknown

The angels are always near to those who are grieving, to whisper to them that their loved ones are safe in the hand of God.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves the porch light on?  ~Tom Waits, "Mr Siegal," Heartattack and Vine  (Thanks, Paula)

If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?  ~Sydney J. Harris

There is nothing more galling to angry people than the coolness of those on whom they wish to vent their spleen.  ~Alexandre Dumas

Life is too short to hold a grudge, also too long.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

He who angers you conquers you.  ~Elizabeth Kenny

For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.  ~Author Unknown

Anger is one letter short of danger.  ~Author Unknown

Anger ventilated often hurries toward forgiveness; and concealed often hardens into revenge.  ~Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing.  ~Will Rogers

Never write a letter while you are angry.  ~Chinese Proverb

Get mad, then get over it.  ~Colin Powell

The world needs anger.  The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough.  ~Bede Jarrett

Never go to bed mad.  Stay up and fight.  ~Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966

Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.  ~Eckhart Tolle

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.  ~Mark Twain

Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.  ~Malachy McCourt

Take no revenge that you have not pondered beneath a starry sky, or on a canyon overlook, or to the lapping of waves and the mewing of a distant gull.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If you kick a stone in anger, you'll hurt your own foot.  ~Korean Proverb

Anger as soon as fed is dead -
'Tis starving makes it fat.
~Emily Dickinson

Not the fastest horse can catch a word spoken in anger.  ~Chinese Proverb

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.  ~Albert Einstein

No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.  ~George Jean Nathan

Anger is short-lived madness.  ~Horace

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.  ~George Eliot

Before you give someone a piece of your mind, make sure you can get by with what is left.  ~Author Unknown

If you're angry at a loved one, hug that person.  And mean it.  You may not want to hug - which is all the more reason to do so.  It's hard to stay angry when someone shows they love you, and that's precisely what happens when we hug each other.  ~Walter Anderson, The Confidence Course, 1997

Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry.  ~Lyman Abbott

Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Get angry, get furious but never crumble to resentment.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Sometimes when I'm angry I have the right to be angry, but that doesn't give me the right to be cruel.  ~Author Unknown

Spite is never lonely; envy always tags along.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Always write angry letters to your enemies.  Never mail them.  ~James Fallows

At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled.  ~Marshall B. Rosenberg

Anger and folly walk cheek by jole.  ~Benjamin Franklin

Temper tantrums, however fun they may be to throw, rarely solve whatever problem is causing them.  ~Lemony Snicket

If you get upset when the toast burns, what are you going to do when your house burns down?  ~Author Unknown

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.  ~Author Unknown

Holding on to anger is like grassockg a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.  ~Buddha

Malice drinks one-half of its own poison.  ~Seneca

Anger is a killing thing:  it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.  ~Louis L'Armour

Never strike your wife - even with a flower.  ~Hindu Proverb

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.  ~Ambrose Bierce

When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894

Anger is a bad counselor.  ~French Proverb

Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, and eventually poisonous.  I have no desire to make my own toxins.  ~Neil Kinnock

The worst-tempered people I've ever met were people who knew they were wrong.  ~Wilson Mizner

To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee.  ~William H. Walton

Two things a man should never be angry at: What he can help, and what he cannot help.  ~Thomas Fuller

The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.  ~Jacqueline Schiff

When a man sends you an impudent letter, sit right down and give it back to him with interest ten times compounded, and then throw both letters in the wastebasket.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Consider how much more you often suffer from your anger and grief, than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved.  ~Marcus Antonius



The difference between friends and pets is that friends we allow into our company, pets we allow into our solitude.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Ever consider what pets must think of us?  I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow.  They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!  ~Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist


Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.  ~George Eliot


You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.  ~Nora Ephron


An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.  ~Martin Buber


Lots of people talk to animals.... Not very many listen, though.... That's the problem.  ~Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh


It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem.  For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.  But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.  ~Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy


Man is rated the highest animal, at least among all animals who returned the questionnaire.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The kind man feeds his beast before sitting down to dinner.  ~Hebrew Proverb


Animals have these advantages over man:  they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.  ~Voltaire, letter to Count Schomberg, 31 August 1769


[H]e doesnt reckon his dog has human feelings, but he sure lets you know when you hurt his instincts.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com





It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or dog than to any human being.  ~Henry David Thoreau





Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.  ~Colette


Most pets display so many humanlike traits and emotions it's easy to forget they're not gifted with the English language and then get snubbed when we talk to them and they don't say anything back.   ~Stephenie Geist


I believe in animal rights, and high among them is the right to the gentle stroke of a human hand.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Be it human or animal, touch is a life-giving thing.  Has anyone ever had a stroke or a heart attack while cozied up with a pet?  I doubt it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man.  I find the result humiliating to me.  ~Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, 1907


I like pigs.  Dogs look up to us.  Cats look down on us.  Pigs treat us as equals.  ~Winston Churchill


There is in all animals a sense of duty that man condescends to call instinct.  ~Robert Brault, robertbrault.com~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man.  All things are connected.  Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.  ~Chief Seattle of the Suquamish Tribe, letter to President Franklin Pierce


It is a perversely human perception that animals in their native habitat are running wild.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com





To insult someone we call him "bestial."  For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult.  ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988






Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.  ~H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques, 1916


Our wedding was many years ago.  The celebration continues to this day.  ~Gene Perret


A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity.  The order varies for any given year.  ~Paul Sweeney


Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots.  ~Hoosier Farmer


The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.  ~Peter De Vries


Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.  ~Author Unknown


Spouse:  someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single.  ~Author Unknown


It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.  ~Rita Rudner


Marriage, n:  The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.  ~Ambrose Bierce


The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.  ~Peter Devries


A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.  ~Mignon McLaughlin


Never go to bed mad.  Stay up and fight.  ~Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966


If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?  ~Source Unknown


Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners.  Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway.  ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975


Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Love is a symbol of eternity.  It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.  ~Author Unknown


Love one another and you will be happy.  It's as simple and as difficult as that.  ~Michael Leunig


An anniversary is a time to celebrate the joys of today, the memories of yesterday, and the hopes of tomorrow.  ~Author Unknown


The highest happiness on earth is marriage.  ~William Lyon Phelps






Trip over love, you can get up.  Fall in love and you fall forever.  ~Author Unknown


Are we not like two volumes of one book?  ~Marceline Desbordes-Valmore


Without love, what are we worth?  Eighty-nine cents!  Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.  ~M*A*S*H, Hawkeye


Love is not singular except in syllable.  ~Marvin Taylor


Love is a sweet tyranny, because the lover endureth his torments willingly.  ~Proverb


A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.  ~Andre Maurois


A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.  ~George Jean Nathan


True love stories never have endings.  ~Richard Bach


Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.  ~Zelda Fitzgerald


We're all a little weird.  And life is a little weird.  And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love.  ~Robert Fulghum, True Love


Remember, if you smoke after sex you're doing it too fast.  ~Woody Allen


Sex on television can't hurt you unless you fall off.  ~Author Unknown


No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.  ~Abraham Lincoln


If two stand shoulder to shoulder against the gods,
Happy together, the gods themselves are helpless
Against them while they stand so.
~Maxwell Anderson


Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.  ~S.J. Perelman


Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.  ~Dinah Craik


Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.  ~Marcel Proust




In some families, please is described as the magic word.  In our house, however, it was sorry.  ~Margaret Laurence


An apology is a good way to have the last word.  ~Author Unknown


A stiff apology is a second insult.... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.  ~G.K. Chesterton


An apology is the superglue of life.  It can repair just about anything.  ~Lynn Johnston


Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured.  Apology is only egotism wrong side out.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Professor at the Breakfast-Table


It is a good rule in life never to apologize.  The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.  ~P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs


Never ruin an apology with an excuse.  ~Kimberly Johnson


True remorse is never just a regret over consequence; it is a regret over motive.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


It's easier to apologize than ask for permission.  ~Author Unknown


Never make a defense or an apology until you are accused.  ~King Charles I


The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology.  ~Red Auerbach


A relationship becomes easier when you realize that you don't have to be the one at fault to be the one who's sorry.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The only good thing about punctuality is that it usually gets you an apology.  ~Author Unknown


Apology is a lovely perfume; it can transform the clumsiest moment into a gracious gift.  ~Margaret Lee Runbeck




Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth.  But we seem to have no other.  ~Ivy Compton-Burnett


I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.  ~Jonathan Swift


It is only when the mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.  ~Jean Cocteau


Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.  ~Samuel Butler, Erewhon


Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.  ~Maurice Chevalier


There is no actual law that says that a person of inner beauty cannot also maintain an appearance.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality.  All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.  ~Niccolo Machiavelli


A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human


Pretty is the queen that rules our land.  ~Carrie Latet


The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look.  It works in reverse, too.  When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.  ~P.J. O'Rourke


Sometimes I wonder - if I were drop-dead handsome, and every woman I met actually dropped dead, would I ever get tired of it?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.  ~Lord Chesterfield


The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.  ~Daniel Webster


Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem.  Most things are judged by their jackets.  ~Baltasar Gracian


The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.  The next best time is now.  ~Chinese Proverb

You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.  ~Denise Levertov

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.  ~Henry David Thoreau

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer.  But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.  ~Henry David Thoreau

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods.  But he cannot save them from fools.  ~John Muir

I never saw a discontented tree.  They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.  They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!  ~John Muir

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.  ~Martin Luther

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903

No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.  ~John Muir

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
~Kahlil Gibran

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.  ~Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies, 1928

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.  ~Nelson Henderson

It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation's need of trees will become serious. We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.  ~Theodore Roosevelt, 1907 Arbor Day Message

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.  ~John Muir

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.  ~Bill Vaughn

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.  ~Hal Borland

Trees outstrip most people in the extent and depth of their work for the public good.  ~Sara Ebenreck, American Forests

If I thought I was going to die tomorrow, I should nevertheless plant a tree today.  ~Stephan Girard

Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature?  Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window?  When the only wild animal he knows is a rat - glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum?  When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?  ~Frank N. Ikard, North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Houston, March 1968

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are written by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
~Joyce Kilmer, "Trees," 1914

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.  ~Cree Indian Proverb

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved.  You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?  ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982

The trip across Arizona is just one oasis after another.  You can just throw anything out and it will grow there, I like Arizona.  ~Will Rogers

Desert rains are usually so definitely demarked that the story of the man who washed his hands in the edge of an Arizona thunder shower without wetting his cuffs seems almost credible.  ~Administration in the State of Arizona, U.S. public relief program, 1935-1943

You know you're an Arizona native when you take rain dances seriously.  ~Skip Boyer, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993

Arizona looks like a battle on Mars.  ~Author Unknown

A three-inch rain in Phoenix means three inches between drops.  ~Local Saying

Welcome to Arizona, where summer spends the winter - and hell spends the summer.  ~Popular saying, modified from a booster slogan in the 1930s

Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth.  The thermometer stays at one hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time - except when it varies and goes higher.  It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it.  There is a tradition... that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition, - and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets.  ~Mark Twain, Roughing It, 1872, chapter LVI

You know you're an Arizona native when you think Taco Bell is the local phone company.  ~Emma Louise Philabaum, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993

The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.  ~Donald Culross Peattie, The Road of a Naturalist, 1941

You know you're an Arizona native when... a rainy day puts you in a good mood.  ~Marshall Trimble, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993

I'll take heat rash over frost bite any day.  ~Ken Travous

I am enamored with desert dew because it's usually the closest thing we get to rain.  ~Linda Solegato

You know you're from Arizona when you drive two miles around a parking lot looking for a shady place - even in the dead of winter.  ~Local Saying

Once, it was so damned dry, the bushes followed the dogs around.  ~Nancy Dedera

In Phoenix summer is
the title, the refrain,
And every other verse.
~Terri Guillemets

You know you're an Arizona native when you run to the window just to watch a dust storm.  ~Marshall Trimble, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993

Baseball, it is said, is only a game.  True.  And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.  ~George F. Will

You know you're from Arizona when you feed your chickens ice cubes to keep them from laying hard-boiled eggs.  ~Local Saying

In Arizona, shade trees are your best friends... and occasionally the basis of small civil wars over parking.  ~Terri Guillemets

I live in the dry dusty desert
Where we're always short on water
And even if the sun fell upon us
It couldn't get any hotter.
~Linda Solegato

You know you live in Phoenix when the cold-water faucet is hotter than the hot-water faucet.  ~Author Unknown

It's so hot even my fake plants are wilting.  ~Linda Solegato

You know you live in Phoenix when the four seasons are:  tolerable, hot, really hot, and are you freakin' kidding me?!  ~Author Unknown

You know you live in Phoenix when you can drive four hours in any one direction and never leave the Valley.  ~Author Unknown

Each season of adventure reality television gets more and more challenging.  I'm waiting for them to come out with a Survivor: Phoenix in July edition.  ~Linda Solegato

You know you're an Arizona native when you "hug" a cactus only once in your lifetime.  ~Nancy Dedera, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993

You know you live in Phoenix when you are willing to park 3 blocks away because you actually found shade from a palm tree imported 300 miles from California and nurtured with water piped 250 miles from Nevada.  ~Author Unknown

What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?  ~Edward Abbey

Winter in 'Zona is spring
Spring is summer
Autumn is our winter
And summer is Hell.
~Cherishe Archer

You know you're an Arizona native when you have to look up "mass transit" in the dictionary.  ~Paul Johnson, quoted in You Know You're an Arizona Native, When... compiled by Don Dedera, 1993

You know you live in Phoenix when you've experienced condensation on your butt cheeks from the hot water evaporating in the toilet bowl.  ~Author Unknown

A hundred ten in the shade is sorta hot, but you don't have to shovel it off your driveway.  ~Author Unknown

"Heat, maam!" I said; "it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones."  ~Sydney Smith, Lady Hollands Memoir  (It's actually not about Arizona, but it fits!)

What dreadful hot weather we have!  It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.  ~Jane Austen  (Also not about Arizona, but fitting!)



It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.  ~Author unknown, sometimes attributed to M. Grundler


This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.  ~Elmer Davis


I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives.  I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.  ~Abraham Lincoln


Freedom is never free.  ~Author Unknown


How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!  ~Maya Angelou


Lord, bid war's trumpet cease;
Fold the whole earth in peace.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes


The patriot's blood is the seed of Freedom's tree.  ~Thomas Campbell


Better than honor and glory, and History's iron pen,
Was the thought of duty done and the love of his fellow-men.
~Richard Watson Gilder


The stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation; the great peaks of honour we had forgotten - duty and patriotism, clad in glittering white; the great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to heaven.  ~David Lloyd George


And each man stands with his face in the light of his own drawn sword.  Ready to do what a hero can.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning


In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.  ~José Narosky


When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?  ~George Canning


For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.  ~Cynthia Ozick


Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations, that we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of a free and undivided Republic.  ~John A. Logan


How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
~William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, much later adapted to "So shines a good deed in a weary world" by David Seltzer for the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory


Where liberty dwells, there is my country.  ~Benjamin Franklin


He loves his country best who strives to make it best.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all!
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.
~John Dickinson


No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others.  The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.  ~Author Unknown


But fame is theirs - and future days
On pillar'd brass shall tell their praise;
Shall tell - when cold neglect is dead -
"These for their country fought and bled."
~Philip Freneau


My God!  How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!  ~Thomas Jefferson


I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks.  ~William Shakespeare


May the sun in his course visit no land more free, more happy, more lovely, than this our own country!  ~Daniel Webster


Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.  ~William Arthur Ward


No one is more cherished in this world than someone who lightens the burden of another.  Thank you.  ~Author Unknown


Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.  ~G.B. Stern


No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks.  ~James Allen


The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.  ~Eric Hoffer


Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.  Art is knowing which ones to keep.  ~Scott Adams

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.  ~Pablo Picasso

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.  ~Twyla Tharp

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.  ~William Faulkner

Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.  ~Pablo Picasso

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.  ~Stella Adler

Painting is silent poetry.  ~Plutarch, Moralia: How to Study Poetry

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.  ~Leonardo da Vinci

It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet.  ~Kojiro Tomita

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.  ~Amy Lowell

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.  ~Schumann

We all know that Art is not truth.  Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.  The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.  ~Pablo Picasso

I don't paint things.  I only paint the difference between things.  ~Henri Matisse

The artist uses the talent he has, wishing he had more talent.  The talent uses the artist it has, wishing it had more artist.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

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

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.  ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.  ~Theodore Dreiser, Life, Art, and America, 1917

The artist's world is limitless.  It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away.  It is always on his doorstep.  ~Paul Strand

All art requires courage.  ~Anne Tucker

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.  ~Oscar Wilde

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.  ~Edgar Degas

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job.  It releases tension needed for his work.  ~Henry Moore

Pictures must not be too picturesque.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.  ~André Gide

Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art.  ~Wynetka Ann Reynolds

But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy.  ~The New Yorker

Very few people possess true artistic ability.  It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort.  If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.  ~Fran Lebowitz

Great art picks up where nature ends.  ~Marc Chagall

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw.  She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"  ~Howard Ikemoto

Art consists of limitation.  The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.  ~G.K. Chesterton

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.  ~John Updike

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist.  The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.  ~Henry Miller

No great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would cease to be an artist.  ~Oscar Wilde

Let me ask you something, what is not art?  ~Author Unknown

The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper.  The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.  ~Andy Warhol

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional.  Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.  ~Kenneth Tynan

God and other artists are always a little obscure.  ~Oscar Wilde

For me, painting is a way to forget life.  It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.  ~Georges Rouault

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.  ~T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening.  ~Aaron Howard

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.  ~Georgia O'Keeffe

Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money.  ~Ernst Levy

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.  ~John Anthony Ciardi

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself.  What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done?  A painter has only one language.  ~Pablo Picasso

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?  ~Pablo Picasso

Sometimes, to pursue a new idea, the artist must forfeit his deposit on an old idea.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.  ~Henri Matisse, Notes d'un peintre, 1908

Great art is as irrational as great music.  It is mad with its own loveliness.  ~George Jean Nathan, House of Satan

Art is the colors and textures of your imagination.  ~Meghan, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is your personal diary where you may color your thoughts and emotions on a page.  ~Sara, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is a shadow of what a person is thinking... a small glimpse of what they hold inside.  Little secrets, regrets, joys... every line has its own meaning.  ~Sarah, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is your emotions flowing in a river of imagination.  ~Devin, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is an adventure that never seems to end.  ~Jason, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is pictures straight from the heart.  ~Ben, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

If Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpapered.  ~Robin Tyler

Art is the triumph over chaos.  ~John Cheever

All great art comes from a sense of outrage.  ~Glenn Close

Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.  ~Jean Paul Richter

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.  Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.  ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which prompts reflection and random reverie.  ~Mark Stevens

God is really only another artist.  He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat.  He has no real style.  He just goes on trying other things.  ~Pablo Picasso

Art doesn't have to matter to a lot of people to matter a lot.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Art hath an enemy called ignorance.  ~Ben Jonson

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.  ~Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.  ~Agnes Repplier, Points of View, 1891

Art disturbs, science reassures.  ~Georges Braque, Le Jour et la nuit

As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.  ~John Lubbock

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.  ~Loren Eiseley, The Night Country, 1971

Art is spirituality in drag.  ~Jennifer Yane

The artist's talent sits uneasy as an object of public acclaim, having been so long an object of private despair.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Coloring outside the lines is a fine art.  ~Kim Nance

Reflexes and instincts are not pretty.  It is their decoration that initiates art.  ~Martin H. Fischer

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.  ~Willa Cather

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.  ~George Santayana

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.  ~Lincoln Steffens

Art is not a thing; it is a way.  ~Elbert Hubbard

An artist's career always begins tomorrow.  ~James McNeill Whistler

The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place:  from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.  ~Pablo Picasso

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.  ~Edmond & Jules de Goncourt

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.  ~G.K. Chesterton

Artistry is an innate distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the five senses.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.  ~André Malraux

An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it.  ~Paul Valéry

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.  The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.  ~Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, 1915

A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist.  It lacks imperfection.  ~Oscar Wilde

An art critic is someone who appreciates art, except for any particular piece of art.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.  ~Jean Cocteau, Newsweek, 16 May 1955

The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is.  ~Alfred Tonnelle

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.  ~Albert Camus

For the mystic what is how.  For the craftsman how is what.  For the artist what and how are one.  ~William McElcheran

O, how much simpler things would be
If eyes could paint or brush could see.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Art is a kind of illness.  ~Giacomo Puccini

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.  ~George Moore

A man and his art are like a fool and his king.  ~Terri Guillemets

A painting is what you make of it, besides which, 'Moon, Weeping' has a better ring to it than 'Paintbrush, Dripping.'  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.  ~Claes Oldenburg

Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths.  Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.  To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.  ~Odilon Redon

The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There is no abstract art.  You must always start with something.  Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.  ~Pablo Picasso

My inspiration is art... because without art, we would just be stuck with reality.  ~Daniel R. Lynch

The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.  ~James Russell Lowell

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

Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul - and you answer.  ~Terri Guillemets

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work.  Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it.  That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.  ~Jean Cocteau

Picasso would give up cubism just to capture your curves.  ~Konfal Blyther

Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.  ~Leonard Bernstein, What Makes Opera Grand?

There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild.  ~Dante Alighieri, Inferno

A portrait has one advantage over its original:  it is unconscious; and you may therefore admire without insulting it.  I have seen portraits which have more.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets, no. 8

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.  ~George Bernard Shaw

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.  ~Michelangelo

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue.  Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.  ~Jules Feiffer

All the other colors are just colors, but purple seems to have a soul.  Purple is not just a noun and an adjective but also a verb - when you look at it, it's looking back at you.  ~Uniek Swain

Architecture begins where engineering ends.  ~Walter Gropius

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.  ~G.K. Chesterton

Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses?  Girls are so much prettier.  ~Marie Laurencin

Art is Man's nature.  Nature is god's art.  ~James Bailey

The artist gazes upon a reality and creates his own impression.  The viewer gazes upon the impression and creates his own reality.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.  ~John Ruskin



Who needs astrology?  The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.  ~Edward Abbey


We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born.  Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.  ~Carl Gustav Jung


Astrology: do we make a hullabaloo among the stars, or do they make a hullabaloo down here?  ~Mason Cooley


A wise man shall overrule his stars, and have a greater influence upon his own content than all the constellations and planets of the firmament.  ~Jeremy Taylor


I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.  ~Arthur C. Clarke


About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities.  They are communism at its best.  Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


Astrology is just a finger pointing at reality.  ~Steven Forrest


A child is born on that day and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his individual karma.  ~Sri Yukteswar


All anyone can see in a birthchart are tendencies that will become facts if he does not do something to alter them.  ~Isabel Hickey


Astrology is one of the earliest attempts made by man to find the order hidden behind or within the confusing and apparent chaos that exists in the world.  ~Karen Hamaker-Zondag


We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac.  The zodiac is well worth flirting with.  ~D.H. Lawrence


The signs of the zodiac are karmic patterns; the planets are the looms; the will is the weaver.  ~Author Unknown


The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection...  ~Carl Jung


There is no better boat than a horoscope to help a man cross over the sea of life.  ~Varaha Mihira


I have been told that one of the reasons the astronomers of the world cooperate is the fact that there is no one nation from which the entire sphere of the sky can be seen.  Perhaps there is in that fact a parable for national statesmen, whose political horizons are all too often limited by national horizons.  ~Adlai Stevenson


It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves; we are underlings.  ~William Shakespeare


I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.
~William Shakespeare


I don't believe in astrology.  The only stars I can blame for my failures are those that walk about the stage.  ~Noel Coward


Figure-flingers and star-gazers pretend to foretell the fortunes of kingdoms, and have no foresight in what concerns themselves.  ~Roger L'Estrange


No date prefixed directs me in the starry rubric set.  ~John Milton


There's some ill planet reigns:
I must be patient till the heavens look
With an aspect more favourable.
~William Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, Act 2, Scene 1, spoken by Hermione


Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy:  the mad daughter of a wise mother.  ~Voltaire


[D]reams, and predictions of astrology.... ought to serve but for winter talk by the fireside.  ~Francis Bacon, "Of Prophecies"


Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.  ~Rebecca West


We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded
Which way please them.
~John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi


This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behaviour) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars: as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treacherous by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.  An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!  ~William Shakespeare


Anyone can be a millionaire, but to become a billionaire you need an astrologer.  ~John Pierpont Morgan


The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith


Before one accepts spirituality, astrology is very powerful, like a lion.  Then when one enters into a deeper spiritual life, astrology becomes a tiny household cat.  ~Sri Chinmoy


Astrology is a language.  If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you.  ~Dane Rudhyar






The vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it.  ~Isaac Asimov


Astrologers are agreed that the squiggles called a horoscope contain some sort of message to be decoded...  ~Dennis Elwell


I know that astrology isn't a science... Of course it isn't.  It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis.... The rules just kind of got there.  They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves.  But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people.  In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make.  It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge.  The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better.  It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are.  It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden.  The graphite's not important.  It's just the means of revealing their indentations.  So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy.  It's just to do with people thinking about people.  ~Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless


The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts.  The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins.  The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever.  Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus?  But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.  ~D.H. Lawrence


Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars.  But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.  ~E.M. Forster


Astrology can clear up or mix up a person as much as any other psychological, philosophical or religious mirror, a looking glass in the endless mirror hall of life.  ~Markku Siivola


A mind is accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations of astrology, resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle.  ~Johannes Kepler


Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter.  To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram - lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull - he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins - that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path - he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the virgin! that's our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales - happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear; we are curing the wound, when come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself.  As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and, to wind up, with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep.  ~Herman Melville


The stars which shone over Babylon and the stable in Bethlehem still shine as brightly over the Empire State Building and your front yard today....  ~Linda Goodman


You stars that reigned at my nativity, whose influence hath allotted death and hell.  ~Christopher Marlowe


Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Well, one gets out of bed and the planets dont always hiss or muck up the day, each day.  ~Anne Sexton


The astrologer who spells the stars, mistakes his globes, and in her bright eye interprets heaven's physiognomies.  ~John Cleveland


I will look on the stars and look on thee, and read the page of thy destiny.  ~Letitia Elizabeth Landon


Astrologers that future fates foreshow.  ~Alexander Pope


At the moment I am looking into astrology, which seems indispensable for a proper understanding of mythology.  There are strange and wondrous things in these lands of darkness.  Please, don't worry about my wanderings in these infinitudes.  I shall return laden with rich booty for our knowledge of the human psyche.  ~Carl Jung


Responsibility, n.  A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor.  In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Astrology is a fact, in most instances.  But astrological aspects are but signs, symbols.  No influence is of greater value or of greater help than the will of an individual.... Do not attempt to be guided by, but use the astrological influences as the means to meet or to overcome the faults and failures, or to minimize the faults and to magnify the virtues in self.  ~Edgar Cayce


Astrology furnishes a splendid proof of the contemptible subjectivity of men.  It refers the course of celestial bodies to the miserable ego:  it establishes a connection between the comets in heaven and squabbles and rascalities on earth.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer


The puzzling thing is that there is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time....  ~Carl Jung


The celestial bodies are the cause of all that takes place in the sublunar world.  ~Thomas Aquinas


Do not Christians and Heathens, Jews and Gentiles, poets and philosophers, unite in allowing the starry influences?  ~Walter Scott


Astrological prayers seem to me to be built on as good reason as the predictions.  ~Benjamin Stillingfleet


Our jovial star reigned at his birth.  ~William Shakespeare


A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.  ~Robert A. Heinlein


If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish...  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


The controls of life are structured as forms and nuclear arrangements, in a relation with the motions of the universe.  ~Louis Pasteur


Men should take their knowledge from the Sun, the Moon and the Stars.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson



Thanks to Liz P. for sharing some of her collection!



A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.  ~Herm Albright, quoted in Reader's Digest, June 1995

Attitudes are contagious.  Are yours worth catching?  ~Dennis and Wendy Mannering

Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.  ~Oscar Wilde

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.  ~Voltaire

If you don't think every day is a good day, just try missing one.  ~Cavett Robert

It's so hard when I have to, and so easy when I want to.  ~Annie Gottlier

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts.  It's what you do with what you have left.  ~Hubert Humphrey

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.  ~Winston Churchill

Every day may not be good, but there's something good in every day.  ~Author Unknown

There are exactly as many special occasions in life as we choose to celebrate.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.  You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.  ~Roald Dahl

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.  ~George Santayana

Happiness is an attitude.  We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong.  The amount of work is the same.  ~Francesca Reigler

If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.  ~Mary Engelbreit

So often time it happens, we all live our life in chains, and we never even know we have the key.  ~The Eagles, "Already Gone"

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.  ~Samuel Johnson

I've decided that the stuff falling through the cracks is confetti and I'm having a party!  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders.  ~Foster's Law

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.  ~H. Jackson Brown, Jr., Life's Little Instruction Book

Every thought is a seed.  If you plant crab apples, don't count on harvesting Golden Delicious.  ~Bill Meyer

We find things where we look for them, which is why I never look for a golf ball out of bounds.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.  ~Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, 1893

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.  ~Attributed to both Jonathan Swift and Benjamin Franklin

To be upset over what you don't have is to waste what you do have.  ~Ken S. Keyes, Jr., Handbook to Higher Consciousness

Defeat is not bitter unless you swallow it.  ~Joe Clark

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

If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.  ~Vince Lombardi

My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants.  ~J. Brotherton

There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly.  ~Publius Terentius Afer

I don't like that man.  I must get to know him better.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Just because you're miserable doesn't mean you can't enjoy your life.  ~Annette Goodheart

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.  ~Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.  ~Buddha

There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.  ~William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues

I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Being in a good frame of mind helps keep one in the picture of health.  ~Author Unknown

Got no checkbooks, got no banks,
Still I'd like to express my thanks -
I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.
~Irving Berlin, "I Got the Sun in the Morning," 1946

To everyone is given the key to heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.  ~Ancient Proverb

Make your optimism come true.  ~Author Unknown

True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.  ~Confucius

Learn to smile at every situation.  See it as an opportunity to prove your strength and ability.  ~Joe Brown

I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.  ~Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

The best things in life are unexpected - because there were no expectations.  ~Eli Khamarov, Surviving on Planet Reebok

The only difference between a good day and a bad day is your attitude.  ~Dennis S. Brown

Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises.
~William Shakespeare

Affectation is a greater enemy to the face than smallpox.  ~English Proverb

Say you are well, or all is well with you,
And God shall hear your words and make them true.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone.  ~Robert Frost

If we shall take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.  ~Jon Kabat-Zinn

Staying positive is one of the hardest fights, though I'm happy I'm in it.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.  ~Patricia Neal

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.  ~William James

Change your thoughts and you change your world.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.  ~Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818

When you feel dog tired at night, it may be because you've growled all day long.  ~Author Unknown

A friend will remind you that assumptions born of malice are better dealt with by gleefully sticking your tongue out.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

What is possible?  What you will.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.  ~Katherine Mansfield

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
Which fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
~Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses, 1909

Whenever you fall, pick something up.  ~Oswald Avery

Success is due less to ability than to zeal.  ~Charles Buxton

My father's nature turned out no waste product; he had none of that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories.  He took his own happiness with him.  ~Margot Asquith

Anywhere is paradise; it's up to you.  ~Author Unknown

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.  ~Elbert Hubbard

If my resolution to be a great man was half so strong as it is to despise the shame of being a little one...  ~William Cowper

Let your inner sunshine overcome the passing haze of discontent.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

I think, what has this day brought me, and what have I given it?  ~Henry Moore

I wish I was a glow worm,
A glow worm's never glum.
'Cos how can you be grumpy
When the sun shines out your bum!
~Author Unknown

We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all.  ~Dorothy Day

Sometimes life's Hell.  But hey!  Whatever gets the marshmallows toasty.  ~J. Andrew Helt

I am an optimist.  It does not seem too much use being anything else.  ~Winston Churchill

You're not going to make me have a bad day.  If there's oxygen on earth and I'm breathing, it's going to be a good day.  ~Cotton Fitzsimmons

If the sky falls, hold up your hands.  ~Author Unknown

[W]hat counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog.  ~Dwight Eisenhower, address to Republican National Committee, 31 January 1958, also sometimes attributed to Mark Twain (unverified)

Two people can have a middling day, but one rounds up and the other rounds down.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time.  ~Betty Smith

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.  ~Walt Whitman

No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.  ~Ellen Glasgow

I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.  ~Wernher von Braun

Where the loser saw barriers, the winner saw hurdles.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.  One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

There's a saying among prospectors:  "Go out looking for one thing, and that's all you'll ever find."  ~Robert Flaherty

I've got dreams in hidden places and extra smiles for when I'm blue.  ~Author Unknown

The soul does not absorb negativity by accident, always by choice.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it.  ~C.C. Scott

I am a little deaf, a little blind, a little impotent, and on top of this are two or three abominable infirmities, but nothing destroys my hope.  ~Voltaire

If you can wear the hard times of your life as furrows on your brow, you can wear the good times as a twinkle in your eye.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.  ~Eudora Welty

Being a sex symbol has to do with an attitude, not looks.  Most men think it's looks, most women know otherwise.  ~Kathleen Turner

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of becoming a prophet.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Too many people miss the silver lining because they're expecting gold.  ~Maurice Setter

We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails.  ~Author Unknown

Negative thinking destroys your brain cells and causes global warming.   Source: The Scientific Institute of GetOverIt!    ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.  ~Thomas Carlyle

Misery is a communicable disease.  ~Martha Graham

A car can't operate without the mechanical systems working, but it can operate with a few dents and scratches..., you are the same.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

The world is full of cactus, but we don't have to sit on it.  ~Will Foley

Optimist: someone who isn't sure whether life is a tragedy or a comedy but is tickled silly just to be in the play.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If you have the will to win, you have achieved half your success; if you don't, you have achieved half your failure.  ~David Ambrose

Be the light in the dark, be the calm in the storm and be at peace while at war.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

If the skies fall, one may hope to catch larks.  ~Francis Rabelais

For my part I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.  ~Adlai Stevenson

A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.  ~Hugh Downs

Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.  ~Arthur Christopher Benson

Leroy bet me I couldn't find a pot of gold at the end, and I told him that was a stupid bet because the rainbow was enough.  ~Rita Mae Brown

The best way to dispel negative thoughts is to require that they have a purpose.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses.  ~Alphonse Karr

If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.  ~John Burroughs

Care not what they say about the color of your skin let the brilliant light of your soul blind them.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

The real "it is well" is something I say from the ground, having fallen.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Since the house is on fire let us warm ourselves.  ~Italian Proverb

Reach for the stars, even if you have to stand on a cactus.  ~Susan Longacre

I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it.  ~Thornton Wilder

May I never miss a sunset or a rainbow because I am looking down.  ~Sara June Parker

I never really look for anything.  What God throws my way comes.  I wake up in the morning and whichever way God turns my feet, I go.  ~Pearl Bailey

Men who never get carried away should be.  ~Malcolm Forbes

Nothing is impossible to a willing heart.  ~John Heywood

Become a possibilitarian.  No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities - always see them, for they're always there.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

Wag more.  Bark less.  ~Author Unknown

Scratch less, purr more.  ~Author Unknown

Surrounded by people who love life, you love it too; surrounded by people who don't, you don't.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Physical strength is measured by what we can carry; spiritual by what we can bear.  ~Author Unknown

There are souls in this world which have the gift of finding joy everywhere and of leaving it behind them when they go.  ~Frederick Faber

We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.  ~Konrad Adenauer

No vision and you perish;
No ideal, and you're lost;
Your heart must ever cherish
Some faith at any cost.
Some hope, some dream to cling to,
Some rainbow in the sky,
Some melody to sing to,
Some service that is high.
~Harriet Du Autermont

Work is either fun or drudgery.  It depends on your attitude.  I like fun.  ~Colleen C. Barrett

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.  ~Kenneth Clark

The impossible can always be broken down into possibilities.  ~Author Unknown

Never mind the odds against you.  If you doubled your effort, what would the odds against you do - send for reinforcements?  ~Robert Brault, "Sparsely Sage, Mostly Rosemary and Thyme," www.robertbrault.com

He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn't be done, and he did it.
~Edgar A. Guest, It Couldn't Be Done

Why not learn to enjoy the little things - there are so many of them.  ~Author Unknown

Say "Yes" to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky.  Say "Yes" to the universe and the planets become your neighbors.  Say "Yes" to dreams of love and freedom.  It is the password to utopia.  ~Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951

Positive anything is better than negative thinking.  ~Elbert Hubbard

They can betray me, but I choose not to betray my peace of mind.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
~John Milton

For every day that there is sunshine, there will be days of rain,
it's how we dance within them both that shows our love and pain.
~Joey Tolbert

Either way, things are a lot better - either a lot better than they were or a lot better than they're going to be.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I am sure that nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man's course as his personal appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in its attractiveness or unattractiveness.  ~Leo Tolstoy

If you are not enjoying the journey, you probably won't enjoy the destination.  ~Author Unknown

Be enthusiastic.  Remember the placebo effect - 30% of medicine is showbiz.  ~Ronald Spark

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.  An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.  ~G.K. Chesterton, "On Running After One's Hat," All Things Considered, 1908

It is no use to grumble and complain;
It's just as cheap and easy to rejoice;
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain -
Why, rain's my choice.
~James Whitcomb Riley

Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.  ~Napoleon

My friends, love is better than anger.  Hope is better than fear.  Optimism is better than despair.  So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic.  And we'll change the world.  ~Jack Layton

Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.  ~Art Linkletter

Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.  ~Eckhart Tolle

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

Heaven is under our feet, as well as over our heads.  ~Henry David Thoreau

A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world; everyone you meet is your mirror.  ~Ken Keyes, Jr.

Whatever my day may have lacked, yet I have tonight's pearl moon.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

The sun won't shine until you put the umbrella away.  Be free.  ~Author Unknown

Is life so wretched?  Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled?  You are the one who must grow up.  ~Dag Hammarskjold

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings.  ~Henri Frédéric Amiel

Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles.  ~Alex Karras

It isn't our position but our disposition which makes us happy.  ~Author Unknown

Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.  ~Maori Proverb

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

Some days there won't be a song in your heart.  Sing anyway.  ~Emory Austin

Mind is everything.  Muscle - pieces of rubber.  All that I am, I am because of my mind.  ~Paavo Nurmi

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.  ~Edward de Bono, Observer, 12 June 1977

Anywhere you go liking everyone, everyone will be likeable.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Worship," The Conduct of Life, 1860

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.  ~Epictetus

Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.  ~Nicholas Chamfort

A cloudy day is no match for a sunny disposition.  ~William Arthur Ward

I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.  ~Arthur Rubinstein

There are two types of people - those who come into a room and say, "Well, here I am!" and those who come in and say, "Ah, there you are."  ~Frederick L. Collins

Consider how much more you often suffer from your anger and grief, than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved.  ~Marcus Antonius

You shouldn't say it is not good.  You should say, you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.  ~James Whistler

"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.  "So it is."  "And freezing."  "Is it?"  "Yes," said Eeyore.  "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately."  ~A.A. Milne

Expect nothing.  Live frugally on surprise.  ~Alice Walker

Those who wish to sing, always find a song.  ~Swedish Proverb

You must start with a positive attitude or you will surely end without one.  ~Carrie Latet

So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.  ~Chinese Proverb

Wish on everything.  Pink cars are good, especially old ones.  And stars of course, first stars and shooting stars.  Planes will do if they are the first light in the sky and look like stars.  Wish in tunnels, holding your breath and lifting your feet off the ground.  Birthday candles.  Baby teeth.  ~Francesca Lia Block

Nothing is interesting if you're not interested.  ~Helen MacInness

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.  ~Joseph Campbell

Excellence is not a skill.  It is an attitude.  ~Ralph Marston



The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.  ~Albert Camus


For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together.  For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.  ~Edwin Way Teale


It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.  ~P.D. James


Bittersweet October.  The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.  ~Carol Bishop Hipps


Delicious autumn!  My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.  ~George Eliot


No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November!
~Thomas Hood, "No!"


Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.  ~Stanley Horowitz


No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.
~John Donne


Oh how we love pumpkin season.  You did know this gourd-ish squash has its own season, right?  Winter, Spring, Summer, Pumpkin.... We anxiously anticipate it every year.  ~Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer, October 2010


Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.
~Emily Dickinson


October's poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter.  ~Nova Bair


falling leaves
hide the path
so quietly
~John Bailey, "Autumn," a haiku year, 2001, as posted on oldgreypoet.com


A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.  ~Hal Borland


October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came -
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.
~George Cooper, "October's Party"


How beautifully leaves grow old.  How full of light and color are their last days.  ~John Burroughs


A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand.  I think, I too, have known autumn too long.  ~e.e. cummings


There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley


The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.  ~Elizabeth Bowen


Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes.  Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.  ~Samuel Butler


Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn.  ~Elizabeth Lawrence





Find more quotes about the seasons at The Spirit of Gardening!



It sometimes happens, even in the best of families, that a baby is born.  This is not necessarily cause for alarm.  The important thing is to keep your wits about you and borrow some money.  ~Elinor Goulding Smith

A baby is an angel whose wings decrease as his legs increase.  ~Author Unknown

Babies are always more trouble than you thought - and more wonderful.  ~Charles Osgood

Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.  ~Ed Howe

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.  ~Leo J. Burke

Babies are such a nice way to start people.  ~Don Herrold

Every baby needs a lap.  ~Henry Robin

Getting down on all fours and imitating a rhinoceros stops babies from crying.  (Put an empty cigarette pack on your nose for a horn and make loud "snort" noises.)  I don't know why parents don't do this more often.  Usually it makes the kid laugh.  Sometimes it sends him into shock.  Either way it quiets him down.  If you're a parent, acting like a rhino has another advantage.  Keep it up until the kid is a teenager and he definitely won't have his friends hanging around your house all the time.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

When babies look beyond you and giggle, maybe they're seeing angels.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

A baby is a blank cheque made payable to the human race.  ~Barbara Christine Seifert

One of the most obvious results of having a baby around the house is to turn two good people into complete idiots who probably wouldn't have been much worse than mere imbeciles without it.  ~Georges Courteline, La Philosophie de Georges Courteline

...a little child, born yesterday,
A thing on mother's milk and kisses fed...

~"Hymn to Mercury" (one of the Homeric Hymns), translated from Greek by Percy Bysshe Shelley

God's interest in the human race is nowhere better evinced than in obstetrics.  ~Martin H. Fischer

A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.  ~Carl Sandburg

If you were to open up a baby's head - and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should - you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland.  ~Dave Barry



If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.  ~Edgar W. Howe


Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation.  If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.  ~Erma Bombeck


Labor Day is a glorious holiday because your child will be going back to school the next day.  It would have been called Independence Day, but that name was already taken.  ~Bill Dodds


The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris


You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so.  After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do.  ~Margaret Laurence


The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life.  ~Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, 1883


Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.  ~John Dewey


The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. ~Robert Maynard Hutchins


As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in schools.  ~Author Unknown


I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.  ~Lily Tomlin as "Edith Ann"


The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.  ~Author Unknown


Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher.  That is, I used to, until she got an unlisted number.  ~Author Unknown


There are three good reasons to be a teacher - June, July, and August.  ~Author Unknown


The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.  ~Ralph W. Sockman


What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.  ~George Bernard Shaw


The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.  ~Aristotle


A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.  ~W.H. Auden


An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin


A cross-eyed teacher can keep twice the number of children in order than any other, because the pupils do not know who she's looking at.  ~Four Hundred Laughs: Or, Fun Without Vulgarity, compiled and edited by John R. Kemble, 1902


Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a child to go to bed.  ~Robert Gallagher


It doesn't make much difference what you study, as long as you don't like it.  ~Finley Peter Dunne


You can get all A's and still flunk life.  ~Walker Percy


Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.  ~Albert Einstein


If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.  ~Attributed to both Andy McIntyre and Derek Bok


Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.  ~Edward Everett


He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ~Victor Hugo






Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?  ~Erich Fromm


Education aims to give you a boost up the ladder of knowledge.  Too often, it just gives you a cramp on one of its rungs.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.  ~William Haley


Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.  ~Doug Larson


Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.  ~Malcolm S. Forbes


Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.  ~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," 1890


Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use?  It's nice to be number one, but we can fix that.  All we need to do is start the war on education.  If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics.  ~Leighann Lord


Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.  ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928


When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.  ~Peter Drucker


Education is the movement from darkness to light.  ~Allan Bloom


Much education today is monumentally ineffective.  All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.  ~John W. Gardner


Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire.  ~William Butler Yeats


I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver.  Then they would really be educated.  ~Al McGuire


Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.  ~Daniel J. Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents


The founding fathers... provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education.  School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.  ~John Updike, The Centaur, 1963


The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.  ~Bishop Mandell Creighton


You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.  ~Clay P. Bedford


When the student is ready, the master appears.  ~Buddhist Proverb


You learn something every day if you pay attention.  ~Ray LeBlond


The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.  ~Mohammed


Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.  ~Chinese Proverb


All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.  ~Martin H. Fischer


I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.  ~Winston Churchill


The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.  ~Mortimer Adler


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.  ~Thomas Szasz


I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.  ~Bernard Keble Sandwell


Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later.  ~Dana Stewart Scott


The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.  ~Alvin Toffler


If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.  ~Donald D. Quinn


A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.  ~Henry Brooks Adams


The mediocre teacher tells.  The good teacher explains.  The superior teacher demonstrates.  The great teacher inspires.  ~William Arthur Ward


The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.  ~Kahlil Gibran




You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.  ~Jim Bouton, Ball Four, 1970


If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.  ~Dave Barry


People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball.  I'll tell you what I do.  I stare out the window and wait for spring.  ~Rogers Hornsby


Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.  ~Ted Williams


I'm convinced that every boy, in his heart, would rather steal second base than an automobile.  ~Tom Clark


A good cigar is like a beautiful chick with a great body who also knows the American League box scores.  ~M*A*S*H, Klinger, "Bug-Out," 1976


A hot dog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz.  ~Humphrey Bogart


You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.  ~Roy Campanella


No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.  ~Paul Gallico


There are three things in my life which I really love:  God, my family, and baseball.  The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit.  ~Al Gallagher, 1971


A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.  ~Earl Wilson


Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.  ~Bob Lemon


What is both surprising and delightful is that spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game.... There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability.  ~George Bernard Shaw


I see great things in baseball.  It's our game - the American game.  It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism.  Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set.  Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.  ~Walt Whitman


Baseball is a fun game.  It beats working for a living.  ~Phil Linz


When they start the game, they don't yell, "Work ball."  They say, "Play ball."  ~Willie Stargell, 1981


Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror.  ~George Carlin, Brain Droppings, 1997


Back then, my idol was Bugs Bunny, because I saw a cartoon of him playing ball - you know, the one where he plays every position himself with nobody else on the field but him?  Now that I think of it, Bugs is still my idol.  You have to love a ballplayer like that.  ~Nomar Garciaparra


I don't want to play golf.  When I hit a ball, I want someone else to go chase it.  ~Rogers Hornsby


When you're in a slump, it's almost as if you look out at the field and it's one big glove.  ~Vance Law


With those who don't give a damn about baseball, I can only sympathize.  I do not resent them.  I am even willing to concede that many of them are physically clean, good to their mothers and in favor of world peace.  But while the game is on, I can't think of anything to say to them.  ~Art Hill


That's baseball, and it's my game.  Y' know, you take your worries to the game, and you leave 'em there.  You yell like crazy for your guys.  It's good for your lungs, gives you a lift, and nobody calls the cops.  Pretty girls, lots of 'em.  ~Humphrey Bogart


When we played softball, I'd steal second base, feel guilty and go back.  ~Woody Allen


Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball.  ~Jim Murray


Baseball is the only sport I know that when you're on offense, the other team controls the ball.  ~Ken Harrelson, Sports Illustrated, 6 September 1976


Good pitching will beat good hitting any time, and vice versa.  ~Bob Veale, 1966


Every hitter likes fastballs, just like everybody likes ice cream.  But you don't like it when someone's stuffing it into you by the gallon.  That's what it feels like when Nolan Ryan's thrown balls by you.  ~Reggie Jackson


Strikeouts are boring - besides that, they're fascist.  Throw some ground balls.  More democratic.  ~From the movie Bull Durham


Baseball players are smarter than football players.  How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?  ~Jim Bouton, 1988


Nolan Ryan is pitching much better now that he has his curve ball straightened out.  ~Joe Garagiola


I don't care how long you've been around, you'll never see it all.  ~Bob Lemon, 1977


It's hard to win a pennant, but it's harder losing one.  ~Chuck Tanner


Poets are like baseball pitchers.  Both have their moments.  The intervals are the tough things.  ~Robert Frost


Say this much for big league baseball - it is beyond question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.  ~Bruce Catton


The charm of baseball is that, dull as it may be on the field, it is endlessly fascinating as a rehash.  ~Jim Murray


It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.  ~A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977


Watching a spring training game is as exciting as watching a tree form its annual ring.  ~Jerry Izenberg


The designated hitter rule is like letting someone else take Wilt Chamberlain's free throws.  ~Rick Wise, 1974


If a horse can't eat it, I don't want to play on it.  ~Dick Allen, on artificial turf, 1970


A ball player's got to be kept hungry to become a big-leaguer.  That's why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues.  ~Joe DiMaggio, quoted in New York Times, 30 April 1961


Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world.  If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.  ~Bill Veeck


Wives of ballplayers, when they teach their children their prayers, should instruct them how to say:  "God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy, God bless Babe Ruth.  Babe Ruth has upped Daddy's paycheck by fifteen to forty percent." ~Waite Hoyt


Trying to sneak a pitch past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak a sunrise past a rooster.  ~Attributed to both Joe Adcock and Curt Simmons


Baseball is the only place in life where a sacrifice is really appreciated.  ~Author Unknown


Ideally, the umpire should combine the integrity of a Supreme Court judge, the physical agility of an acrobat, the endurance of Job and the imperturbability of Buddha.  ~"The Villains in Blue," Time magazine, 25 August 1961


I've come to the conclusion that the two most important things in life are good friends and a good bullpen.  ~Bob Lemon, 1981


No matter how good you are, you're going to lose one-third of your games.  No matter how bad you are you're going to win one-third of your games.  It's the other third that makes the difference.  ~Tommy Lasorda


You don't save a pitcher for tomorrow.  Tomorrow it may rain.  ~Leo Durocher, in New York Times, 16 May 1965


You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock.  You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance.  That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.  ~Earl Weaver






It's no coincidence that female interest in the sport of baseball has increased greatly since the ballplayers swapped those wonderful old-time baggy flannel uniforms for leotards.  ~Mike Royko


Pro-rated at 500 at-bats a year that means that for two years out of the fourteen I played, I never even touched the ball.  ~Norm Cash, on his 1,081 strikeouts


During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times.  I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times.  You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season.  That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.  ~Mickey Mantle, 1970


Sandy's fastball was so fast, some batters would start to swing as he was on his way to the mound.  ~Jim Murray, on Sandy Koufax


I was such a dangerous hitter I even got intentional walks in batting practice.  ~Casey Stengel, 1967


Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem.  ~Saul Steinberg


The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays.  ~Lawrence Ritter


The pitcher has to find out if the hitter is timid.  And if the hitter is timid, he has to remind the hitter he's timid.  ~Don Drysdale, quoted in New York Times, 9 July 1979


It ain't like football.  You can't make up no trick plays.  ~Yogi Berra


Baseball, to me, is still the national pastime because it is a summer game.  I feel that almost all Americans are summer people, that summer is what they think of when they think of their childhood.  I think it stirs up an incredible emotion within people.  ~Steve Busby, in Washington Post, 8 July 1974


A baseball fan has the digestive apparatus of a billy goat.  He can, and does, devour any set of diamond statistics with insatiable appetite and then nuzzles hungrily for more.  ~Arthur Daley


That's the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on a ball.  ~Bill Veeck, 1976


A baseball park is the one place where a man's wife doesn't mind his getting excited over somebody else's curves.  ~Brendan Francis


Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs.  That's baseball as it should be played - in God's own sunshine.  And that's really living.  ~Alvin Dark


Baseball is not necessarily an obsessive-compulsive disorder, like washing your hands 100 times a day, but it's beginning to seem that way.  We're reaching the point where you can be a truly dedicated, state-of-the-art fan or you can have a life.  Take your pick.  ~Thomas Boswell, Washington Post, 13 April 1990


This is a game to be savored, not gulped.  There's time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings.  ~Bill Veeck


A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours.  ~Ray Fitzgerald, in Boston Glove, 1970


I don't know why people like the home run so much.  A home run is over as soon as it starts.... The triple is the most exciting play of the game.  A triple is like meeting a woman who excites you, spending the evening talking and getting more excited, then taking her home.  It drags on and on.  You're never sure how it's going to turn out.  ~George Foster, 1978


Baseball is a game dominated by vital ghosts; it's a fraternity, like no other we have of the active and the no longer so, the living and the dead.  ~Richard Gilman


The other sports are just sports.  Baseball is a love.  ~Bryant Gumbel, 1981


There have been only two geniuses in the world.  Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.  ~Tallulah Bankhead


Baseball fans love numbers.  They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.  ~Pat Conroy


Don't tell me about the world.  Not today.  It's springtime and they're knocking baseball around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball.  ~Pete Hamill


More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.  ~Thomas Boswell, in Inside Sports


Baseball?  It's just a game - as simple as a ball and a bat.  Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes.  It's a sport, business - and sometimes even religion.  ~Ernie Harwell, "The Game for All America," 1955


My dad taught me to switch-hit.  He and my grandfather, who was left-handed, pitched to me everyday after school in the back yard.  I batted lefty against my dad and righty against my granddad.  ~Mickey Mantle


I don't love baseball.  I don't love most of today's players.  I don't love the owners.  I do love, however, the baseball that is in the heads of baseball fans.  I love the dreams of glory of 10-year-olds, the reminiscences of 70-year-olds.  The greatest baseball arena is in our heads, what we bring to the games, to the telecasts, to reading newspaper reports.  ~Stan Isaacs, "Diamond-Studded Memories," Newsday, 9 April 1990


Baseball is a harbor, a seclusion from failure that really matters, a playful utopia in which virtuosity can be savored to the third decimal place of a batting average.  ~Mark Kramer


Basketball, hockey and track meets are action heaped upon action, climax upon climax, until the onlooker's responses become deadened.  Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams.  ~Roger Kahn


[L]ike those special afternoons in summer when you go to Yankee Stadium at two o'clock in the afternoon for an eight o'clock game.  It's so big, so empty and so silent that you can almost hear the sounds that aren't there.  ~Ray Miller


Why does everybody stand up and sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" when they're already there?  ~Larry Anderson


Things could be worse.  Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player.  ~Author Unknown


All requests for leave of absence on account of grandmother's funeral, sore throat, housecleaning, lame back, turning of the ringer, headaches, brain storm, cousin's wedding, general ailments or other legitimate excuses must be made out and handed to the boss not later than 10 a.m. on the morning of the game.  ~Traditional gag notice hung in offices and factories at a time period when all games were played during daylight hours


Baseball is very big with my people.  It figures.  It's the only way we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot.  ~Dick Gregory


Baseball is reassuring.  It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.  ~Sharon Olds, This Sporting Life, 1987


One of the chief duties of the fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him.  This department of the game has been allowed to run down fearfully.  ~Robert Benchley


Though I like the various forms of football in the world, I don't think they begin to compare with these two great Anglo-Saxon ball games for sophisticated elegance and symbolism.  Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base - in both senses - greed.  With football we are back to the monotonous clashing armor of the brontosaurus.  ~John Fowles


It is well to remember that a Martian observing his first baseball game would be quite correct in concluding that the last two words of the National Anthem are:  PLAY BALL!  ~Herbert H. Paper, in Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 April 1989


I believe in the Church of Baseball.  I tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones.  I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan.  I know things.  For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball.  When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance.  ~Ron Shelton, Bull Durham, 1988


The great thing about baseball is that there's a crisis every day.  ~Gabe Paul


I have discovered in twenty years of moving around a ball park, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.  ~Bill Veeck


A game of great charm in the adoption of mathematical measurements to the timing of human movements, the exactitudes and adjustments of physical ability to hazardous chance.  The speed of the legs, the dexterity of the body, the grace of the swing, the elusiveness of the slide - these are the features that make Americans everywhere forget the last syllable of a man's last name or the pigmentation of his skin.  ~Branch Rickey, May 1960


I became a good pitcher when I stopped trying to make them miss the ball and started trying to make them hit it.  ~Sandy Koufax


Hitting is timing.  Pitching is upsetting timing.  ~Warren Spahn


Don't forget to swing hard, in case you hit the ball.  ~Woodie Held


Putting lights in Wrigley Field is like putting aluminum siding on the Sistine Chapel.  ~Roger Simon, 1988


You know it's summertime at Candlestick when the fog rolls in, the wind kicks up, and you see the center fielder slicing open a caribou to survive the ninth inning.  ~Bob Sarlette


The place was always cold, and I got the feeling that the fans would have enjoyed baseball more if it had been played with a hockey puck.  ~Andre Dawson, on Montreal


A baseball game is twice as much fun if you're seeing it on the company's time.  ~William C. Feather






Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection.  ~Red Smith


It ain't nothin' till I call it.  ~Bill Klem, umpire


Baseball, it is said, is only a game.  True.  And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.  ~George F. Will, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, 1990


Baseball is like a poker game.  Nobody wants to quit when he's losing; nobody wants you to quit when you're ahead.  ~Jackie Robinson


Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player.  It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.  ~Casey Stengel


Baseball is an island of activity amidst a sea of statistics.  ~Author Unknown


The greatest feeling in the world is to win a major league game.  The second-greatest feeling is to lose a major league game.  ~Chuck Tanner, quoted in The Sporting News, 15 July 1985


What we have are good gray ballplayers, playing a good gray game and reading the good gray Wall Street Journal.  They have been brainwashed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated!... Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.  ~Bill Veeck, The Hustler's Handbook


Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.  ~John Leonard, New York Times, 2 November 1975


They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation.  In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.  ~George F. Will, 1990


Baseball is a ballet without music.  Drama without words.  ~Ernie Harwell, "The Game for All America," 1955


Well, boys, it's a round ball and a round bat and you got to hit the ball square.  ~Joe Schultz, 1969


Pitchers, like poets, are born not made.  ~Cy Young


What does a mama bear on the pill have in common with the World Series?  No cubs.  ~Harry Caray


You know you're pitching well when the batters look as bad as you do at the plate.  ~Duke Snider, 1975


There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball.  Unfortunately, neither of them work.  ~Charlie Lau, 1982


It actually giggles at you as it goes by.  ~Rick Monday, on Phil Niekro's knuckleball, quoted in Sports Illustrated, 1 August 1983


The best way to catch a knuckleball is to wait until the ball stops rolling and then pick it up.  ~Bob Uecker


[A knuckleball is] a curve ball that doesn't give a damn.  ~Jimmy Cannon


Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini.  They show a lot, but not everything.  ~Toby Harrah, 1983


Reading about baseball is a lot more interesting than reading about chess, but you have to wonder:  Don't any of these guys ever go fishing?  ~Dave Shiflett, quoted in Houston Chronicle, 29 April 1990


I know a man who is a diamond cutter.  He mows the lawn at Yankee Stadium.  ~Author Unknown


Spread the diaper in the position of the diamond with you at bat.  Then fold second base down to home and set the baby on the pitcher's mound.  Put first base and third together, bring up home plate and pin the three together.  Of course, in case of rain, you gotta call the game and start all over again.  ~Jimmy Piersal, on how to diaper a baby, 1968


To a pitcher, a base hit is the perfect example of negative feedback.  ~Steve Hovley, 1969


It never ceases to amaze me how many of baseball's wounds are self-inflicted.  ~Bill Veeck, The Hustler's Handbook


A mystique of history and heritage surrounds the New York Yankees.  It's like the old days revived.  We're loved and hated, but always in larger doses than any other team.  We're the only team in any sport whose name and uniform and insignia are synonymous with their entire sport all over the world.... the Yankees mean baseball to more people than all the other teams combined.  ~Paul Blair, quoted in Washington Post, 22 June 1978


Hating the New York Yankees is as American as apple pie, unwed mothers and cheating on your income tax.  ~Mike Royko, 1981


Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for the house in blackjack.  ~Adam Morrow, quoted in Bill Simmons, "Letters from the Nation," 20 October 2003


I have observed that baseball is not unlike war, and when you get right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery.  ~Ty Cobb


Baseball is too much of a sport to be called a business, and too much of a business to be called a sport.  ~Philip Wrigley


Life will always throw you curves, just keep fouling them off... the right pitch will come, but when it does, be prepared to run the bases.  ~Rick Maksian


Baseball isn't a business, it's more like a disease.  ~Walter F. O'Malley


England and America should scrap cricket and baseball and come up with a new game that they both can play.  Like baseball, for example.  ~Robert Benchley


Baseball is the only game left for people.  To play basketball, you have to be 7 feet 6 inches.  To play football, you have to be the same width.  ~Bill Veeck, 1975


Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast.  ~Joe Garagiola, Baseball is a Funny Game


Don't park in the spaces marked, "Reserved for Umpires."  ~John McSherry


Baseball fans are junkies, and their heroin is the statistic.  ~Robert S. Wieder


The season starts too early and finishes too late and there are too many games in between.  ~Bill Veeck


Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too.  ~Greg, age 8


When Steve and I die, we are going to be buried in the same cemetery, 60-feet 6-inches apart.  ~Tim McCarver, who caught all of Steve Carlton's games, 1977


What are we at the park for except to win?  I'd trip my mother.  I'd help her up, brusher her off, tell her I'm sorry.  But mother don't make it to third.  ~Leo Durocher


There ought to be some other means of reckoning quality in this the best and loveliest of games; the scoreboard is an ass.  ~Neville Cardus, A Fourth Innings with Cardus, 1981


In cricket, as in no other game, a great master may well go back to the pavilion scoreless.... In no other game does the law of averages get to work so potently, so mysteriously.  ~Neville Cardus, Cardus on the Ashes, 1989


It's a funny kind of month, October.  For the really keen cricket fan it's when you discover that your wife left you in May.  ~Denis Norden


To have some idea what it's like, stand in the outside lane of a motorway, get your mate to drive his car at you at 95 mph and wait until he's 12 yards away, before you decide which way to jump.  ~Geoffrey Boycott, 1989, how a cricket batsman feels when facing a fast bowler


Progress always involves risks.  You can't steal second base and keep your foot on first.  ~Frederick B. Wilcox


Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.  ~Barry Switzer


Confucious say:  "Baseball wrong - man with four balls cannot walk."  ~Author Unknown




The invention of basketball was not an accident.  It was developed to meet a need.  Those boys simply would not play "Drop the Handkerchief."  ~James Naismith


This is the second most exciting indoor sport, and the other one shouldn't have spectators.  ~Dick Vertleib


There are really only two plays:  Romeo and Juliet, and put the darn ball in the basket.  ~Abe Lemons


Any American boy can be a basketball star if he grows up, up, up.  ~Bill Vaughn


If the NBA were on channel 5 and a bunch of frogs making love was on channel 4, I'd watch the frogs even if they were coming in fuzzy.  ~Bobby Knight


The rule was "No autopsy, no foul."  ~Stewart Granger, on the pickup games of his childhood


When it's played the way is spozed to be played, basketball happens in the air; flying, floating, elevated above the floor, levitating the way oppressed peoples of this earth imagine themselves in their dreams.  ~John Edgar Wideman


I haven't been able to slam-dunk the basketball for the past five years.  Or, for the thirty-eight years before that, either.  ~Dave Barry


I look at the NBA as a football game without the helmet.  ~Tom Tolbert


To win, you've got to put the ball in the macramé.  ~Terry McGuire


These are my new shoes.  They're good shoes.  They won't make you rich like me, they won't make you rebound like me, they definitely won't make you handsome like me.  They'll only make you have shoes like me.  That's it.  ~From a Charles Barkley commercial for basketball shoes, 1993


I liked the choreography, but I didn't care for the costumes.  ~Tommy Tune, on why he never considered playing basketball


If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball.  ~Phil Jackson


Nothing there but basketball, a game which won't be fit for people until they set the basket umbilicus-high and return the giraffes to the zoo.  ~Ogden Nash


What is so fascinating about sitting around watching a bunch of pituitary cases stuff a ball through a hoop?  ~Woody Allen, Annie Hall


We have a great bunch of outside shooters.  Unfortunately, all our games are played indoors.  ~Weldon Drew


Basketball is the MTV of sports.  ~Sara Levinson


The idea is not to block every shot.  The idea is to make your opponent believe that you might block every shot.  ~Bill Russell


I hate it.  It looks like a stickup at 7-Eleven.  Five guys standing there with their hands in the air.  ~Norm Sloan, on zone defense


Basketball is like war in that offensive weapons are developed first, and it always takes a while for the defense to catch up.  ~Red Auerbach


Fans never fall asleep at our games, because they're afraid they might get hit by a pass.  ~George Raveling


The only difference between a good shot and a bad shot is if it goes in or not.  ~Charles Barkley


When I dunk, I put something on it.  I want the ball to hit the floor before I do.  ~Darryl Dawkins


You don't play against opponents.  You play against the game of basketball.  ~Bobby Knight


When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball.  He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest.  The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team.  ~George Raveling


We're shooting 100 percent - 60 percent from the field and 40 percent from the free-throw line.  ~Norm Stewart


You can run a lot of plays when your X is twice as big as the other guys' O.  It makes your X's and O's pretty good.  ~Paul Westphal


Giving "Magic" the basketball is like giving Hitler an army, Jesse James a gang, or Genghis Khan a horse.  ~Jim Murray, about Earvin Johnson


The secret is to have eight great players and four others who will cheer like crazy.  ~Jerry Tarkanian


Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.  ~John Muir

Our hearts are drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see.  ~George W. Russell

I've never seen a smiling face that was not beautiful.  ~Author Unknown

By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.  ~Rabindrath Tagore

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Against Him those women sin who torment their skin with potions, stain their cheeks with rouge and extend the line of their eyes with black coloring.  Doubtless they are dissatisfied with God's plastic skill.  In their own persons they convict and censure the Artificer of all things.  ~Tertullian

That which is striking and beautiful is not always good, but that which is good is always beautiful.  ~Ninon de L'Enclos

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.  ~Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal"

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty - they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.  ~Martin Buxbaum

Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Rhodora"

Close your eyes and see the beauty.  ~Author Unknown

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.  ~Leo Tolstoy

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.  ~Christopher Morley

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.  ~Simone Weil

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

The most beautiful view is the one I share with you.  ~Author Unknown

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.  ~Chinese Proverb

Beauty comes in all sizes, not just size 5.  ~Roseanne

I don't like standard beauty - there is no beauty without strangeness.  ~Karl Lagerfeld

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.  ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting - a wayside sacrament.  Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty and folly are generally companions.  ~Baltasar Gracian

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend....
~William Butler Yeats, "A Prayer for my Daughter"

Beauty comes as much from the mind as from the eye.  ~Grey Livingston

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.  ~Confucius

Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty.  ~George Eliot

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.  ~Johann von Goethe

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.  ~Karl Kraus

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.  ~John Ruskin

Beauty in the flesh will continue to rule the world.  ~Florenz Ziegfeld

Do I love you because you're beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.  ~John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1851

Glamour is a shooting star, it catches your eye, but fades away, beauty is the sun always brilliant day after day.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Beauty is the promise of happiness.  ~Stendhal

Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin.  That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.  ~Gwyneth Paltrow

Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space.  Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages.  Otherwise there was no reminder of human life.  My companion and I were alone with the stars:  the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon.  It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators.  But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will.  ~Rachel Carson

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.  ~Walt Whitman

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

...[K]now that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful.  A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe....
~Robinson Jeffers, from "The Answer"

Beauty... is the shadow of God on the universe.  ~Gabriela Mistral, Desolacíon

Beauty... when you look into a woman's eyes and see what is in her heart.  ~Nate Dircks

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen.  But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.  ~Marie Stopes

Beauty - in projection and perceiving - is 99.9% attitude.  ~Grey Livingston

Beauty?... To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.  ~Pablo Picasso

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep.  That's deep enough.  What do you want - an adorable pancreas?  ~Jean Kerr, The Snake Has All the Lines

Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.  ~Saint Augustine

Taking joy in living is a woman's best cosmetic.  ~Rosalind Russell

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul.  No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow's feet and an obvious wig.  Then you shall see me coming out strong.  ~George Bernard Shaw, to Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Beauty isn't worth thinking about; what's important is your mind.  You don't want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.  ~Garrison Keillor

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.  ~Ezra Pound

This is how humans are:  we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.  ~Orson Scott Card

In the end you regret less the things you believed that weren't true than the things that never came true because you didn't believe.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.  ~Seneca

Not believing has a sickness which is believing a little.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.  You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872

He does not believe who does not live according to his belief.  ~Thomas Fuller

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

An old belief is like an old shoe.  We so value its comfort that we fail to notice the hole in it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878

He who does not know how to believe, should not know.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Generally the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories.  ~Felix Cohen

Few really believe.  The most only believe that they believe or even make believe.  ~John Lancaster Spalding

Men never do evil so thoroughly and cheerfully as when they do it for conscience sake.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

Not... what opinions are held, but... how they are held:  instead of being held dogmatically, [liberal] opinions are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.  ~Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950

When I believe in nothing I do not want to meet you when you believe in nothing.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I respect more the person who struggles with his faith than the person who is confident in his skepticism.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Skepticism is a religion very rich in evangelists but very short on saviors.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Let me warn you, if you start chasing after views, you'll be left without bread and without views.  ~Nikolai Gogol

Just because something is unbelievable does not mean you shouldn't believe it.  Put another way, some things are worth believing in whether they're true or not.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.  ~Laurens van der Post

Some things have to be believed to be seen.  ~Ralph Hodgson, The Skylark and Other Poems

I believe that there is an explanation for everything, so, yes, I believe in miracles.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never the correctness, of a belief.  ~Arthur Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought, 1932

It is easier to believe than to doubt.  ~E.D. Martin, The Meaning of a Liberal Education

Man tends to treat all his opinions as principles.  ~Herbert Agar

Sometimes you believe a thing that isn't true because in the world you wish to live in, it would be true.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.  ~Bertrand Russell



The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.  ~Christopher Morley


The bicycle is a curious vehicle.  Its passenger is its engine.  ~John Howard


It would not be at all strange if history came to the conclusion that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest incident of the nineteenth century.  ~Author Unknown


Tens of thousands who could never afford to own, feed and stable a horse, had by this bright invention enjoyed the swiftness of motion which is perhaps the most fascinating feature of material life.  ~Frances Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle


Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle?  ~Flann O'Brien


The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.  Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish.  Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.  ~Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green


When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments.  Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man.  And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became.  Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others.  Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle.  ~Elizabeth West, Hovel in the Hills


When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.  ~H.G. Wells


When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations:  bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting and so on.  This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead.  I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity.  But I am mentally far away from civilization.  The world is breaking someone else's heart.  ~Diane Ackerman


For instance, the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created:  Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon.  ~Bill Strickland, The Quotable Cyclist


A bicycle does get you there and more.... And there is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive.  Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal.  And getting there is all the fun.  ~Bill Emerson, "On Bicycling," Saturday Evening Post, 29 July 1967


[T]he bicycle will accomplish more for women's sensible dress than all the reform movements that have ever been waged.  ~Author Unknown, from Demerarest's Family Magazine, 1895


The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.  ~Ann Strong


Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.  ~James E. Starrs


The bicycle had, and still has, a humane, almost classical moderation in the kind of pleasure it offers.  It is the kind of machine that a Hellenistic Greek might have invented and ridden.  It does no violence to our normal reactions:  It does not pretend to free us from our normal environment.  ~J.B. Jackson


Until mountain biking came along, the bike scene was ruled by a small elite cadre of people who seemed allergic to enthusiasm.  ~Jacquie Phelan


I took care of my wheel as one would look after a Rolls Royce.  If it needed repairs I always brought it to the same shop on Myrtle Avenue run by a negro named Ed Perry.  He handled the bike with kid gloves, you might say.  He would always see to it that neither front nor back wheel wobbled.  Often he would do a job for me without pay, because, as he put it, he never saw a man so in love with his bike as I was.  ~Henry Miller, My Bike and Other Friends


Get a bicycle.  You will not regret it if you live.  ~Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"


Cycling is unique.  No other sport lets you go like that - where there's only the bike left to hold you up.  If you ran as hard, you'd fall over.  Your legs wouldn't support you.  ~Steve Johnson


The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles.  A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom.  The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.  ~Sloan Wilson


Life is like riding a bicycle - in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving.  ~Albert Einstein


Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion.  Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers.  Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville.  Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history.  ~P.J. O'Rourke






After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable.  A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go.  You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.  ~H.G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance


Messengers and mountain bikers share a common chromosome.  ~James Bethea


If we all, mountain bikers, cyclists, multinational companies, Jo Public, respected the land like old civilizations we wouldn't get so many punctures.  Earth's revenge.  ~Jo Burt  (Thanks, Jacquie)


The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion.  Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.  ~Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, 1974


It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.  Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.  ~Ernest Hemingway


Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.  ~John F. Kennedy


Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.  ~H.G. Wells


It is curious that with the advent of the automobile and the airplane, the bicycle is still with us.  Perhaps people like the world they can see from a bike, or the air they breathe when they're out on a bike.  Or they like the bicycle's simplicity and the precision with which it is made.  Or because they like the feeling of being able to hurtle through air one minute, and saunter through a park the next, without leaving behind clouds of choking exhaust, without leaving behind so much as a footstep.  ~Gurdon S. Leete


The sound of a car door opening in front of you is similar to the sound of a gun being cocked.  ~Amy Webster


Bicycling is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds.  The airplane simply carries a man on its back like an obedient Pegasus; it gives him no wings of his own.  ~Louis J. Helle, Jr., Spring in Washington


There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country.  A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo.  Even a bicycle goes too fast.  ~Paul Scott Mowrer, The House of Europe


You never have the wind with you - either it is against you or you're having a good day.  ~Daniel Behrman, The Man Who Loved Bicycles


I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise.  And no sooner do I get on that accursed machine than off I go hammer and tongs; I never look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view - get hot, juicy, red - like a grilled chop.  Get me on that machine and I have to go.  I go scorching along the road, and cursing aloud at myself for doing it.  ~H.G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance


The secret to mountain biking is pretty simple.  The slower you go the more likely it is you'll crash.  ~Julie Furtado


Things look different from the seat of a bike carrying a sleeping bag with a cold beer tucked inside.  ~Jim Malusa


If you ride you know those moments when you have fed yourself into the traffic, felt the hashed-up asphalt rattle in the handlebars, held a lungful of air in a cloud of exhaust.  Up ahead there are two parallel buses.  With cat's whiskers, you measure the clearance down a doubtful alley.  You swing wide, outflank that flower truck.  The cross-street yellow light is turning red.  You burst off the green like a surfer on a wave of metal.  You have a hundred empty yards of Broadway to yourself.  ~Chip Brown, "A Bike and a Prayer"


All bicycles weigh fifty pounds.  A thirty-pound bicycle needs a twenty-pound lock.  A forty-pound bicycle needs a ten-pound lock.  A fifty-pound bicycle doesn't need a lock.  ~Author Unknown


Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world.  ~Grant Petersen


Most bicyclists in New York City obey instinct far more than they obey the traffic laws, which is to say that they run red lights, go the wrong way on one-way streets, violate cross-walks, and terrify innocents, because it just seems easier that way.  Cycling in the city, and particularly in midtown, is anarchy without malice.  ~Author unknown, from New Yorker, "Talk of the Town"


All creatures who have ever walked have wished that they might fly.  With highwheelers a flesh and blood man can hitch wings to his feet.  ~Karl Kron, Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle


What do you call a cyclist who doesn't wear a helmet?  An organ donor.  ~David Perry


Consider a man riding a bicycle.  Whoever he is, we can say three things about him.  We know he got on the bicycle and started to move.  We know that at some point he will stop and get off.  Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it.  That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.  ~William Golding


I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.  ~Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 1712

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.  ~Izaak Walton

Have you ever observed a humming-bird moving about in an aerial dance among the flowers - a living prismatic gem.... it is a creature of such fairy-like loveliness as to mock all description.  ~W.H. Hudson, Green Mansions

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.  ~Eric Berne

God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into its nest.  ~J.G. Holland

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Seagulls... slim yachts of the element.  ~Robinson Jeffers

Half the modern drugs could well be thrown out the window, except that the birds might eat them.  ~Martin H. Fischer

God loved the birds and invented trees.  Man loved the birds and invented cages.  ~Jacques Deval, Afin de vivre bel et bien

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

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Eagle"

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.  ~Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion and Other Essays

A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
~William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather.  ~Terri Guillemets

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."  ~Henry David Thoreau, 28 November 1858 journal entry

When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast.  ~John Burroughs

A wonderful bird is the pelican
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.
~Dixon Lanier Merritt

We like to praise birds for flying.  But how much of it is actually flying, and how much of it is just sort of coasting from the previous flap?  ~Jack Handey, Deeper Thoughts: All New, All Crispy

A flock of geese leave their lake and take wing, turning to poems in the sky.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Happier of happy though I be, like them I cannot take possession of the sky, mount with a thoughtless impulse, and wheel there, one of a mighty multitude whose way and motion is a harmony and dance magnificent.  ~William Wordsworth

Birds of a feather flock together and crap on your car.  ~Author Unknown

There are joys which long to be ours.  God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?  ~Rose F. Kennedy

A bird does not sing because it has an answer.  It sings because it has a song.  ~Chinese Proverb



A crying baby is the best form of birth control.  ~Carole Tabron


Condoms aren't completely safe.  A friend of mine was wearing one and got hit by a bus.  ~Bob Rubin


The best contraceptive is the word no - repeated frequently.  ~Margaret Smith


Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion.  ~Spike Milligan, The Last Goon Show of All


Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.  ~Mark Twain, Notebooks, 1935


We all worry about the population explosion, but we don't worry about it at the right time.  ~Arthur Hoppe


It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.  ~H.L. Mencken, Notebooks, 1956


It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins.  ~Chinese Proverb


He no play-da-game.  He no make-a-da rules!  ~Earl Butz, referring to the Pope's stricture against contraception


The best contraceptive is a glass of cold water:  not before or after, but instead.  ~Author Unknown


I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception.  I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said "No."  ~Woody Allen


When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.  ~H.G. Wells, 1935


A birth control pill for men, that's fair.  It makes more sense to take the bullets out of the gun than to wear a bulletproof vest.  ~Author Unknown


For birth control, I rely on my personality.  ~Milt Abel


My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on.  ~Joan Rivers


Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.  ~Bertrand Russell


We want far better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.  ~Dora Winifred Black Russell


It would be a service to mankind if the pill were available in slot machines and the cigarette were placed on prescription.  ~Malcolm Potts, MD


No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.  No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.  ~Margaret Sanger


It needs to become as easy to get hold of a condom in a poor country as Coca-Cola.  ~Clare Short


What does a mama bear on the pill have in common with the World Series?  No cubs.  ~Harry Caray


For most women, including women who want to have children, contraception is not an option; it is a basic health care necessity.  ~Louise Slaughter


We know we're getting old when the only thing we want for our birthday is not to be reminded of it.  ~Author Unknown

There is still no cure for the common birthday.  ~John Glenn

A birthday is just the first day of another 365-day journey around the sun.  Enjoy the trip.  ~Author Unknown

Believing hear, what you deserve to hear:
Your birthday as my own to me is dear...
But yours gives most; for mine did only lend
Me to the world; yours gave to me a friend.
~Martial

Because time itself is like a spiral, something special happens on your birthday each year:  The same energy that God invested in you at birth is present once again.  ~Menachem Mendel Schneerson

Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.  ~Chili Davis

Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once.  ~Dave Barry, "Your Disintegrating Body," Dave Barry Turns 40, 1990

Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair.  ~Sam Ewing

Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a crime to waste it on children.  ~George Bernard Shaw

In childhood, we yearn to be grown-ups.  In old age, we yearn to be kids.  It just seems that all would be wonderful if we didn't have to celebrate our birthdays in chronological order.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.  ~Jerry M. Wright

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.  It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.  ~Mark Twain

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.  ~Ogden Nash

They say that age is all in your mind.  The trick is keeping it from creeping down into your body.  ~Author Unknown

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson, "Virginibus Puerisque II," Virginibus Puerisque, 1881

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.  ~Don Marquis

Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.  ~Charles Schulz

Middle age is having a choice between two temptations and choosing the one that'll get you home earlier.  ~Dan Bennett

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.  ~Truman Capote

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.  ~Bob Hope

First you forget names; then you forget faces; then you forget to zip up your fly; and then you forget to unzip your fly.  ~Branch Rickey

Youth is a disease from which we all recover.  ~Dorothy Fulheim

Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.  ~Herbert Asquith

I'm sixty years of age.  That's 16 Celsius.  ~George Carlin, Brain Droppings, 1997

You're not 40, you're eighteen with 22 years experience.  ~Author Unknown

I still have a full deck; I just shuffle slower now.  ~Author Unknown

So mayst thou live, dear! many years,
In all the bliss that life endears,...
~Thomas Hood, "To My Daughter, On Her Birthday"

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.  ~Robert Frost

Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.  ~Jean Paul Richter

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.  ~Lucille Ball

May you live to be a hundred years
With one extra year to repent.
~Author Unknown

Birthdays are good for you.  Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.  ~Larry Lorenzoni

Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.  ~Author Unknown

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.  ~Jennifer Yane

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age.  Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.  ~Tom Wilson



May you get to Heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you're dead.  ~Irish Proverb


May you live all the days of your life.  ~Irish blessing, also attributed to Jonathan Swift


A sunbeam to warm you,
A moonbeam to charm you,
A sheltering angel, so nothing can harm you.
~Irish Blessing


May you live as long as you are fit to live, but no longer! or, may you rather die before you cease to be fit to live than after!  ~Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1749


May the sun shine, all day long,
everything go right, and nothing wrong.
May those you love bring love back to you,
and may all the wishes you wish come true!
~Irish Blessing


May the devil chase you every day of your life and never catch you.  ~Irish Toast


May God grant you many years to live,
For sure He must be knowing
The earth has angels all too few
And Heaven is overflowing.
~Irish Blessing


May the holes in your net be no larger than the fish in it.  ~Irish Blessing


May those that love us, love us.
And those that don't love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if He doesn't turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles
So we will know them by their limping.
~Irish Blessing


May you have warm words on a cool evening, a full moon on a dark night, and a smooth road all the way to your door.  ~Irish Toast


May brooks and trees and singing hills
Join in the chorus too,
And every gentle wind that blows
Send happiness to you.
~Irish Blessing


May your thoughts be as glad as the shamrocks
May your heart be as light as a song
May each day bring you bright
Happy hours that stay with you all the year long.
~Irish Blessing


May you live to be a hundred years
With one extra year to repent.
~Author Unknown


May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions.  ~Joey Adams


May you always have walls for the winds,
a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire,
laughter to cheer you, those you love near you,
and all your heart might desire.
~Irish Blessing


May you always have work for your hands to do.
May your pockets hold always a coin or two.
May the sun shine bright on your windowpane.
May the rainbow be certain to follow each rain.
May the hand of a friend always be near you.
And may God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.
~Irish Blessing


May your pockets be heavy and your heart be light,
May good luck pursue you each morning and night.
~Irish Blessing


Let all thy joys be as the month of May,
And all thy days be as a marriage day.
~Francis Quarles


Here's to a long life and a merry one
A quick death and an easy one
A pretty girl and an honest one
A cold beer and another one!
~Author Unknown


May you live as long as you want,
And never want as long as you live.
~Irish Blessing


May flowers always line your path and sunshine light your day.
May songbirds serenade you every step along the way.
May a rainbow run beside you in a sky that's always blue.
And may happiness fill your heart each day your whole life through.
~Irish Blessing


Here's a sigh to those who love me,
And a smile to those who hate;
And, whatever sky's above me,
Here's a heart for every fate.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "To Thomas Moore"


To the lamp of love:  may it burn brightest in the darkest hours and never flicker in the winds of trial.  ~Author Unknown


The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Take care of your body.  It's the only place you have to live.  ~Jim Rohn

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack.  We give it orders which make no sense.  ~Henry Miller

Every man is the builder of a Temple called his body, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Blood is that fragile scarlet tree we carry within us.  ~Osbert Sitwell

The word arse is as much god as the word face.  It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist.  ~D.H. Lawrence

To keep the body in good health is a duty... otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.  ~Buddha

Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?  ~Thomas Hardy

How idiotic civilization is!  Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?  ~Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories

Scars are tattoos with better stories.  ~From a Toyota advertisement in Sports Illustrated magazine, 3 June 2002

The human body is a machine which winds its own springs.  ~Julien Offroy de la Mettrie, L'Homme Machine

Beyond my body my veins are invisible.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Emotion always has its roots in the unconscious and manifests itself in the body.  ~Irene Claremont de Castillejo

Man is the sole animal whose nudity offends his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.  ~Montaigne

Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat.  For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.  ~Samuel Johnson

The body is your temple.  Keep it pure and clean for the soul to reside in.  ~B.K.S. Iyengar, Yoga: The Path To Holistic Health

Our bodies are our gardens - our wills are our gardeners.  ~William Shakespeare

A trembling in the bones may carry a more convincing testimony than the dry documented deductions of the brain.  ~Llewelyn Powers

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.  ~Aldous Huxley

The body never lies.  ~Martha Graham

Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.  ~William Osler

Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.  ~Frank Gillette Burgess

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.  ~Aldous Huxley

The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stew pan and the whole fixed upon stilts.  ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks

The body too has its rights; and it will have them:  they cannot be trampled on without peril.  The body ought to be the soul's best friend.  Many good men however have neglected to make it such:  so it has become a fiend and has plagued them.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Hormones, vitamines, stimulants and depressives are oils upon the creaky machinery of life.  Principal item, however, is the machinery.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Make your feet your friend.  ~J.M. Barrie

The heart is not simply suspended in a body but in a culture, a place, a time.  ~Mimi Guarneri, The Heart Speaks: A Cardiologist Reveals the Secret Language of Healing

The trouble with having a body is that people know it's where you hang out and you don't get any privacy.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body.  We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.  ~Thomas Carlyle

Your body is a flower that life let bloom.... ~Ilchi Lee

Your body is a beautiful manifestation powered by spirit.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

The Church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.
~Eduardo Galeano

If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Flesh goes on pleasuring us, and humiliating us, right to the end.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Our feet are our body's connection to the earth.  ~Andrew Weil

Sometimes your body is smarter than you are.  ~Author Unknown

[T]he way he treats his body, youd think he was renting.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Yet this is health:  To have a body functioning so perfectly that when its few simple needs are met it never calls attention to its own existence.  ~Bertha Stuart Dyment

Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?  ~Pablo Casals

A woman is as young as her knees.  ~Mary Quant

'Tis better than riches
To scratch when it itches.
~Author Unknown

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood:  our body.  ~Marcel Proust

The body is not a permanent dwelling, but a sort of inn which is to be left behind when one perceives that one is a burden to the host.  ~Seneca

What fools indeed we morals are
To lavish care upon a Car,
With ne'er a bit of time to see
About our own machinery!
~John Kendrick Bangs

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The human body is the only machine for which there are no spare parts.  ~Hermann M. Biggs

In vain we shall penetrate more and more deeply the secrets of the structure of the human body, we shall not dupe nature; we shall die as usual.  ~Bernard Le Bovier de Fontanelle

The body is a bundle of careful compromises.  ~Randolph Nesse and George Williams, Why We Get Sick

Massage is the only form of physical pleasure to which nature forgot to attach consequences.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Most guys aren't that picky.  They may have quicker reflexes around large breasts, but they need more to keep them interested.  We know plenty of women whose sex appeal makes their breasts exactly the right size.  ~From "The Playboy Advisor," Playboy magazine, March 2004, in answer to the question, "If you have small breasts, how do you make yourself look sexy?  Most guys want girls with large breasts."

The body is a sacred garment.  ~Martha Graham

We use our brains too little, and when we do, it is only to make excuses for our reflexes and our instincts.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Abdicate, v.:  to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. ~Author Unknown

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected:  the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.  ~W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed?  ~Michelangelo

Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.  ~Ken Wilbur

If we were meant to be nude, we would have been born that way.  ~Author Unknown

I use the word "fat."  I use that word because that's what people are: they're fat.  They're not bulky; they're not large, chunky, hefty or plump.  And they're not big-boned.  Dinosaurs were big-boned.  These people are not overweight: this term somehow implies there is some correct weight.  There is no correct weight.  Heavy is also a misleading term.  An aircraft carrier is heavy; it's not fat.  Only people are fat, and that's what fat people are!  They're fat!  ~George Carlin

Why do we pay for psychotherapy when massages cost half as much?  ~Jason Love

We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life.  ~William Godwin

A girl without freckles is like a night without stars.  ~Author Unknown

You know the definition of the perfectly designed machine.... The perfectly designed machine is one in which all its working parts wear out simultaneously.  I am that machine.  ~Frederick Alexander Lindemann

I am a private person, but I will reveal this about myself: if you start massaging my shoulders, don't expect me to tell you to stop.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be,
To taste whole joyes.
~John Donne

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.  ~John Updike

Some patients I see are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds.  ~Zacharty Bercovitz

A human being is an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.  ~Christopher Morley

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.  ~Maria Montessori

Your heart knows not how to lie.  It is great that it lays deep in your chest and not in your mouth.  ~Kak Sri

We don't stop at our skin.  ~Dolores Krieger, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine

Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature!  - ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more!  Is not nakedness then indecent?  No, not inherently.  It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability that is indecent.  There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent.  Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is - nor what faith or art or health really is.  ~Walt Whitman

Skin does not equal sin.  ~Author Unknown

Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

The best and most efficient pharmacy is within your own system.  ~Robert C. Peale



It is better to be bold than too circumspect, because fortune is of a sex which likes not a tardy wooer and repulses all who are not ardent.  ~Machiavelli


Put a grain of boldness into everything you do.  ~Baltasar Gracian


But the fruit that can fall without shaking
Indeed is too mellow for me.
~Mary Wortley Montagu, The Answer


Venus favors the bold.  ~Ovid


I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated


Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.  ~Francis Bacon


Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn't either.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Freedom lies in being bold.  ~Robert Frost


Moderation is a fatal thing; nothing succeeds like excess.  ~Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, 1894


Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.  ~Edmund Spenser


If the light in your life has changed to yellow, I recommend you floor it.  It's safer than the alternative.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


Boldness is a mask for fear, however great.  ~John Dryden


The unforgivable crime is soft hitting.  Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.  ~Theodore Roosevelt


He who finds Fortune on his side should go briskly ahead, for she is wont to favor the bold.  ~Baltasar Gracian


He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.  ~Jonathan Swift


A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend.  ~Author Unknown

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face.  It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.  ~Edward P. Morgan

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.  ~James Bryce

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.  ~Author Unknown

A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end.  You live several lives while reading it.  ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.  ~G.K. Chesterton

Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing.  It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.  ~Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning

If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.  ~Toni Morrison

A good book has no ending.  ~R.D. Cumming

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.  ~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.  ~Charles W. Eliot

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.  Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.  ~Attributed to Groucho Marx

I find television to be very educating.  Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.  ~Groucho Marx

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.  ~Mark Twain, attributed

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.  ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833

Let books be your dining table,
And you shall be full of delights
Let them be your mattress
And you shall sleep restful nights.
~Author Unknown

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.  ~George Robert Gissing

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.  ~Chinese Proverb

There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.  ~Joe Ryan

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.  ~William Hazlitt

My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.  ~Thomas Helm

A dirty book is rarely dusty.  ~Author Unknown

As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it.  I need resistance to celebrate!  ~William James

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.  ~Paul Sweeney

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.  ~Oscar Wilde

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.  ~Franz Kafka

Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.  Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.  ~Christopher Morley

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.  ~Abraham Lincoln

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.  ~Andrew Ross

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.  ~Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, Pensées Diverses

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.  ~Kenko Yoshida

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.  ~Jessamyn West

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.  ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

TV.  If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six.  Open your child's imagination.  Open a book.  ~Author Unknown

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, Trivia, 1917

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.  ~Bern Williams

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

To choose a good book, look in an inquisitors prohibited list.  ~John Aikin

In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.  ~Stéphane Mallarmé

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.  ~James Russell Lowell

Books can be dangerous.  The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life."  ~Helen Exley

There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know:  to touch words and have them touch you back.  ~Jim Fiebig

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience:  this is the ideal life.  ~Mark Twain

A book is to me like a hat or coat - a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off.  ~Charles B. Fairbanks

If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe?  The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.  ~Author Unknown

Books are the glass of council to dress ourselves by.  ~Bulstrode Whitlock

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

Reading means borrowing.  ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

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.  ~Jesse Lee Bennett

Book lovers never go to bed alone.  ~Author Unknown

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.  One does not love breathing.  ~Harper Lee

The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity.  When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.  ~Washington Irving

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.  ~Clifton Fadiman

For friends... do but look upon good Books:  they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.  ~Francis Bacon

A book that is shut is but a block.  ~Thomas Fuller

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.  ~Thomas Carlyle

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away.  No one has stepped twice into the same river.  But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?  ~Marina Tsvetaeva

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.  ~Howard Pyle

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Medicine for the soul.  ~Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.  ~E.P. Whipple

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.  From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.  ~Gilbert Highet

"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.  ~François Mauriac

Books are embalmed minds.  ~Bovee

Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation.  They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly.  They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978

I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.  ~William Lyon Phelps

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.  ~Charles Dudley Warner

If you have never said "Excuse me" to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time.  ~Sherri Chasin Calvo

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.  ~Ross MacDonald

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.  ~Samuel Butler

I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command.  ~Francesco Petrarch

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.  ~Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, "Book Buying"

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.  ~Edmund Burke

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.  ~André Maurois

A house without books is like a room without windows.  ~Heinrich Mann

From my point of view, a book is a literary prescription put up for the benefit of someone who needs it.  ~S.M. Crothers

He fed his spirit with the bread of books.  ~Edwin Markham

Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.  ~John Ruskin

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.  ~J. Swartz

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.  ~John LeCarre

Never judge a book by its movie.  ~J.W. Eagan 

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.  ~Charles Lamb

Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money.  ~John Lyly

The wise man reads both books and life itself.  ~Lin Yutang

I like intellectual reading.  It's to my mind what fiber is to my body.  ~Grey Livingston

I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, - who yet live and speak excellently in their works.  My neighbors think me often alone, - and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes - each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs - quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words.  ~Laurence Sterne

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be -
I had a mother who read to me.
~Strickland Gillilan (Thanks, Laurel)

When a new book is published, read an old one.  ~Samuel Rogers

He who lends a book is an idiot.  He who returns the book is more of an idiot.  ~Arabic Proverb

Borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.  ~Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, "The Two Races of Men," 1822

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.  ~Lord Chesterfield

An ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.  ~Augustine Birrell

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.  ~George Steiner

We are too civil to books.  For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

From every book invisible threads reach out to other books; and as the mind comes to use and control those threads the whole panorama of the world's life, past and present, becomes constantly more varied and interesting, while at the same time the mind's own powers of reflection and judgment are exercised and strengthened.  ~Helen E. Haines

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

How vast an estate it is that we came into as the intellectual heirs of all the watchers and searchers and thinkers and singers of the generations that are dead!  What a heritage of stored wealth!  What perishing poverty of mind we should be left in without it!  ~J.N. Larned

Books are a uniquely portable magic.  ~Stephen King

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.  ~Amos Bronson Alcott

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.  ~Voltaire

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; books are well written or badly written.  ~Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.  ~Richard Steele, Tatler, 1710

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time).  It is the only way of discovering what they contain.  A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.  ~E.M. Forster

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book!  A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.  ~Charles Kingsley

Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds.  Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh.  ~Judah Ibn Tibbon

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.  ~Francis Bacon

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.  ~Walter Pater

No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic.  ~Ann Landers

That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;
Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,
Deface their ill-placed statues. 
~Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it.  I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.  ~Henry David Thoreau

To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.  ~Chinese Saying

O for a Booke and a shdie nooke, eyther in-a-doore or out;
With the grene leaves whisp'ring overhede, or the Streete cryes all about.
Where I maie Reade all at my ease, both of the Newe and Olde;
For a jollie goode Booke whereon to looke is better to me than Golde.
~John Wilson

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.  ~Anatole France

A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading.  ~Jeremy Collier

Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.  ~Plato

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.  ~Mary Wortley Montagu

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.  ~Woodrow Wilson

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.  ~Henry David Thoreau

It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle.  ~Sutton Elbert Griggs

Many persons read and like fiction.  It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.  ~Rose Macaulay

Americans like fat books and thin women.  ~Russell Baker

What holy cities are to nomadic tribes - a symbol of race and a bond of union - great books are to the wandering souls of men:  they are the Meccas of the mind.  ~G.E. Woodberry

God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.  ~W.E. Channing

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.  ~Holbrook Jackson

A blessed companion is a book, - a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend,... a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own.  ~Douglas Jerrold

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.  ~William Styron

A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."  ~Holbrook Jackson

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, 1870

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.  ~Henry Miller

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.  ~Harold Bloom

One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else's imaginary friends, at all hours of the night.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge.  It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.  ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary.  It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.  ~Holbrook Jackson

I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments.  ~Lord Chesterfield

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Books are delightful society.  If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.  ~William Ewart Gladstone

Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.  ~Jeremy Collier

Grasp your opportunities, no matter how poor your health; nothing is worse for your health than boredom.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.  ~Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Boredom is an emptiness filled with insistence.  ~Leo Stein

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe.  It's a symptom of security.  ~Eugene Ionesco

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century.  Boredom slays more of existence than war.  ~Norman Mailer

I am never bored anywhere:  being bored is an insult to oneself.  ~Jules Renard

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.  ~Thomas Szasz

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.  ~William Inge

Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.  ~C.C. Colton

Boredom is a sickness the cure for which is work; pleasure is only a palliative.  ~Le Duc de Lévis, Mémoires

Earth's nothing more than a rotating ball of boredom.  ~Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "What You Leave Behind," 1999, written by Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.  ~Evelyn Waugh

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time.  Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.  ~Charlotte Whitton

When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I'm leaving.  ~-Steven Wright

All man's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

The cure for boredom is curiosity.  There is no cure for curiosity.  ~Dorothy Parker (Thanks, Kaitlin)

Bore:  A man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.  ~Gian Vincenzo Gravina

Some people are so boring that they make you waste an entire day in five minutes.  ~Jules Renard

We all denounce bores, but while we do so, let us remember that there is nobody who isn't a bore to somebody.  ~J.A. Spender

There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.  ~James Russell Lowell

One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore... and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.  ~John Updike, Assorted Prose

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.  ~Frank Moore Colby

Everyone is a bore to someone.  That is unimportant.  The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.  ~Gerald Brenan

A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.  ~Bert Leston Taylor, The So-Called Human Race

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.  ~H.L. Mencken

Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.  ~William Dean Howells

Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.  ~Don Marquis

The bore is usually considered a harmless creature, or of that class of irrational bipeds who hurt only themselves.  ~Maria Edgeworth, Thoughts on Bores

We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore.  ~Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Labor Day is a holiday honoring those who work for a living.  Laborious Day is a lesser known holiday honoring those who cannot stop talking about their work.  ~Lemony Snicket

The only thing worse than being bored is being boring.  ~Jean Baudrillard

A bore is a fellow who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.  ~Henry Ford

Bore, n.  A person who talks when you wish him to listen.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The worst thing about a bore is not that he won't stop talking, but that he won't let you stop listening.  ~Author Unknown



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


I've met a few people in my time who were enthusiastic about hard work.  And it was just my luck that all of them happened to be men I was working for at the time.  ~Bill Gold


One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you.  ~Dennis A. Peer


Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.  ~Doug Larson


Ability is what will get you to the top if the boss has no daughter.  ~Author Unknown


Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.  ~Thomas J. Watson


If a trainstation is where the train stops, what's a workstation?  ~Author Unknown


Monday is a lame way to spend 1/7 of your life.  ~Author Unknown


The best leader is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.  ~Theodore Roosevelt


Most people like hard work.  Particularly when they are paying for it.  ~Franklin P. Jones


Don't worry about people stealing your ideas.  If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.  ~Howard Aiken


If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."  ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.  ~Robert Frost


When you own your breath, nobody can steal your peace.  ~Author Unknown

When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady.  But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life.  Therefore, one should learn to control the breath.  ~Svatmarama, Hatha Yoga Pradipika

A healthy mind has an easy breath.  ~Author Unknown

If you woke up breathing, congratulations!  You have another chance.  ~Andrea Boydston

Inhale, and God approaches you.  Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you.  Exhale, and you approach God.  Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God.  ~Krishnamacharya

Breathing is the greatest pleasure in life.  ~Giovanni Papini

Smile, breathe and go slowly.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Breath is Spirit.  The act of breathing is Living.  ~Author Unknown

For breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth.  ~Sanskrit Proverb

The nose is for breathing, the mouth is for eating.  ~Proverb

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky.  Conscious breathing is my anchor.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Walking through the house at night is wonderful to me; a symphony of breath, each person a separate instrument as they collectively breathe in time to the metronome of life itself.  ~Edwin Leap, www.edwinleap.com

To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV

He lives most life whoever breathes most air.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Focusing on the act of breathing clears the mind of all daily distractions and clears our energy enabling us to better connect with the Spirit within.  ~Author Unknown

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.  ~Erich Fromm

You know that our breathing is the inhaling and exhaling of air.  The organ that serves for this is the lungs that lie round the heart, so that the air passing through them thereby envelops the heart.  Thus breathing is a natural way to the heart.  And so, having collected your mind within you, lead it into the channel of breathing through which air reaches the heart and, together with this inhaled air, force your mind to descend into the heart and to remain there.  ~Nicephorus the Solitary

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart:  I am, I am, I am.  ~Sylvia Plath

Freedom is strangely ephemeral.  It is something like breathing; one only becomes acutely aware of its importance when one is choking.  ~William E. Simon

Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours.  ~Swedish Proverb

The best things in life are nearest:  Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.  Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Fear is excitement without the breath.  ~Fritz Perls

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.  ~L. Frank Baum

Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?  ~Mary Oliver

What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?  ~Mary Oliver

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.  ~John Updike

We too should make ourselves empty, that the great soul of the universe may fill us with its breath.  ~Laurence Binyon

Learn how to exhale, the inhale will take care of itself.  ~Carla Melucci Ardito

There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted.  Then, there's another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.  ~Rumi

Breathe.  Let go.  And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.  ~Oprah Winfrey

The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.  Erma Bombeck

In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air.  ~Changing Times magazine

We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water.  By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere.  If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist.  In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss.  ~Alexander Lowen

I love to breathe.  Oxygen is sexy!  ~Kris Carr

To live is not breathing it is action.  ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Angels are all around us, all the time, in the very air we breathe.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994



It is with words as with sunbeams.  The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.  ~Robert Southey


Good things, when short, are twice as good.  ~Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom


It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books - what other men do not say in whole books.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols


Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief.
~William Shakespeare, Hamlet


The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.  ~Thomas Jefferson


My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.  ~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart


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.  ~William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style, 1918


If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought.  ~Dennis Roth


The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.  ~Blaise Pascal, translated from French, Lettres Provinciales, XVI, 1656


In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.  ~Sydney Smith


The trick to writing an aphorism is to place a period at the point where you're inclined to say, "in other words...."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


If you bring that sentence in for a fitting, I can have it shortened by Wednesday.  ~M*A*S*H, Hawkeye, "The Gun"


"In good prose (says Schlegel) every word should be underlined!" that is, every word should be the right one; and then no one would be righter than another.  There are no italics in Plato.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


He replies nothing but monosyllables.  I believe he would make three bites of a cherry.  ~Rabelais, Pantagruel


Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.  ~Branch Rickey


If any man will draw up his case, and put his name at the foot of the first page, I will give him an immediate reply.  Where he compels me to turn over the sheet, he must wait my leisure.  ~Lord Sandwich


Brevity is the soul of lingerie.  ~Dorothy Parker


If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea.  ~David Belasco


You cannot contribute anything to the ideal condition of mind and heart known as Brotherhood, however much you preach, posture, or agree, unless you live it.  ~Faith Baldwin

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.  ~John Donne

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.  ~James Baldwin

In union there is strength.  ~Aesop

Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.  ~Alexander the Great

So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth.  ~Bahá'u'lláh

I look to a time when brotherhood needs no publicity; to a time when a brotherhood award would be as ridiculous as an award for getting up each morning.  ~Daniel D. Mich

Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.  ~Booker T. Washington

Our design is so flawed, so take everything and fill the gaps with selfless love.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.  ~Virginia Burden, The Process of Intuition

We're all just walking each other home.  ~Ram Dass

Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.  ~Kenyan Proverb

I have often noticed that when chickens quit quarreling over their food they often find that there is enough for all of them.  I wonder if it might not be the same with the human race.  ~Don Marquis

Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet.  ~Vietnamese Proverb

I, who have no sisters or brothers, look with some degree of innocent envy on those who may be said to be born to friends.  ~James Boswell

Sometimes being a brother is even better than being a superhero.  ~Marc Brown

It takes two men to make one brother.  ~Israel Zangwill

There's no other love like the love for a brother.  There's no other love like the love from a brother.  ~Terri Guillemets

I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers.  It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage.  Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.  ~Maya Angelou

A friend is a brother who was once a bother.  ~Author Unknown

A brother shares childhood memories and grown-up dreams.  ~Author Unknown

Our brothers and sisters are there with us from the dawn of our personal stories to the inevitable dusk.  ~Susan Scarf Merrell

If you want to know how your girl will treat you after marriage, just listen to her talking to her little brother.  ~Sam Levenson

It snowed last year too:  I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.  ~Dylan Thomas

A brother is a friend given by Nature.  ~Jean Baptiste Legouve

I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see.  I sought my God, but my God eluded me.  I sought my brother and I found all three.  ~Author Unknown

The best way to get a puppy is to beg for a baby brother - and they'll settle for a puppy every time.  ~Winston Pendelton

All for one and one for all
My brother and my friend
What fun we have
The time we share
Brothers 'til the end.
~Author Unknown

Never make a companion equal to a brother.  ~Hesiod

It was nice growing up with someone like you - someone to lean on, someone to count on... someone to tell on!  ~Author Unknown

A sibling may be the keeper of one's identity, the only person with the keys to one's unfettered, more fundamental self.  ~Marian Sandmaier

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago - the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider.... It doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we've traveled.  ~Jane Mersky Leder

Help your brother's boat across, and your own will reach the shore.  ~Hindu Proverb

The younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder.  ~Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins:  cash and experience.  Take the experience first; the cash will come later.  ~Harold Geneen

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.  ~Henry Ford

Business is a combination of war and sport.  ~André Maurois

The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers.  ~John Egan

Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn't always have to be their top priority.  ~William Arthur Ward

Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

It is not the employer who pays the wages.  He only handles the money.  It is the product that pays the wages.  ~Henry Ford, 1922, also sometimes quoted as "It is the customer that pays the wages"

Hire character.  Train skill.  ~Peter Schutz

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.  The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.  ~Bill Gates

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus puerisque, 1881

I don't pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.  ~Robert Bosch

Professionalism is a frame of mind, not a paycheck.  ~Cecil Castle

In college, Yuppies major in business administration.  If to meet certain requirements they have to take a liberal arts course, they take Business Poetry.  ~Dave Barry

Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in man.  ~Author Unknown

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.  ~Edward R. Murrow

Make the workmanship surpass the materials.  ~Ovid

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.  ~Howard Scott

The executive exists to make sensible exceptions to general rules.  ~Elting E. Morison

There are so many men who can figure costs, and so few who can measure values.  ~Author Unknown

For all of its faults, it gives most hardworking people a chance to improve themselves economically, even as the deck is stacked in favor of the privileged few.  Here are the choices most of us face in such a system:  Get bitter or get busy.  ~Bill O'Reilly, about capitalism

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.  ~Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought

People that pay for things never complain.  It's the guy you give something to that you can't please.  ~Will Rogers

To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart.  ~Thomas Watson, Sr.

I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.  ~Alan Greenspan

Men err when they think they can be inhuman exploiters in their business life, and loving husbands and fathers at home.  ~Smiley Blanton

Let's be honest.  There's not a business anywhere that is without problems.  Business is complicated and imperfect.  Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings.  ~Bob Parsons

Successful enterprises are usually led by a proven chief executive who is a competent benevolent dictator.  ~Richard Pratt

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.  ~Henry Ford

The NBA is never just a business.  It's always business.  It's always personal.  All good businesses are personal.  The best businesses are very personal.  ~Mark Cuban

It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises but only performance is reality.  ~Harold Geneen

You can't file a conversation.  ~Author Unknown

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.  Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.  Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak.  ~Jay Leno

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.  ~Confucius

It is unfortunate we can't buy many business executives for what they are worth and sell them for what they think they are worth.  ~Malcolm Forbes

Too many people think only of their own profit.  But business opportunity seldom knocks on the door of self-centered people.  No customer ever goes to a store merely to please the storekeeper.  ~Kazuo Inamori

A man of business may talk of philosophy; a man who has none may practise it.  ~Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1727

Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.  ~Norman Cousins

Work as if you own the company and soon you just might.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

To take something from a person and keep it for oneself:  that is robbery.  To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get:  that is business.  Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger.  ~Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden

Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business.  Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.  ~Dale Carnegie

A consultant is a man sent in after the battle to bayonet the wounded.  ~Author Unknown

The results of quality work last longer than the shock of high prices.  ~Author Unknown

It doesn't matter how many times you fail.  It doesn't matter how many times you almost get it right.  No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you.  All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because... All that matters in business is that you get it right once.  Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.  ~Mark Cuban

Commerce, n. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's World Book, 1906

You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.  ~Joseph E. Levine

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

May the wings of the butterfly kiss the sun
And find your shoulder to light on,
To bring you luck, happiness and riches
Today, tomorrow and beyond.
~Irish Blessing

Butterflies are self propelled flowers.  ~R.H. Heinlein

If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies.  ~Author Unknown

The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity.  ~Attributed to George Carlin

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.  ~Richard Bach

But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.
~Robert Frost, "Blue-Butterfly Day"

I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow.  He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book.  It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.  ~Karl Kraus

Beautiful and graceful, varied and enchanting, small but approachable, butterflies lead you to the sunny side of life.  And everyone deserves a little sunshine.  ~Jeffrey Glassberg

The butterfly is a flying flower,
The flower a tethered butterfly.
~Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.  ~Richard Buckminster Fuller

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.  ~Edith Wharton

With the rose the butterfly's deep in love,
A thousand times hovering round;
But round himself, all tender like gold,
The sun's sweet ray is hovering found.
~Heinrich Heine, "New Spring"

"Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, "one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower."  ~Hans Christian Andersen

Love is like a butterfly:  It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes.  ~Author Unknown

I've watched you now a full half-hour;
Self-poised upon that yellow flower
And, little Butterfly!  Indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless! - not frozen seas
More motionless! and then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again!
~William Wordsworth, "To a Butterfly"

I only ask to be free.  The butterflies are free.  ~Charles Dickens

The butterfly's attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry:  deeper motives contribute to it.  We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.  ~Primo Levi

And what's a butterfly? At best,
He's but a caterpillar, at rest.
~John Grey

Flowers and butterflies drift in color, illuminating spring.  ~Author Unknown

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.  ~Carl Sagan

This great purple butterfly,
In the prison of my hands,
Has a learning in his eye
Not a poor fool understands.
~William Butler Yeats, "Another Song of a Fool"

[N]ot quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.  ~Elizabeth Goudge

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight.
~Robert Graves, "Flying Crooked"

The green grass and the happy skies
court the fluttering butterflies.  ~Terri Guillemets

Know thyself!  A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly.  Whoever observes himself arrests his own development.  A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.  ~Andre Gide

Do ye not comprehend that we are worms,
Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly
That flieth unto judgment without screen?
~Dante Alighieri

Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave.
The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.
~Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.  ~Author Unknown

Go on, hitch a ride on the back of a butterfly.  There's no better way to fly.  ~Pat Monahan, Scott Michael Underwood, and James W. Stafford, "Get To Me"

The fluttering of a butterfly's wings can effect climate changes on the other side of the planet.  ~Paul Erlich

And the case of butterflies so rich it looks
As if all summer settled there and died.
~Philip Larkin, "Autumn"

Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one.  It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where, I assume it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake - as almost all hats are.  ~Nikolaus Laszlo, Nora Ephron, and Delia Ephron, You've Got Mail

A million butterflies rose up from South America,
All together, and flew in a gold storm toward Spain...
~Winfield Townley Scott, "Annual Legend"

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly.  But with humans it is the other way around:  a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.  ~Anton Chekhov

Gray sail against the sky,
Gray butterfly!
Have you a dream for going.
Or are you the blind wind's blowing?
~Dana Burnet, "A Sail at Twilight"

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.  I grow older.
~Li Po

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.  ~Joseph Conrad

Just like the butterfly, I too will awaken in my own time.  ~Deborah Chaskin

Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies,
Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows.
I envy you, drunk with flowers,
Butterflies swirling in your dreams.
~Ch'ien Ch'i, translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Women, don't get a tattoo.  That butterfly looks great on your breast when you're twenty or thirty, but when you get to seventy, it stretches into a condor.  ~Billy Elmer

Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone
That science may have staked the future on?
He seems to say the reason why so much
Should come to nothing must be fairly faced.
~Robert Frost, "Pod of the Milkweed"

As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.  ~Marianne Moore, "To a Steam Roller"

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.  We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them.  It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.  Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The tulip and the butterfly
Appear in gayer coats than I:
Let me be dressed fine as I will,
Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still.
~Isaac Watts

We are closer to the ants than to butterflies.  Very few people can endure much leisure.  ~Gerald Brenan

Nerves and butterflies are fine - they're a physical sign that you're mentally ready and eager.  You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that's the trick.  ~Steve Bull

The least thing upset him on the links.  He missed short putts because of the uproar of butterflies in the adjoining meadows.  ~P.G. Wodehouse

Grown-ups love figures.  When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters.  They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like?  What games does he love best?  Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand:  "How old is he?  How many brothers has he?  How much does he weigh?  How much money does his father make?"  Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.  ~Vita Sackville-West

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.  ~Chuang Tzu



Camping: nature's way of promoting the motel industry.  ~Dave Barry, Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need


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


The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another.  It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Camping:  The art of getting closer to nature while getting farther away from the nearest cold beverage, hot shower and flush toilet.  ~Author Unknown


What I like about camping is you can get really dirty.  Either you're all by yourself, so no one else sees you, or everyone you're with is just as dirty as you are, so nobody cares.  ~Anonymous former Boy Scout, quoted in Highs! Over 150 Ways to Feel Really, Really Good Without Alcohol or Other Drugs by Alex J. Packer


But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: "Home is home, be it never so homely."  ~Henry David Thoreau


The ultimate camping trip was the Lewis and Clark expedition.  ~Dave Barry


I got into an argument with a girlfriend inside of a tent.  That's a bad place for an argument, because then I tried to walk out and slammed the flap.  How are you supposed to express your anger in this situation?  Zipper it up really quick?  ~Mitch Hedberg


We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared.  ~Jack Handey


It always rains on tents.  Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.  ~Dave Barry


Backpacking:  An extended form of hiking in which people carry double the amount of gear they need for half the distance they planned to go in twice the time it should take.  ~Author Unknown


Campers: Nature's way of feeding mosquitoes.  ~Author Unknown


How is it that one match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box of matches to start a campfire?  ~Christy Whitehead


When using a public campground, a tuba placed on your picnic table will keep the campsites on either side vacant.  ~Author Unknown


If you're not in New York, you're camping out.  ~Thomas E. Dewey


Jews don't go camping.  Life is hard enough as it is.  ~Carol Siskind


A lot of parents pack up their troubles and send them off to summer camp.  ~Raymond Duncan


Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.  ~Garrison Keillor


How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof!  In such places standing alone on the mountain-top it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make - leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone - we all dwell in a house of one room - the world with the firmament for its roof - and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.  ~John Muir


Life is short, God's way of encouraging a bit of focus.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Don't be fooled by the calendar.  There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.  ~Charles Richards

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite.  Or waiting around for Friday night or waiting perhaps for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil or a better break or a string of pearls or a pair of pants or a wig with curls or another chance.  Everyone is just waiting.  ~Dr. Seuss

Enjoy yourself.  It's later than you think.  ~Chinese Proverb

Live every day as if it were your last and then some day you'll be right.  ~H.H. "Breaker" Morant

Go for it now.  The future is promised to no one.  ~Wayne Dyer

I have died so little today, friend, forgive me.  ~Thomas Lux

Every man dies.  Not every man really lives.  ~Braveheart

Do not take life too seriously.  You will never get out of it alive.  ~Elbert Hubbard

As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.  ~Zachary Scott

Spend the afternoon.  You can't take it with you.  ~Annie Dillard

Dream as if you'll live forever.  Live as if you'll die today.  ~James Dean

Why always "not yet"?  Do flowers in spring say "not yet"?  ~Norman Douglas

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.  ~Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden, 1854

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.  ~Stephen Vincent Benét

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count.  It's the life in your years.  ~Abraham Lincoln

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.  ~George Santayana, "War Shrines," Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life.  But there was always some obstacle in the way.  Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid.  Then life would begin.  At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.  ~Fr. Alfred D'Souza

Time! where didst thou those years inter
Which I have seene decease?
~William Habington

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.  ~Scottish Proverb

I'm less interested in why we're here.  I'm wholly devoted to while we're here.  ~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com

To always be intending to live a new life, but never find time to set about it - this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking from one day to another till he be starved and destroyed.  ~Walter Scott

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.  ~John Burroughs

Never forget that you must die; that death will come sooner than you expect... God has written the letters of death upon your hands.  In the inside of your hands you will see the letters M.M.  It means "Memento Mori" - remember you must die.  ~J. Furniss, Tracts for Spiritual Reading

There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.  ~Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

To change one's life:  Start immediately.  Do it flamboyantly.  No exceptions.  ~William James

Why must conversions always come so late?  Why do people always apologize to corpses?  ~David Brin

A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he has lost no time.  ~Francis Bacon, Essays

You will never find time for anything.  If you want time you must make it.  ~Charles Buxton

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.  ~Margaret Fuller

Death twitches my ear.  "Live," he says, "I am coming."  ~Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), Minor Poems, Copa

He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.  ~Sydney Smith

Fear not that life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.  ~John Henry Cardinal Newman

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.  ~Ruth E. Renkl

You may delay, but time will not.  ~Benjamin Franklin

We cannot waste time.  We can only waste ourselves.  ~George M. Adams

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.  ~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.  ~Bernard Berenson

I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.  ~Tagore

Many people die with their music still in them.  Why is this so?  Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live.  Before they know it, time runs out.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Contemplation often makes life miserable.  We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.  ~Nicolas de Chamfort

I held a moment in my hand, brilliant as a star, fragile as a flower, a tiny sliver of one hour.  I dripped it carelessly, Ah!  I didn't know, I held opportunity.  ~Hazel Lee

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may;
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
~Robert Herrick

We die daily.  Happy those who daily come to life as well.  ~George MacDonald

Most of us spend our lives as if we had another one in the bank.  ~Ben Irwin

If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.  ~Larry McMurtry, Some Can Whistle

Minutes are worth more than money.  Spend them wisely.  ~Thomas P. Murphy

When your life flashes before your eyes, make sure you've got plenty to watch.  ~Author unknown, from a television commercial

Begin doing what you want to do now.  We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand, and melting like a snowflake.  ~Marie Ray

I try to treat each evening and weekend as little slices of retirement because no one is guaranteed a lengthy one at the end of their career.  ~Mike Hammar

One can make a day of any size.  ~John Muir

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed.  So it is with Time in one's life.  ~Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927

Don't put off your happy life.  ~Author Unknown

Our time consumes like smoke, and posts away;
Nor can we treasure up a month or day:
The sand within the transitory glass
Doth haste, and so our silent minutes pass.
~Rowland Watkyns

If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.  ~Edmund Wilson

The more side roads you stop to explore, the less likely that life will pass you by.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

...Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day" (poem)

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.  ~Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.  ~Arthur Miller, After the Fall, 1964

What to do with your one life?  The same thing you would do if you had two lives, and this were the second.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out.  That is what it is for.  Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.  ~George Bernard Shaw

The clock talked loud.  I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.  ~Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle

Time is like the wind
That comes in the morning
With a barely palpable caress of the cheek
Rising to a comfortable caress
In its measured passage of the day
Until it rises a sudden gale
Revealing the irrevocability of its power
Trembling our browning leaves
And blowing them to our finality.
~Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me, www.originals.net

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it.  If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.  ~Jean Cocteau

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced.  Live your life in such a manner that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.  ~Indian Saying

Warning:  Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear.  ~Author Unknown

Each day is an opportunity to travel back into tomorrow's past and change it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got.  ~Art Buchwald

If you woke up breathing, congratulations!  You have another chance.  ~Andrea Boydston

though love be a day and life be nothing, it shall not stop kissing.  ~e.e. cummings

There are many To-morrows, my Love, my Love, -
There is only one To-day.
~Joaquin Miller

Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do?  Back off and take its picture.  ~Russell Baker

Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life's a short summer, man a flower;
He dies - alas! how soon he dies!
~Samuel Johnson

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

To-morrow - oh, 'twill never be,
If we should live a thousand years!
Our time is all to-day, to-day,
The same, though changed; and while it flies
With still small voice the moments say:
"To-day, to-day, be wise, be wise."
~James Montgomery, To-day

I admire the man who exclaimed, "I have lost a day!" because he had neglected to do any good in the course of it.... ~Author unknown, "Flowers of Literature," 1803

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it.  I want to have lived the width of it as well.  ~Diane Ackerman

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.  ~Dion Boucicault

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say?  And why are you waiting?  ~Stephen Levine

Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy?  Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic?  Am I to concern myself with an allotment of days I never had and was never promised?  Must I check off each day of my life as if I am subtracting from this imaginary hoard?  No, on the contrary, I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived.  And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The fear of death follows from the fear of life.  A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.  ~Mark Twain

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Remember you must die whether you sit about moping all day long or whether on feast days you stretch out in a green field, happy with a bottle of Falernian from your innermost cellar.  ~Horace

Time wears all his locks before;
Take thy hold upon his forehead;
When he flies, he turns no more,
And behind his scalp is naked.

~Robert Southwell

Who knows whether the gods will add tomorrow to the present hour?  ~Horace

Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take time by the forelock; for, when it is once past, there is no recalling it.  ~Jonathan Swift

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.  ~William Hazlitt, On the Love of Life, 1815

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.  ~Jean de La Bruyère

Is there life before death?  ~Author Unknown

It's a mere moment in a man's life between an All-Star Game and an Old-timers' Game.  ~Vin Scully

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
~William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1600

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.  ~Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom and Destiny, 1901, translated by Alfred Sutro

If you could travel back in time to the present moment, what would you do differently?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When it comes time to die, make sure all you got to do is die.  ~Attributed to Jim Elliot

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.  ~Henry James

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.  ~Samuel Johnson

Every day you are alive is a special occasion.  Every minute, every breath, is a gift from God.  ~Mary Manin Morrissey

Eventually you realize that your whole life up to now has been preparation, and you begin to suspect that the rest might be preparation, too.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Expect an early death - it will keep you busier.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Fields can lie fallow, but we can't; we have less time.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

No! no arresting the vast wheel of time,
That round and round still turns with onward might.
~Charles Cowden Clarke

Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending.  ~Author Unknown

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

The question for each man is not what he would do if he had the means, time, influence, and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has.  ~Hamilton

May you live all the days of your life.  ~Jonathan Swift

Now is the time to get drunk!  To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk - on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.  ~Charles Baudelaire, "Enivrez-vous," Paris Spleen, 1869

Live as you will wish to have lived when you are dying.  ~Christian Furchtegott Gellert

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.  ~Samuel Johnson

The swift years slip and slide adown the steep;
The slow years pass; neither will come again.
~William Sharp

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.  I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.  ~Jack London

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

Later never exists.  ~Author Unknown

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.  ~Johann von Goethe

If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand.  ~Righteous Brothers, "Rock & Roll Heaven"

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
~Emily Dickinson

Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.  ~Mark Twain

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.  ~Allen Saunders, 1957

The value of moments, when cast up, is immense, if well employed; if thrown away, their loss is irrevocable.  ~Lord Chesterfield

Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity.  Waste not the smallest time in imbecile infirmity, for well thou knowest that seconds form eternity.  ~E. Knight

Lost time is never found again.  ~Benjamin Franklin

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds left undone.  ~Harriet Beecher Stowe, Little Foxes, 1865

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.  ~William Shakespeare

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop to look around once in a while you could miss it.  ~From the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Many a man gets weary of clamping down on his rough impulses, which if given occasional release would encourage the living of life with salt in it, in place of dust.  ~Henry S. Haskins

Every second is of infinite value.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We are always getting ready to live but never living.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.  ~George F. Will

We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.  ~Jean Paul Sartre, Situations, 1939

Time goes, you say?  Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.
~Henry Austin Dobson

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.  ~Sydney J. Harris

No man is quick enough to enjoy life to the full.  ~Spanish Proverb

How did it get so late so soon?
It's night before it's afternoon.
December is here before it's June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?
~Dr. Seuss

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.  ~Hector Berlioz

Waste your money and you're only out of money, but waste your time and you've lost a part of your life.  ~Michael Leboeuf

You don't get to choose how you're going to die.  Or when.  You can only decide how you're going to live.  Now.  ~Joan Baez

The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.  ~Helen Rowland

Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours should not be numbered by years, days, and hours.  ~Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, 1578

You only live once; but if you live it right, once is enough.  ~Adam Marshall

Life, if well lived, is long enough.  ~Seneca, De Ira

There are but three events in a man's life:  birth, life, and death.  He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.  ~Jean de la Bruyère

What a folly to dread the thought of throwing away life at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.  ~John Howe

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Tis better to buy a small bouquet
And give to your friend this very day,
Than a bushel of roses white and red
To lay on his coffin after he's dead.
~Author Unknown

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.  ~Author unknown, sometimes attributed to W.M. Lewis

All the windows of my heart I open to the day.  ~John Greenleaf Whittier

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Each day comes bearing its own gifts.  Untie the ribbons.  ~Ruth Ann Schabacker

Present your family and friends with their eulogies now - they won't be able to hear how much you love them and appreciate them from the grave.  ~Anonymous

The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours.  No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen.  And the fact that it practically always doesn't, matters not a jot.  The possibility is always there.  ~Monica Baldwin

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.  ~Japanese Proverb

When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence?  The summer of a dormouse.  ~Lord Byron

Don't ever save anything for a special occasion.  Being alive is the special occasion.  ~Author Unknown

It is impossible to keep a straight face in the presence of one or more kittens.  ~Cynthia E. Varnado

In order to keep a true perspective of one's importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.  ~Dereke Bruce

There are few things in life more heartwarming than to be welcomed by a cat.  ~Tay Hohoff

If cats could talk, they wouldn't.  ~Nan Porter

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life - music and cats.  ~Albert Schweitzer

A catless writer is almost inconceivable.  It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.  ~Barbara Holland

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.  ~Mark Twain

Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.  ~Joseph Wood Krutch

The cat could very well be man's best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.  ~Doug Larson

There is something about the presence of a cat... that seems to take the bite out of being alone.  ~Louis J. Camuti

As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat.  ~Ellen Perry Berkeley

The problem with cats is that they get the exact same look on their face whether they see a moth or an axe-murderer.  ~Paula Poundstone

Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause most inconvenience.  ~Pam Brown

After scolding one's cat one looks into its face and is seized by the ugly suspicion that it understood every word.  And has filed it for reference.  ~Charlotte Gray

A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.  ~William Ralph Inge

The reason cats climb is so that they can look down on almost every other animal - it's also the reason they hate birds.  ~K.C. Buffington

A cat is an example of sophistication minus civilization.  ~Author Unknown

There has never been a cat
Who couldn't calm me down
By walking slowly
Past my chair.
~Rod McKuen

Your cat will never threaten your popularity by barking at three in the morning.  He won't attack the mailman or eat the drapes, although he may climb the drapes to see how the room looks from the ceiling.  ~Helen Powers

Cats do care.  For example they know instinctively what time we have to be at work in the morning and they wake us up twenty minutes before the alarm goes off.  ~Michael Nelson

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?  ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1580

Kittens are born with their eyes shut.  They open them in about six days, take a look around, then close them again for the better part of their lives.  ~Stephen Baker

I had been told that the training procedure with cats was difficult.  It's not.  Mine had me trained in two days.  ~Bill Dana

If there is one spot of sun spilling onto the floor, a cat will find it and soak it up.  ~J.A. McIntosh

No amount of time can erase the memory of a good cat, and no amount of masking tape can ever totally remove his fur from your couch.  ~Leo Dworken

It doesn't do to be sentimental about cats; the best ones don't respect you for it.  ~Susan Howatch

A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem.  ~Jean Burden

The cat is the only animal without visible means of support who still manages to find a living in the city.  ~Carl van Vechten

There's no need for a piece of sculpture in a home that has a cat.  ~Wesley Bates

If the pull of the outside world is strong, there is also a pull towards the human.  The cat may disappear on its own errands, but sooner or later, it returns once again for a little while, to greet us with its own type of love.  ~Lloyd Alexander

One is never sure, watching two cats washing each other, whether it's affection, the taste, or a trial run for the jugular.  ~Helen Thomson

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth.  A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.  ~Jules Verne

A cat pours his body on the floor like water.  ~William Lyon Phelps

There is no more intrepid explorer than a kitten.  ~Jules Champfleury

A cat improves the garden wall in sunshine, and the hearth in foul weather.  ~Judith Merkle Riley

A cat's got her own opinion of human beings.  She don't say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the whole of it.  ~Jerome K. Jerome

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.  ~Edgar Allan Poe

The cat seldom interferes with other people's rights.  His intelligence keeps him from doing many of the fool things that complicate life.  ~Carl Van Vechten

Cats come and go without ever leaving.  ~Martha Curtis

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.  ~Joseph Wood Krutch

You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.  ~Proverb

The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.  ~Jules Reynard

Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you later.  ~Mary Bly

The cat is the only animal which accepts the comforts but rejects the bondage of domesticity.  ~Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.  ~Italo Calvino

If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.  ~Lemony Snicket

My cat speaks sign language with her tail.  ~Robert A. Stern

Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel.  True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.  ~Missy Dizick

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.  ~Terry Pratchett

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.  ~Robertson Davies

The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends.  ~Saki

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.  ~Garrison Keillor

Most cats, when they are Out want to be In, and vice versa, and often simultaneously.  ~Louis J. Camuti

Kittens believe that all nature is occupied with their diversion.  ~F.A. Paradis de Moncrif

What greater gift than the love of a cat?  ~Charles Dickens

Before a cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem
Is needed, like a dish of cream.
~T.S. Eliot

People that hate cats will come back as mice in their next life.  ~Faith Resnick

Most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness.  I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked about the house with a saintly expression.  ~Beverly Nichols

Kittens are angels with whiskers.  ~Author Unknown

Even if you have just destroyed a Ming Vase, purr.  Usually all will be forgiven.  ~Lenny Rubenstein

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat.  You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.  Do you understand this?  And radio operates exactly the same way:  you send signals here, they receive them there.  The only difference is that there is no cat.  ~Albert Einstein

Purring would seem to be, in her case, an automatic safety valve device for dealing with happiness overflow.  ~Monica Edwards

It is in the nature of cats to do a certain amount of unescorted roaming.  ~Adlai Stevenson

A cat bitten once by a snake dreads even rope.  ~Arab Proverb

Cats have intercepted my footsteps at the ankle for so long that my gait, both at home and on tour, has been compared to that of a man wading through low surf.  ~Roy Blount, Jr.

Like a graceful vase, a cat, even when motionless, seems to flow.  ~George F. Will

You own a dog but you feed a cat.  ~Jenny de Vries

Everything I know I learned from my cat:  When you're hungry, eat.  When you're tired, nap in a sunbeam.  When you go to the vet's, pee on your owner.  ~Gary Smith

Sometimes he curls up on my pillow during the night and I don't know he's there until I yawn and my mouth closes on a whisker.  ~Astrid Alauda

A cat isn't fussy - just so long as you remember he likes his milk in the shallow, rose-patterned saucer and his fish on the blue plate.  From which he will take it, and eat it off the floor.  ~Arthur Bridges

There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.  ~Author Unknown

Kittens can happen to anyone.  ~Paul Gallico

It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating little friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.  ~Agnes Repplier

No heaven will not ever Heaven be
Unless my cats are there to welcome me.
~Author Unknown

The cat is the animal to whom the Creator gave the biggest eye, the softest fur, the most supremely delicate nostrils, a mobile ear, an unrivaled paw and a curved claw borrowed from the rose-tree.  ~Colette

A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.  ~Joseph Epstein

Cats conspire to keep us at arm's length.  ~Frank Perkins

I have studied many philosophers and many cats.  The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.  ~Hippolyte Taine

There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.  ~Dan Greenberg

Although all cat games have their rules and rituals, these vary with the individual player.  The cat, of course, never breaks a rule.  If it does not follow precedent, that simply means it has created a new rule and it is up to you to learn it quickly if you want the game to continue.  ~Sidney Denham

People who love cats have some of the biggest hearts around.  ~Susan Easterly

Prowling his own quiet backyard or asleep by the fire, he is still only a whisker away from the wilds.  ~Jean Burden

The trouble with a kitten is that
Eventually it becomes a cat.
~Ogden Nash

Cats can be cooperative when something feels good, which, to a cat, is the way everything is supposed to feel as much of the time as possible.  ~Roger Caras

The man who carries a cat by the tail learns something that can be learned in no other way.  ~Mark Twain

When you're used to hearing purring and suddenly it's gone, it's hard to silence the blaring sound of sadness.  ~Missy Altijd

Any conditioned cat-hater can be won over by any cat who chooses to make the effort.  ~Paul Corey

Keep an eye on the cat and another on the frying pan.  ~Proverb

Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance.  ~Dan Greenburg

Psychologists now recognize that the need in some people to have a dozen cats is really a sublimated desire to have two dozen cats.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It always gives me a shiver when I see a cat seeing what I can't see.  ~Eleanor Farjeon

Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges.  Cats have the courage to live by them.  ~Jim Davis

Cats speak a subtle language in which few sounds carry many meanings, depending on how they are sung or purred.  "Mnrhnh" means comfortable soft chairs.  It also means fish.  It means genial companionship... and the absence of dogs.  ~Val Schaffner

People that don't like cats haven't met the right one yet.  ~Deborah A. Edwards

Another cat?  Perhaps.  For love there is also a season; its seeds must be resown.  But a family cat is not replaceable like a wornout coat or a set of tires.  Each new kitten becomes its own cat, and none is repeated.  I am four cats old, measuring out my life in friends that have succeeded but not replaced one another.  ~Irving Townsend

I love cats because I love my home and after a while they become its visible soul.  ~Jean Cocteau

By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.  ~Barbara Holland

You cannot look at a sleeping cat and feel tense.  ~Jane Pauley

If by chance I seated myself to write, she very slyly, very tenderly, seeking protection and caresses, would softly take her place on my knee and follow the comings and goings of my pen -sometimes effacing, with an unintentional stroke of her paw, lines of whose tenor she disapproved.  ~Pierre Loti

You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.  ~George Mikes

If he is comic, it is only because of the incongruity of so demure a look and so wild a heart.  ~Alan Devoe

To err is human, to purr is feline.  ~Robert Byrne

Cat lovers can readily be identified.  Their clothes always look old and well used.  Their sheets look like bath towels and their bath towels look like a collection of knitting mistakes.  ~Eric Gurney

The cat loves fish, but she's loath to wet her feet.  ~Proverb

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail?  If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don't think it is so much the actual bath that most cats dislike; I think it's the fact that they have to spend a good part of the day putting their hair back in place.  ~Debbie Peterson

The way to keep a cat is to try to chase it away.  ~E.W. Howe

Those who play with cats must expect to be scratched.  ~Proverb

To bathe a cat takes brute force, perseverance, courage of conviction - and a cat.  The last ingredient is usually hardest to come by.  ~Stephen Baker

Cats are the ultimate narcissists.  You can tell this because of all the time they spend on personal grooming.  Dogs aren't like this.  A dog's idea of personal grooming is to roll on a dead fish.  ~James Gorman

Cats are smarter than dogs.  You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.  ~Jeff Valdez

Cats as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by that fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods.  ~P.G. Wodehouse

Some people say man is the most dangerous animal on the planet.  Obviously those people have never met an angry cat.  ~Lillian Johnson

Time spent with cats is never wasted.  ~May Sarton

A cat is a lion in a jungle of small bushes.  ~Indian Proverb

People meeting for the first time suddenly relax if they find they both have cats.  And plunge into anecdote.  ~Charlotte Gray

Any household with at least one feline member has no need for an alarm clock.  ~Louise A. Belcher

Who would believe such pleasure from a wee ball o' fur?  ~Irish Saying

Dogs have owners, cats have staff.  ~Author Unknown

One must love a cat on its own terms.  ~Paul Gray

The sun rose slowly, like a fiery furball coughed up uneasily onto a sky-blue carpet by a giant unseen cat.  ~Michael McGarel

A kitten is the most irresistible comedian in the world.  Its wide-open eyes gleam with wonder and mirth.  It darts madly at nothing at all, and then, as though suddenly checked in the pursuit, prances sideways on its hind legs with ridiculous agility and zeal.  ~Agnes Repplier

Dogs eat.  Cats dine.  ~Ann Taylor

She clawed her way into my heart and wouldn't let go.  ~Missy Altijd

Of all the toys available, none is better designed than the owner himself.  A large multipurpose plaything, its parts can be made to move in almost any direction.  It comes completely assembled, and it makes a sound when you jump on it.  ~Stephen Baker

No matter how much the cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I enjoy many silent moments with my cat, a conversation always resumed exactly where left off.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The dog may be wonderful prose, but only the cat is poetry.  ~French Proverb

The cat has always been associated with the moon.  Like the moon it comes to life at night, escaping from humanity and wandering over housetops with its eyes beaming out through the darkness.  ~Patricia Dale-Green

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.  ~Mark Twain

Cats never strike a pose that isn't photogenic.  ~Lillian Jackson Braun

Who hath a better friend than a cat?  ~William Hardwin

Nobody who is not prepared to spoil cats will get from them the reward they are able to give to those who do spoil them.  ~Compton MacKenzie

A cat is a puzzle for which there is no solution.  ~Hazel Nicholson

Always the cat remains a little beyond the limits we try to set for him in our blind folly.  ~Andre Norton

When a cat chooses to be friendly, it's a big deal, because a cat is picky.  ~Mike Deupree

He liked companionship, but he wouldn't be petted, or fussed over, or sit in anyone's lap a moment; he always extricated himself from such familiarity with dignity and with no show of temper.  If there was any petting to be done, however, he chose to do it.  Often he would sit looking at me, and then, moved by a delicate affection, come and pull at my coat and sleeve until he could touch my face with his nose, and then go away contented.  ~Charles Dudley Warner

Even overweight, cats instinctively know the cardinal rule:  when fat, arrange yourself in slim poses.  ~John Weitz

In the middle of a world that had always been a bit mad, the cat walks with confidence.  ~Rosanne Amberson

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.  ~Colette

The cat does not offer services.  The cat offers itself.  Of course he wants care and shelter.  You don't buy love for nothing.  Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.  ~William S. Burroughs

One cat just leads to another.  ~Ernest Hemingway

Women, poets, and especially artists, like cats; delicate natures only can realize their sensitive systems.  ~Helen M. Winslow

Most beds sleep up to six cats.  Ten cats without the owner.  ~Stephen Baker

A cat is a tiger that is fed by hand.  ~Proverb

I put down my book, The Meaning of Zen, and see the cat smiling into her fur as she delicately combs it with her rough pink tongue.  "Cat, I would lend you this book to study but it appears you have already read it."  She looks up and gives me her full gaze.  "Don't be ridiculous," she purrs, "I wrote it."  ~Dilys Laing, "Miao"

Who among us hasn't envied a cat's ability to ignore the cares of daily life and to relax completely?  ~Karen Brademeyer

Cats only pretend to be domesticated if they think there's a bowl of milk in it for them.  ~Robin Williams

Every dog has his day - but the nights are reserved for the cats.  ~Author Unknown

A kitten is so flexible that she is almost double; the hind parts are equivalent to another kitten with which the forepart plays.  She does not discover that her tail belongs to her until you tread on it.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Your cat may never have to hunt farther than the kitchen counter for its supper nor face a predator more fierce than the vacuum cleaner.  ~Barbara L. Diamond

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.  ~Mark Twain

A meow massages the heart.  ~Stuart McMillan

The domestic cat seems to have greater confidence in itself than in anyone else.  ~Lawrence N. Johnson

If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have.  Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy.  It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite pet.  People like pets to possess the same qualities they do.  Cats are irresponsible and recognize no authority, yet are completely dependent on others for their material needs.  Cats cannot be made to do anything useful.  Cats are mean for the fun of it.  In fact, cats possess so many of the same qualities as some people (expensive girlfriends, for instance) that it's often hard to tell the people and the cats apart.  ~P.J. O'Rourke, Modern Manners

It's really the cat's house - we just pay the mortgage.  ~Author Unknown

Cats are notoriously sore losers.  Coming in second best, especially to someone as poorly coordinated as a human being, grates their sensibility.  ~Stephen Baker

Does the father figure in your cat's life ever clean the litter box?  My husband claims that men lack the scooping gene.  ~Barbara L. Diamond

Some people have cats and go on to lead normal lives.  ~Author Unknown

Cats have an infallible understanding of total concentration - and get between you and it.  ~Arthur Bridges

Four little Persians, but only one looked in my direction.  I extended a tentative finger and two soft paws clung to it.  There was a contented sound of purring, I suspect on both our parts.  ~George Freedley

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid.  She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.  ~Mark Twain

I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food which they take for granted, but his or her entertainment value.  ~Author Unknown

It is remarkable, in cats, that the outer life they reveal to their masters is one of perpetual boredom.  ~Robley Wilson, Jr.

The smart cat doesn't let on that he is.  ~H.G. Frommer

If I called her she would pretend not to hear, but would come a few moments later when it could appear that she had thought of doing so first.  ~Arthur Weigall

I am as vigilant as a cat to steal cream.  ~William Shakespeare, Henry IV

If we treated everyone we meet with the same affection we bestow upon our favorite cat, they, too, would purr.  ~Martin Buxbaum

The cat was created when the lion sneezed.  ~Arabian Proverb

The cat is above all things, a dramatist.  ~Margaret Benson

Meow is like aloha - it can mean anything.  ~Hank Ketchum

An ordinary kitten will ask more questions than any five year old.  ~Carl Van Vechten

Cats were put into the world to disprove the dogma that all things were created to serve man.  ~Paul Gray

If the claws didn't retract, cats would be like Velcro.  ~Bruce Fogle

A cat determined not to be found can fold itself up like a pocket handkerchief if it wants to.  ~Louis J. Camuti

Most cats do not approach humans recklessly.  The possibility of concealed weapons, clods or sticks, tend to make them reserved.  Homeless cats in particular - with some justification, unfortunately - consider humans their natural enemies.  Much ceremony must be observed, and a number of diplomatic feelers put out, before establishing a state of truce.  ~Lloyd Alexander

God made the cat in order that man might have the pleasure of caressing the lion.  ~Fernand Mery

Cats are smarter than dogs.  You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.  ~Jeff Valdez

If only cats grew into kittens.  ~R. Stern

If there were to be a universal sound depicting peace, I would surely vote for the purr.  ~Barbara L. Diamond



We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.  ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859


The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.  ~Henry Steele Commager


The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.  ~Tommy Smothers


Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself.  It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.  ~Potter Stewart


We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.  ~Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764


The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.  ~Walt Whitman


Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.  ~Voltaire


I am thankful for all the complaining I hear about our government because it means we have freedom of speech.  ~Nancie J. Carmody


The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.  If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:  if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.  ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859


Books won't stay banned.  They won't burn.  Ideas won't go to jail.  In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.  The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.  ~Alfred Whitney Griswold, New York Times, 24 February 1959


Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.  ~Abbott Joseph Liebling, "Do You Belong in Journalism?" New Yorker, 4 May 1960


A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.  ~Albert Camus


To reject the word is to reject the human search.  ~Max Lerner, 1953, on book purging


Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.  ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935


What progress we are making.  In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.  Now they are content with burning my books.  ~Sigmund Freud, 1933


Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.  ~Heinrich Heine, Almansor, 1823


Every burned book enlightens the world.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


The paper burns, but the words fly away.  ~Akiba ben Joseph


Did you ever hear anyone say, "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?" ~Joseph Henry Jackson


If you don't have this freedom of the press, then all these little fellows are weaseling around and doing their monkey business and they never get caught.  ~Harold R. Medina


Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture.  ~Theodore Schroeder


Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.  ~George Bernard Shaw, "The Rejected Statement, Part I," The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, 1911


I believe in censorship.  I made a fortune out of it.  ~Mae West


Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.  ~Dick Cavett


The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.  ~David Ben-Gurion


If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.  ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859


To choose a good book, look in an inquisitors prohibited list.  ~John Aikin


To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.  ~Claude-Adrien Helvétius


Censorship offends me.  ~Author Unknown


We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values.  For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.  ~John F. Kennedy


God forbid that any book should be banned.  The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.  ~Rebecca West


If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.  ~Noam Chomsky


Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government."  ~Lenny Bruce


Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him.  It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!  ~Thomas Carlyle


Books won't stay banned -
Ideas won't go to jail.
~Alfred Whitney Griswold


You can cage the singer but not the song.  ~Harry Belafonte, in International Herald Tribune, 3 October 1988


I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.  ~Evelyn Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire, 1906, a description of Voltaire's attitude, commonly misattributed to Voltaire, the closest of his documented sentiments being "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write." in a 1770 letter (Thanks, Toby & Bill)


The populist authoritarianism that is the downside of political correctness means that anyone, sometimes it seems like everyone, can proclaim their grief and have it acknowledged.  The victim culture, every sufferer grassockg for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship.  And censorship, that by-product of fear - stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others - must surely be resisted.  ~Jonathon Green, "Did You Say 'Offensive?'," as posted on wordwizard.com





ROOT CHAKRA
Muladhara, 1st Chakra


A trembling in the bones may carry a more convincing testimony than the dry documented deductions of the brain.  ~Llewelyn Powers


There is deep wisdom within our very flesh, if we can only come to our senses and feel it.  ~Elizabeth A. Behnke


I think we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack.  We give it orders which make no sense.  ~Henry Miller


Every man is the builder of a Temple called his body, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead.  ~Henry David Thoreau


The body never lies.  ~Martha Graham


What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.  ~Aldous Huxley


Surely a man needs a closed place wherein he may strike root and, like the seed, become.  But also he needs the great Milky Way above him and the vast sea spaces, though neither stars nor ocean serve his daily needs.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert


To fear is one thing.  To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.  ~Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I Loved 


And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.  ~Confucius



SACRAL CHAKRA
Svadhisthana, 2nd Chakra


To give vent now and then to his feelings, whether of pleasure or discontent, is a great ease to a man's heart.  ~Francesco Guicciardini


Trust only movement.  Life happens at the level of events, not of words.  Trust movement.  ~Alfred Adler


Let's not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.  ~Vincent Van Gogh, 1889


What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh.  ~Henry Fielding


Sex is emotion in motion.  ~Mae West


Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
~John Donne, Extasy


Emotion always has its roots in the unconscious and manifests itself in the body.  ~Irene Claremont de Castillejo


The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.  ~D.H. Lawrence


The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music.  Bodies never lie.  ~Agnes de Mille


Movement never lies.  It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather.  ~Martha Graham


Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.  ~Carl G. Jung


Socrates learned to dance when he was seventy because he felt that an essential part of himself had been neglected.  ~Source Unknown


Movement is a medicine for creating change in a person's physical, emotional, and mental states.  ~Carol Welch


Never apologize for showing feeling.  When you do so, you apologize for the truth.  ~Benjamin Disraeli



SOLAR PLEXUS CHAKRA
Manipura, 3rd Chakra


No man is free who is not a master of himself.  ~Epictetus


They are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.  ~Christian Bovee


What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.  ~Henry S. Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street, 1940, commonly misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven.
~William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well


It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.  ~Edmund Hillary






Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.  ~Epicurus


I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.  ~Louisa May Alcott


Chiefly the mold of a man's fortune is in his own hands.  ~Francis Bacon


Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.  ~Eleanor Roosevelt


It's not who you are that holds you back, it's who you think you're not.  ~Author Unknown


The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.  ~Lady Bird Johnson


Whether you think you can or think you can't - you are right.  ~Henry Ford


Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Put your future in good hands - your own.  ~Author Unknown


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 light from within.  ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross


The words "I am" are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to.  The thing you're claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.  ~A.L. Kitselman


Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.  ~Anaïs Nin, Diary, 1969


You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.  ~Michael Jordan


If you doubt yourself, then indeed you stand on shaky ground.  ~Henrik Ibsen


Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.  ~Michel de Montaigne


If I am not for myself, who will be?  ~Pirke Avoth


Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.  ~Henry Van Dyke, The Prison and the Angel


The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.  No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.  ~The Sickness Unto Death


We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is civil war.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


A wise man never loses anything if he have himself.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated


Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him.  Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be.  Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate.  Everyone has it within his power to say, "This I am today; that I will be tomorrow."  ~Louis L'Amour


Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and apply myself to them, if they will not apply themselves to me.  ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1588


I am,
indeed,
a king,
because I know how
to rule myself.
~Pietro Aretino, 10 May 1537


Don't compromise yourself.  You're all you've got.  ~Janis Joplin


The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.  ~Richard Grant


He who knows others is learned;
He who knows himself is wise.
~Lao-tzu, Tao te Ching


Every man is the architect of his own fortune.  ~Sallust


Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.  ~Seneca


Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.  ~Shakti Gawain


You must have control of the authorship of your own destiny.  The pen that writes your life story must be held in your own hand.  ~Irene C. Kassorla


Life is the sum of all your choices.  ~Albert Camus



HEART CHAKRA
Anahata, 4th Chakra


When your heart speaks, take good notes.  ~Judith Campbell


Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.  ~William Shakespeare


The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670


If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion.  ~Dalai Lama


If you haven't any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.  ~Bob Hope


Kindness is the greatest wisdom.  ~Author Unknown


The first and highest law must be the love of man to man.  Homo homini Deus est - this is the supreme practical maxim, this is the turning point of the world's History.  ~Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity


The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience.  Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around.... Throughout history, "tender loving care" has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.  ~Larry Dossey


The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.  ~Mother Teresa


Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595


Who, being loved, is poor?  ~Oscar Wilde


A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it.  ~Frank A. Clark


Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.  ~Jean Anouilh


Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.  ~Henry Van Dyke


A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasnt put there to stay -
Love isnt love
'Til you give it away.
~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, "You Are Sixteen (Reprise)"
(Thanks, Krystel)


It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.  ~John Bulwer


Love never reasons but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles lest it has done too little.  ~Hannah More


Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.  ~Zora Neale Hurston


Love is the poetry of the senses.  ~Honoré de Balzac


A man is not where he lives, but where he loves.  ~Latin Proverb


What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.  ~William Carlos Williams


Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up.  ~Jesse Jackson


It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.  ~Author Unknown


Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.  ~Mark Twain


Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.  ~Seneca


There is one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life - reciprocity.  ~Confucius


How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong.  Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.  ~George Washington Carver


You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.  ~John Wooden


If those who owe us nothing gave us nothing, how poor we would be.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.  ~Leo Buscaglia


A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses.  ~Chinese Proverb


Open your heart - open it wide; someone is standing outside.  ~Quoted in Believe: A Christmas Treasury by Mary Engelbreit


Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight.  Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward.  Your life will never be the same again.  ~Og Mandino


I expect to pass through life but once.  If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.  ~William Penn



THROAT CHAKRA
Vishudha, 5th Chakra


No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.  ~Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907


To speak and to speak well are two things.  A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.  ~Ben Jonson


The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.  ~Winston Churchill


The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music.  Bodies never lie.  ~Agnes de Mille


There is in a man an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it.  If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground round it into a swamp.  ~Mark Rutherford (William Hale White), More Pages from a Journal, 1910


We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.  ~Epictetus


Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hands on the strings to stop their vibration as in twanging them to bring out their music.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't being said.  ~Author Unknown


Keep your words soft and tender because tomorrow you may have to eat them.  ~Author Unknown


Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.  ~William Wordsworth


To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make.  ~Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967


If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.  ~Lord Byron


Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.  The chasm is never completely bridged.  We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer


Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.  ~Etty Hillesum, quoted in Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die by Karol Jackowski


A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.  ~Ethel Wilson


Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.  ~Theodore Dreiser, 1900


Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke


Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.  ~Amy Lowell


I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.  ~Georgia O'Keeffe


Art is your personal diary where you may color your thoughts and emotions on a page.  ~Sara, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999


If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.  ~Mark Twain


The truth needs so little rehearsal.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams



BROW CHAKRA
Ajna, 6th Chakra


We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us.  But there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.  ~Oliver Sacks


It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Trust yourself.  You know more than you think you do.  ~Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 1977


Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.  ~Florence Scovel Shinn


Reasoning at every step he treads,
Man yet mistakes his way,
Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads,
Are rarely known to stray.
~William Cowper


There is a wisdom of the head, and... a wisdom of the heart.  ~Charles Dickens


The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.  ~John Locke, 16 May 1699


Trust your own instinct.  Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.  ~Billy Wilder


Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.  ~Michael Burke


Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.  ~John Sterling


Trust your hunches.  They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.  ~Joyce Brothers


Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.  ~Theodore Geisel



CROWN CHAKRA
Sahasrara, 7th Chakra


Beyond my body my veins are invisible.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet


It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts.  ~K.T. Jong


It is a puzzling thing.  The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away.  Puzzling.  ~Robert M. Pirsig


God, why do I storm heaven for answers that are already in my heart?  Every grace I need has already been given me.  Oh, lead me to the Beyond within.  ~Macrina Wieherkehr


There are joys which long to be ours.  God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.  ~Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun


Not all those who wander are lost.  ~J.R.R. Tolkien


We can be Knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.  ~Michel de Montaigne


Wisdom begins at the end.  ~Daniel Webster


Patience is the companion of wisdom.  ~St. Augustine


Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.  ~Josh Billings


There is no god higher than truth.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


Before enlightenment - chop wood, carry water.  After enlightenment - chop wood, carry water.  ~Zen Buddhist Proverb



BALANCE, BODY, & HEALTH


Our bodies are our gardens - our wills are our gardeners.  ~William Shakespeare


What fools indeed we morals are
To lavish care upon a Car,
With ne'er a bit of time to see
About our own machinery!
~John Kendrick Bangs


Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.  ~Henry David Thoreau


The... patient should be made to understand that he or she must take charge of his own life.  Don't take your body to the doctor as if he were a repair shop.  ~Quentin Regestein


Health is a large word.  It embraces not the body only, but the mind and spirit as well;... and not today's pain or pleasure alone, but the whole being and outlook of a man.  ~James H. West


Yet this is health:  To have a body functioning so perfectly that when its few simple needs are met it never calls attention to its own existence.  ~Bertha Stuart Dyment


Enough is as good as a feast.  ~English Proverb


Be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance.  ~Epicurus


To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.  ~Confucius, Analects


The human body is a machine which winds its own springs.  ~Julien Offroy de la Mettrie, L'Homme Machine


Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.  ~Aldous Huxley


If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Some patients I see are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds.  ~Zacharty Bercovitz


The best and most efficient pharmacy is within your own system.  ~Robert C. Peale


The greatest wealth is health.  ~Virgil


The best six doctors anywhere
And no one can deny it
Are sunshine, water, rest, and air
Exercise and diet.
These six will gladly you attend
If only you are willing
Your mind they'll ease
Your will they'll mend
And charge you not a shilling.
~Nursery rhyme quoted by Wayne Fields, What the River Knows, 1990


A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book.  ~Irish Proverb


Water, air, and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia.  ~Napoleon


I think you might dispense with half your doctors if you would only consult Dr. Sun more.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene
Supports the mind supports the body too.
~John Armstrong


Life is not merely to be alive, but to be well.  ~Marcus Valerius Martial


He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.  ~Arabian Proverb


Joy and Temperance and Repose
Slam the door on the doctor's nose.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares.  They fatigued only the muscles, we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves.  ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton


No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick


A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.  ~Aesop, Fables


Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.  ~Lao Tzu


He who rejects change is the architect of decay.  The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.  ~Harold Wilson

If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.  ~Mary Engelbreit

It is not necessary to change.  Survival is not mandatory.  ~W. Edwards Deming  (Thanks, Michelle)

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.  ~Anatole France

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.  ~Victor Frankl

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure.  But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it.  Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.  ~Shunryu Suzuki

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.  ~Henry Miller

You must welcome change as the rule but not as your ruler.  ~Denis Waitley

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine.  ~Robert C. Gallagher

If you're in a bad situation, don't worry it'll change.  If you're in a good situation, don't worry it'll change.  ~John A. Simone, Sr.

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse!  As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.  ~Washington Irving

When you are through changing, you are through.  ~Bruce Barton

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.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith

What can we take on trust
in this uncertain life? Happiness, greatness,
pride - nothing is secure, nothing keeps.
~Euripides, Hecuba

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.  ~Confucius

Change always comes bearing gifts.  ~Price Pritchett

The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.  ~Ellen Glasgow

Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril.  ~Laurens van der Post

Growth is the only evidence of life.  ~John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua, 1864

Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.  ~Irene Peter

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.  ~Faith Baldwin

The circumstances of the world are so variable that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one.  ~William H. Seward

The birds are molting.  If only man could molt also - his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions.  ~James Allen

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.  ~William Blake

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mutability"

You can avoid having ulcers by adapting to the situation:  If you fall in the mud puddle, check your pockets for fish.  ~Author Unknown

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.  ~Marcel Proust

Stubborness does have its helpful features.  You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow.  ~Glen Beaman

If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies.  ~Author Unknown

I put a dollar in one of those change machines.  Nothing changed.  ~George Carlin

We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves.  ~Lynn Hall

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.  ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Charles Darwin

Change may come to you in trinkets and I hope it adorns your life gracefully.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.  ~Henri Bergson

The wheel of change moves on, and those who were down go up and those who were up go down.  ~Jawaharlal Nehru

We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
~W.H. Auden

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history.  ~Joan Wallach Scott

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.  ~Ellen Glasgow

Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!  ~Andre Gide

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.  ~Woodrow Wilson

After you've done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully.  After five years, look at it with suspicion.  And after ten years, throw it away and start all over.  ~Alfred Edward Perlman, New York Times, 3 July 1958

Continuity gives us roots; change gives us branches, letting us stretch and grow and reach new heights.  ~Pauline R. Kezer

If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are.  For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained.  Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.  ~Saint Augustine

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.  ~John Steinbeck, America and Americans

A good question is never answered.  It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.  ~John Ciardi

The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.  ~Japanese Proverb

The devil could change.  He was once an angel and may be evolving still.  ~Laurence J. Peter

Nothing that is can pause or stay;
The moon will wax, the moon will wane,
The mist and cloud will turn to rain,
The rain to mist and cloud again,
Tomorrow be today.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.  ~Ezra Pound

Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing.  ~Paul Valery

It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

People don't change.  Only their costumes do.  ~Gene Moore

God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it's me.  ~Author Unknown

We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.  ~Harrison Ford

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.  ~Michel Montaigne

If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.  ~Kurt Lewin

Every single thing changes and is changing always in this world.  Yet with the same light the moon goes on shining.  ~Saigyo

Things do not change; we change.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Our only security is our ability to change.  ~John Lilly

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.  ~Bertold Brecht

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.  ~Francis Bacon, "On Innovation," Essays, 1597

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.  ~Francis Bacon

A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar.  ~Confucius, Analects

Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of the mercury in the barometer, indicates nothing but the changeableness of the weather.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet.  ~Stanislaw Lec

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me.  The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.  ~George Bernard Shaw



"Charm" - which means the power to effect work without employing brute force - is indispensable to women.  Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.  ~Havelock Ellis


Charm is... a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.  ~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956


Modesty is the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.  ~Oliver Herford


Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.  ~Henri Frédéric Amiel


All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.  ~Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise


Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


It's a sort of bloom on a woman.  If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.  ~James Matthew Barrie, What Every Woman Knows, about charm


There is a sort of charm in ugliness, if the person has some redeeming qualities and is only ugly enough.  ~Josh Billings


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


Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others.  ~John Mason Brown


Charisma is a fancy name given to the knack of giving people your full attention.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There is no personal charm so great as the charm of a cheerful temperament.  ~Henry Van Dyke


Forbidden things have a secret charm.  ~Publius Cornelius Tacitus


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




Simply because we do not run across goal lines, slam dunk basketballs, or hit home runs, doesn't mean we can't change the score.  ~Author Unknown


A good cheerleader is not measured by the height of her jumps but by the span of her spirit.  ~Author Unknown


I'm not a cheerleader.  I'm an athletic supporter.  ~Author Unknown


Players:  A vital part of any sporting event, they entertain the crowd in the intervals between timeouts so the cheerleaders can take a well-earned break.  ~Author Unknown


In any other sport, if you miss the catch all you lose is the ball.  ~Author Unknown


Any man can hold a girl's hand, but only the elite can hold her feet.  ~Author Unknown


Cheerleaders are simply a jump above the rest.  ~Author Unknown


If cheerleading got any easier, it would be called football.  ~Author Unknown


There is no halftime for cheerleaders!  ~Author Unknown


The referees have always been blind, it's our job to make them deaf.  ~Author Unknown


If cheerleaders are so easy, why aren't you with one?  ~Author Unknown


Cheerleaders know that pyramids were not built in Egypt.  ~Author Unknown


You know you're a cheerleader when you have to yell, kick, and scream to get what you want.  ~Author Unknown


Flying is the second best thrill to cheerleaders; being caught is the first.  ~Author Unknown


I trade sweat for strength.  I trade doubt for belief.  I trade cheerleading for nothing.  ~Author Unknown


There is only one way to cheer - hard!  ~Author Unknown


One of the great disappointments of a football game is that the cheerleaders never seem to get injured.  ~Author Unknown


Cheerleaders are angels - we're the only humans who can fly.  ~Author Unknown


Cheerleading is more than a sport; it's an attitude.  ~Author Unknown


I don't play the field - I rule the sidelines.  ~Author Unknown


Wimps lift weights, cheerleaders lift people.  ~Author Unknown


It's hard to be humble when you can jump, stunt, and tumble!  ~Author Unknown


There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.  ~Elizabeth Lawrence

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.  ~John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells

Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.
~William Wordsworth, "To a Butterfly"

Childhood:  the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.  ~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860

Childhood is the most beautiful of all life's seasons.  ~Author Unknown

Childhood is a promise that is never kept.  ~Ken Hill

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.  ~Katherine Anne Porter

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.  ~Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory  (thanks Harold)

When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.  ~Sam Ewing

In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out.  In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
~Christopher Morley, To a Child

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.  ~Tom Stoppard

I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day.
~Lewis Carroll, "Solitude"

It is never too late to have a happy childhood.  ~Tom Robbins

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.  ~Cynthia Ozick

The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day.
~John Milton, Paradise Regained

To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation - is there a worst trade one makes in life?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Childhood is a short season.  ~Helen Hayes

I leave to children exclusively, but only for the life of their childhood, all and every the dandelions of the fields and the daisies thereof, with the right to play among them freely, according to the custom of children, warning them at the same time against the thistles.  And I devise to children the yellow shores of creeks and the golden sands beneath the water thereof, with the dragon flies that skim the surface of said waters, and and the odors of the willows that dip into said waters, and the white clouds that float on high above the giant trees.  ~Williston Fish, "A Last Will," 1898

In the happiest of our childhood memories, our parents were happy, too.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in in a thousand ways, and the Night, and the trail of the Milky Way to wonder at.... ~Williston Fish, "A Last Will," 1898

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice cream straight out of the container.  ~Bill Bryson

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.  ~Herbert Gold

All any child needs is the protection of loving parents and an alternative source of information.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.  ~Mark Twain

Childhood is that wonderful time of life when all you need to do to lose weight is take a bath.  ~Author Unknown

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.  ~Ellen Glasgow

The world knows how to straighten out a spoiled child but never makes it up to a child deprived.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.  ~Malcolm de Chazal

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.  ~Stacia Tauscher

You can learn many things from children.  How much patience you have, for instance.  ~Franklin P. Jones

In a dark moment I ask, "How can anyone bring a child into this world?"  And the answer rings clear, "Because there is no other world, and because the child has no other way into it."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I brought children into this dark world because it needed the light that only a child can bring.  ~Liz Armbruster, on robertbrault.com

A characteristic of the normal child is he doesn't act that way very often.  ~Author Unknown

We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.  ~Christopher Morley

A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer.  ~Author Unknown

Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.  ~Harold Hulbert

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.  ~William Stafford

The world is as many times new as there are children in our lives.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.  ~Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (introduction), 1982

Children are one third of our population and all of our future.  ~Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health, 1981

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.  ~Fran Lebowitz

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing.  What!  Is it nothing to be happy?  Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long?  Never in his life will he be so busy again.  ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762

A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.  ~Bill Vaughan

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.  ~Pearl S. Buck

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children.  The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted.  The result is unruly children and childish adults.  ~Thomas Szasz

Children are unpredictable.  You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.  ~Franklin P. Jones

Children make you want to start life over.  ~Muhammad Ali

Boy, n.:  a noise with dirt on it.  ~Not Your Average Dictionary

I am fond of children - except boys.  ~Lewis Carroll

Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a crime to waste it on children.  ~George Bernard Shaw

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Children seldom misquote.  In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.  ~Author Unknown

A little girl is sugar and spice and everything nice - especially when she's taking a nap.  ~Author Unknown

A child is a curly dimpled lunatic.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.  ~Robert Benchley

The prime purpose of being four is to enjoy being four - of secondary importance is to prepare for being five.  ~Jim Trelease, The Read-Aloud Handbook, 1985

Youth is a perpetual intoxication; it is a fever of the mind.  ~François Duc de la Rochefoucauld

Little girls are cute and small only to adults.  To one another they are not cute.  They are life-sized.  ~Margaret Atwood

While we try to teach our children all about life,
Our children teach us what life is all about.
~Angela Schwindt

What is a home without children?  Quiet.  ~Henny Youngman

It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.  ~John W. Gardner and Francesca Gardner Reese

A child seldom needs a good talking to as a good listening to.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If we would listen to our kids, we'd discover that they are largely self-explanatory.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Creative play is like a spring that bubbles up from deep within a child.  ~Joan Almon

There are only two things a child will share willingly - communicable diseases and his mother's age.  ~Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, 1945

Tarry a moment to watch the chaos of a playground, crayola-colored shirts of running children, all trying out their wings.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Do your kids a favor - don't have any.  ~Robert Orben

Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.  ~Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone Scelto

A rose can say "I love you",
orchids can enthrall,
but a weed bouquet in a chubby fist,
yes, that says it all.
~Author Unknown

Having a two-year-old is like having a blender that you don't have the top for.  ~Jerry Seinfeld

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.  ~Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969

Our genes make us immortal.  ~The Secret of Life, PBS

Women gather together to wear silly hats, eat dainty food, and forget how unresponsive their husbands are.  Men gather to talk sports, eat heavy food, and forget how demanding their wives are.  Only where children gather is there any real chance of fun.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.  ~Phyllis Diller

Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a child to go to bed.  ~Robert Gallagher

Any kid will run any errand for you if you ask at bedtime.  ~Red Skelton

Children need the freedom and time to play.  Play is not a luxury.  Play is a necessity.  ~Kay Redfield Jamison

The only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child.  ~Joe Houldsworth

There's nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.  ~Frank A. Clark

If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.  ~Edgar W. Howe

Children raced outside.  She surveyed their trail - traces of sticky fingerprints across everything, like wee poems.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.  ~Frederick Douglass

If you haven't time to respond to a tug at your pants leg, your schedule is too crowded.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Pausing to listen to an airplane in the sky, stooping to watch a ladybug on a plant, sitting on a rock to watch the waves crash over the quayside - children have their own agendas and timescales.  As they find out more about their world and their place in it, they work hard not to let adults hurry them.  We need to hear their voices.  ~Cathy Nutbrown

The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.  ~Joan Kerr, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, 1957

Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selfish, lazy, flighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in expressing joy and sorrow, especially about trifles, they'll do anything to avoid pain but they enjoy inflicting it:  little men already.  ~Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, 1688

There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child.  There are seven million.  ~Walt Streightiff

Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

Christmas is a time when you get homesick - even when you're home.  ~Carol Nelson

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.  ~Roy L. Smith

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  ~Charles Dickens

Christmas is the gentlest, loveliest festival of the revolving year - and yet, for all that, when it speaks, its voice has strong authority.  ~W.J. Cameron

The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree:  the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.  ~Burton Hillis

One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day.  Don't clean it up too quickly.  ~Andy Rooney

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!  ~Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836

There has been only one Christmas - the rest are anniversaries.  ~W.J. Cameron

'Twas Christmas broach'd the mightiest ale;
'Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man's heart through half the year.
~Walter Scott

Christmas is a necessity.  There has to be at least one day of the year to remind us that we're here for something else besides ourselves.  ~Eric Sevareid

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.  ~Laura Ingalls Wilder

May Peace be your gift at Christmas and your blessing all year through!  ~Author Unknown

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.  ~Charles Dickens

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree.  In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.  ~Larry Wilde, The Merry Book of Christmas

Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.  ~Washington Irving

Gifts of time and love are surely the basic ingredients of a truly merry Christmas.  ~Peg Bracken

Isn't it funny that at Christmas something in you gets so lonely for - I don't know what exactly, but it's something that you don't mind so much not having at other times.  ~Kate L. Bosher

At Christmas, all roads lead home.  ~Marjorie Holmes

Instead of being a time of unusual behavior, Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when people can obey their natural impulses and express their true sentiments without feeling self-conscious and, perhaps, foolish.  Christmas, in short, is about the only chance a man has to be himself.  ~Francis C. Farley

It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air.  ~W.T. Ellis

For centuries men have kept an appointment with Christmas.  Christmas means fellowship, feasting, giving and receiving, a time of good cheer, home.  ~W.J. Ronald Tucker

Christmas is forever, not for just one day,
for loving, sharing, giving, are not to put away
like bells and lights and tinsel, in some box upon a shelf.
The good you do for others is good you do yourself...
~Norman Wesley Brooks (U.S. design engineer, 1923-2002)
"Let Every Day Be Christmas," 1976 - click for full poem

Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it.  Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it.  ~Richard Lamm

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love!  ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.  ~Author unknown, attributed to a 7-year-old named Bobby

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.  Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?  ~G.K. Chesterton

I wish we could put up some of the Christmas spirit in jars and open a jar of it every month.  ~Harlan Miller

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.  ~Alexander Smith

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.  ~Katharine Whitehorn

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it 'Christmas' and went to church; the Jews called it 'Hanukkah' and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank.  People passing each other on the street would say 'Merry Christmas!' or 'Happy Hanukkah!'  or (to the atheists) 'Look out for the wall!'  ~Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping:  A Survivor's Guide"

Remember
This December,
That love weighs more than gold!
~Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon

I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day.  We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year.  As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year.  And thus I drift along into the holidays - let them overtake me unexpectedly - waking up some fine morning and suddenly saying to myself:  "Why, this is Christmas Day!"  ~David Grayson

A Christmas candle is a lovely thing;
It makes no noise at all,
But softly gives itself away.
~Eva Logue

Christmas is not as much about opening our presents as opening our hearts.  ~Janice Maeditere

 
"It came without ribbons!  It came without tags!  It came without packages, boxes or bags!"... Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!  "Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store.  Maybe Christmas... perhaps... means a little bit more!"  ~Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Perhaps the best Yuletide decoration is being wreathed in smiles.  ~Author Unknown

Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special!  How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer.... Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously?  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

Only in souls the Christ is brought to birth,
And there He lives and dies.
~Alfred Noyes

For the spirit of Christmas fulfils the greatest hunger of mankind.  ~Loring A. Schuler

This is the message of Christmas:  We are never alone.  ~Taylor Caldwell

Tradition: sit with husband in a room lit only by tree lights and remember that our blessings outnumber the lights.  Happy Christmas to all.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

At Christmas play and make good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year
~Thomas Tusser

Christmas is for children.  But it is for grown-ups too.  Even if it is a headache, a chore, and nightmare, it is a period of necessary defrosting of chill and hide-bound hearts.  ~Lenora Mattingly Weber

Sing hey!  Sing hey!
For Christmas Day;
Twine mistletoe and holly.
For a friendship glows
In winter snows,
And so let's all be jolly!
~Author Unknown

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year.  ~E.B. White, "The Distant Music of the Hounds," The Second Tree from the Corner, 1954

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.  ~Author Unknown

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.  ~May Sarton

It is the Christmas time:
And up and down 'twixt heaven and earth,
In glorious grief and solemn mirth,
The shining angels climb.
~Dinah Maria Mulock

Fail not to call to mind, in the course of the twenty-fifth of this month, that the Divinest Heart that ever walked the earth was born on that day; and then smile and enjoy yourselves for the rest of it; for mirth is also of Heaven's making.  ~Leigh Hunt

The perfect Christmas tree?  All Christmas trees are perfect!  ~Charles N. Barnard

Great little One! whose all-embracing birth
Lifts Earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to Earth.
~Richard Crashaw

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill.  But it is clumsier every year.  ~E.M. Forster

At Christmas
A man is at his finest towards the finish of the year;
He is almost what he should be when the Christmas season's here;
Then he's thinking more of others than he's thought the months before,
And the laughter of his children is a joy worth toiling for.
He is less a selfish creature than at any other time;
When the Christmas spirit rules him he comes close to the sublime...
~Edgar Guest

Christmas is the season when you buy this year's gifts with next year's money.  ~Author Unknown

The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts.  Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected.  ~Samuel Johnson

As long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, Christmas is.  ~Eric Sevareid

When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things - not the great occasions - give off the greatest glow of happiness.  ~Bob Hope

[I]t is the one season of the year when we can lay aside all gnawing worry, indulge in sentiment without censure, assume the carefree faith of childhood, and just plain "have fun."  Whether they call it Yuletide, Noel, Weinachten, or Christmas, people around the earth thirst for its refreshment as the desert traveller for the oasis.  ~D.D. Monroe

Roses are reddish
Violets are bluish
If it weren't for Christmas
We'd all be Jewish.
~Benny Hill

May the spirit of Christmas bring you peace,
The gladness of Christmas give you hope,
The warmth of Christmas grant you love.
~Author Unknown

Christmas!  The very word brings joy to our hearts.  No matter how we may dread the rush, the long Christmas lists for gifts and cards to be bought and given - when Christmas Day comes there is still the same warm feeling we had as children, the same warmth that enfolds our hearts and our homes.  ~Joan Winmill Brown

May you have the gladness of Christmas which is hope;
The spirit of Christmas which is peace;
The heart of Christmas which is love.
~Ada V. Hendricks

The best Christmas trees come very close to exceeding nature.  ~Andy Rooney

What is Christmas?  It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future.  It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal, and that every path may lead to peace.  ~Agnes M. Pahro

Be merry all, be merry all,
With holly dress the festive hall;
Prepare the song, the feast, the ball,
To welcome merry Christmas.
~William Robert Spencer

The Christmas season has come to mean the period when the public plays Santa Claus to the merchants.  ~John Andrew Holmes

If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts, wouldn't it be a Merry Christmas?  ~Don Meredith

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.  ~Author Unknown

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The message of Christmas is that the visible material world is bound to the invisible spiritual world.  ~Author Unknown

Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.  ~Robert Lynd

Mankind is a great, an immense family.  This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas.  ~Pope John XXIII

I love the Christmas-tide, and yet,
I notice this, each year I live;
I always like the gifts I get,
But how I love the gifts I give!
~Carolyn Wells

'Tis blessed to bestow, and yet,
Could we bestow the gifts we get,
And keep the ones we give away,
How happy were our Christmas day!
~Carolyn Wells

There are no strangers on Christmas Eve.  ~Mildred Cram and Adele Comandini

There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime.  Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with raw egg yolks and cottage cheese in them.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind.  To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.  ~Calvin Coolidge, 1927

No matter how carefully you stored the lights last year, they will be snarled again this Christmas.  ~Robert Kirby

Except the Christ be born again tonight
In dreams of all men, saints and sons of shame,
The world will never see his kingdom bright.
~Vachel Lindsay

Like snowflakes, my Christmas memories gather and dance - each beautiful, unique and too soon gone.  ~Deborah Whipp

When Christmas bells are swinging above the fields of snow, we hear sweet voices ringing from lands of long ago, and etched on vacant places are half-forgotten faces of friends we used to cherish, and loves we used to know.  ~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that - as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time.  ~Charles Dickens

At Christmas-tide the open hand
Scatters its bounty o'er sea and land,
And none are left to grieve alone,
For Love is heaven and claims its own.
~Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.  ~Erma Bombeck, I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression

The one thing women don't want to find in their stockings on Christmas morning is their husband.  ~Joan Rivers

The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C.  This wasn't for any religious reasons.  They couldn't find three wise men and a virgin.  ~Jay Leno

I hear that in many places something has happened to Christmas; that it is changing from a time of merriment and carefree gaiety to a holiday which is filled with tedium; that many people dread the day and the obligation to give Christmas presents is a nightmare to weary, bored souls; that the children of enlightened parents no longer believe in Santa Claus; that all in all, the effort to be happy and have pleasure makes many honest hearts grow dark with despair instead of beaming with good will and cheerfulness.  ~Julia Peterkin, A Plantation Christmas, 1934

The earth has grown old with its burden of care,
But at Christmas it always is young....
~Phillips Brooks

Nothing's as mean as giving a little child something useful for Christmas.  ~Kin Hubbard

The worst gift is a fruitcake.  There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.  ~Johnny Carson

Let Christmas not become a thing
Merely of merchant's trafficking,
Of tinsel, bell and holly wreath
And surface pleasure, but beneath
The childish glamour, let us find
Nourishment for soul and mind.
Let us follow kinder ways
Through our teeming human maze,
And help the age of peace to come
From a Dreamer's martyrdom.
~Madeline Morse

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, make the Yuletide gay.  ~Ralph Blane

It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.  ~Charles Dickens

Three phrases that sum up Christmas are:  Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men, and Batteries not Included.  ~Author Unknown

I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a note on it saying, toys not included.  ~Bernard Manning

Christmas begins about the first of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April fifteenth of the next year.  ~P.J. O'Rourke, Modern Manners

Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.  ~Kin Hubbard

Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall.  We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space.  ~Dave Barry

Keep your Christmas-heart open all the year round.  ~Jessica Archmint

Wouldn't life be worth the living
Wouldn't dreams be coming true
If we kept the Christmas spirit
All the whole year through?
~Author Unknown

The universal joy of Christmas is certainly wonderful.  We ring the bells when princes are born, or toll a mournful dirge when great men pass away.  Nations have their red-letter days, their carnivals and festivals, but once in the year and only once, the whole world stands still to celebrate the advent of a life.  ~Author Unknown

We ring the bells and we raise the strain
We hang up garlands everywhere
And bid the tapers twinkle fair,
And feast and frolic - and then we go
Back to the same old lives again.
~Susan Coolidge

I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.  ~Dick Gregory

Christmas is a time to open our hearts to God and his gifts.  Just like the rest of the year.  ~Author Unknown

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas,
Just like the ones I used to know,
Where the tree tops glisten
And children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow...
~Irving Berlin

Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl.  But it warmed more than your body.  It warmed your heart... filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.  ~Bess Streeter Aldrich

Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.  ~Johnny Carson

Whatever else be lost among the years,
Let us keep Christmas still a shining thing;
Whatever doubts assail us, or what fears,
Let us hold close one day, remembering
Its poignant meaning for the hearts of men.
Let us get back our childlike faith again.
~Grace Noll Crowell

O Christmas Sun!  What holy task is thine!
To fold a world in the embrace of God!
~Guy Wetmore Carryl

Christmas is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends.  ~Margaret Thatcher

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine;
Love was born at Christmas;
Star and angels gave the sign.
~Christina Rossetti

Christmas - that magic blanket that wraps itself about us, that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance.  It may weave a spell of nostalgia.  Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance - a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved.  ~Augusta E. Rundel

Santa is very jolly because he knows where all the bad girls live.  ~Dennis Miller

It is the most human and kindly of seasons, as fully penetrated and irradiated with the feeling of human brotherhood, which is the essential spirit of Christianity, as the month of June with sunshine and the balmy breath of roses.  ~George William Curtis

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, - not even a mouse:
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there....
~Clement Clarke Moore

People can't concentrate properly on blowing other people to pieces if their minds are poisoned by thoughts suitable to the twenty-fifth of December.  ~Ogden Nash

Christmas gift suggestions:  To your enemy, forgiveness.  To an opponent, tolerance.  To a friend, your heart.  To a customer, service.  To all, charity.  To every child, a good example.  To yourself, respect.  ~Oren Arnold

Christmas in Bethlehem.  The ancient dream: a cold, clear night made brilliant by a glorious star, the smell of incense, shepherds and wise men falling to their knees in adoration of the sweet baby, the incarnation of perfect love.  ~Lucinda Franks

Oh! lovely voices of the sky
Which hymned the Saviour's birth,
Are ye not singing still on high,
Ye that sang, "Peace on earth"?
~Felicia Hemans

We hear the beating of wings over Bethlehem and a light that is not of the sun or of the stars shines in the midnight sky.  Let the beauty of the story take away all narrowness, all thought of formal creeds.  Let it be remembered as a story that has happened again and again, to men of many different races, that has been expressed through many religions, that has been called by many different names.  Time and space and language lay no limitations upon human brotherhood.  ~New York Times, 25 December 1937, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren, 1938, published by The H.W. Wilson Company, New York

Which Christmas is the most vivid to me?  It's always the next Christmas.  ~Joanne Woodward



Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.  ~Roman Polanski


Acting:  An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.  ~Ralph Richardson


Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.  ~Alfred Hitchcock


Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.  ~John LeCarre


The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.  ~Alfred Hitchcock


A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.  ~Alfred Hitchcock


A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.  ~Don Marquis


Never judge a book by its movie.  ~J.W. Eagan


I've spent several years in Hollywood, and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.  ~Wilson Mizner


Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.  ~Jessamyn West


Most horror movies are certainly that.  ~Brendan Francis


You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather.  Later he played my father and finally he played my husband.  If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother.  That's the way it is in Hollywood.  The men get younger and the women get older.  ~Lillian Gish


What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.  ~Agnes Repplier


What I've learned is that life is too short and movies are too long.  ~Denis Leary


There are only three ages for women in Hollywood - Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.  ~Goldie Hawn


Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.  ~River Phoenix


Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay home and see bad television for nothing?  ~Samuel Goldwyn


The chief difference between horror fans and science fiction fans lies in why they won't walk backwards.  A horror fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll be knifed by a madman.  A science fiction fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll step on the cat.  ~Aaron Allston


It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around.  ~Mary Pickford


A play should give you something to think about.  When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.  ~T.S. Eliot, New York Post, 22 September 1963


Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Rated G is nobody gets the girl.  PG is the good guy gets the girl.  R is the bad guy gets the girl.  XXX is everybody gets the girl.  ~Author Unknown


[M]ovie-making is the process of turning money into light.  All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.  ~John Boorman, Money into Light, 1985


There's no thief like a bad movie.  ~Sam Ewing 


If I find a film dull, I find it infinitely more entertaining to watch the scratches.  ~Norman McLaren




There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.  ~Philip G. Hamerton


All cities are mad:  but the madness is gallant.  All cities are beautiful:  but the beauty is grim.  ~Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins


Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men.
~John Milton


What is the city but the people?  ~William Shakespeare


No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.  ~Cyril Connolly


Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.  ~Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo


Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities.  ~Marcus Terentius Varro, De Re Rustica


The roaring street is hung for miles
With fierce electric fire.
~William Vaughan Moody, In New York


There is hardly one in three of us who live in the cities who is not sick with unused self.  ~Ben Hecht


Suburb:  a place that isn't city, isn't country, and isn't tolerable.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
~William Wordsworth


God made the country, and man made the town.  ~William Cowper, The Task, 1785


A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.  ~Herbert Prochnow


I have an affection for a great city.  I feel safe in the neighbourhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV


Cities are the abyss of the human species.  ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile


In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing.  It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.  ~Somerset Maugham


In Rome you long for the country; in the country - oh inconstant! - you praise the distant city to the stars.  ~Horace, Satires




Dare to do things worthy of imprisonment if you mean to be of consequence.  ~Juvenal


Laws control the lesser man.  Right conduct controls the greater one.  ~Chinese Proverb


Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.  ~Albert Einstein


No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime.  ~Hermann Keyserling


When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders.  ~Veterans Fast for Life


It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.  ~Voltaire


If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.  ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobediance, 1849


You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality.  Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.  ~Malcolm X


Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.  ~Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion


Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.  You cannot shirk this and be a man.  To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.  ~Mark Twain


Integrity has no need of rules.  ~Albert Camus


If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.  ~Louis D. Brandeis


Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen.  Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher.  Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.  ~John J. Miller, And Hope to Die


Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists


Every actual state is corrupt.  Good men must not obey laws too well.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."  ~Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Why We Can't Wait, 1963


We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong.... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them.  ~Alexander Bickel


It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of obedience.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911


I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.  It is not so desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849


As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.  ~Clarence Darrow


It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.  ~Edmund Burke, Second Speech on Conciliation, 1775


I am free, no matter what rules surround me.  If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.  I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.  ~Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress


Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face.  But I left with a smile.  I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr., March 22, 1956


If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.  If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.  ~Bishop Desmond Tutu


It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.  If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders.  ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience


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

Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don't.  ~Lord Raglan

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.  ~Syrus

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.  ~Bryan White

Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long...  ~Ogden Nash, "Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours," New Yorker, 1959 April 4 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.  ~C.P. Snow

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.  ~Confucius

Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.  ~Author and exact wording unknown, I've been told this was quoted by Paul Harvey

I've made an odd discovery.  Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility.  Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.  ~Bertrand Russell

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

We pass through this world but once.  Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.  ~Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man

And the wind shall say "Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."
~T.S. Eliot

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.  ~Albert Einstein

When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.  ~Lois McMaster Bujold

K is for "Kenghis Khan."  He was a very nice person.  History has no record of him.  There is a moral in that, somewhere.  ~Harlan Ellison, From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~T.S. Eliot, The Rock, 1934

Is man's civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?  ~Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol III, book V, chapter 7

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life.  Otherwise it would die of civilization.  ~Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 3 September 1855

Leash: n, a means by which animals, formerly running wild, are prevented from running tame, also.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race.  It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems.  But there are tens of thousands of years in the future.  Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.  ~Richard P. Feynman

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.  ~Aldous Huxley

Animals have these advantages over man:  they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.  ~Voltaire, letter to Count Schomberg, 31 August 1769

Codi:  Gives you the willies, doesn't it?  The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?  [referring to cliff dwellings]
Loyd:  No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.  ~Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 2 March 1861

[M]odern man is just ancient man... with way better electronics.  ~Author unknown, "A Short History of Breakfast," from a Jack in the Box tray liner, 2006

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.  ~Henry Havelock Ellis

Civilization begins with soap.  ~Galveston Times, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren

A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums.  ~Martin H. Fischer

One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion.  It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.  ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.  ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897

Society is a made-up formula of what we are supposed to be, kept alive by those who believe in it.... I laugh in the ugly face of society, with all its fabricated dimensions.  ~Author Unknown

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.  ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.  ~B.F.Skinner

[T]he progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea.  ~Edgar Saltus, The Philosophy of Disenchantment

When tillage begins, other arts follow.  The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.  ~Daniel Webster, Remarks on Agriculture

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.  ~H.G. Wells, The Outline of History

They civilize what's pretty
By puttin' up a city
Where nothin' that's
Pretty can grow....
They civilize left
They civilize right
Till nothing is left
Till nothing is right
~Alan Jay Lerner, "The First Thing You Know," Paint Your Wagon, 1969

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.  ~ Mark Twain

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.  ~Abraham Joshua Heschel

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.  ~Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, "There's a naked person outside!"  ~Mike Nichols

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization.  But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

Civilization is what makes you sick.  ~Paul Gauguin

The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.  ~Carol Matthau

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.  ~Richard Bach

Where there are humans
you'll find flies,
and Buddhas.
~Issa

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.  ~Arnold Toynbee

We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us.  ~James Ramsey Ullman

Good manners:  The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.  ~Bennett Cerf

Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.  ~Thor Heyerdahl, Fatu-Hiva

If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.  ~Stanley Garn

I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing:
And I said, "O years, that meet in tears,
Have ye aught that is worth the knowing?
Science enough and exploring,
Wanderers coming and going,
Matter enough for deploring,
But aught that is worth the knowing?"
~Alfred Tennyson

Civilization:  a thin veneer over barbarianism.  ~John M. Shanahan, The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time (In Two Lines or Less)

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.  ~Brian Aldiss

Evolution made civilization steward of this planet.  A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite.  So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love.  ~Richard Bach

The finest clothing made is a person's skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.  ~Mark Twain

Unmentionables - those articles of ladies' apparel that are never discussed in public, except in full-page, illustrated ads.  ~Changing Times

A dress that zips up the back will bring a husband and wife together.  ~James H. Boren

I base most of my fashion sense on what doesn't itch.  ~Gilda Radner

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.... It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.  ~Albert Einstein

People seldom notice old clothes if you wear a big smile.  ~Lee Mildon

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.  ~Henry David Thoreau

When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.  ~Lois McMaster Bujold

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.  ~Henry David Thoreau

I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent.  A person, yes.  ~Robert A. Heinlein

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Seldom do people discern
Eloquence under a threadbare cloak.
~Juvenal

If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties?  How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?  ~Linda Ellerbee

I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie.  Neckties strangle clear thinking.  ~Lin Yutang

A man hasn't got a corner on virtue just because his shoes are shined.  ~Anne Petry

I talk to him when I'm lonesome like; and I'm sure he understands.  When he looks at me so attentively, and gently licks my hands; then he rubs his nose on my tailored clothes, but I never say naught thereat.  For the good Lord knows I can buy more clothes, but never a friend like that.  ~W. Dayton Wedgefarth

Just around the corner in every woman's mind - is a lovely dress, a wonderful suit, or entire costume which will make an enchanting new creature of her.  ~Wilhela Cushman

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you.  ~Françoise Sagan

Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed.  There ain't much credit in that.  ~Charles Dickens

When in doubt, wear red.  ~Bill Blass

Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

What a strange power there is in clothing.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence on society.  ~Mark Twain

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.  ~Virginia Woolf

A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloath'd at the same time.  ~Laurence Sterne

Shopping tip:  You can get shoes for 85 cents at the bowling alley.  ~Author Unknown

O what a sight were Man, if his attires
Did alter with his minde;
And like a dolphins skinne, his clothes combin'd
With his desires!
~George Herbert

Every time a woman leaves off something she looks better, but every time a man leaves off something he looks worse.  ~Will Rogers

Remember that always dressing in understated good taste is the same as playing dead.  ~Susan Catherine

Funny that a pair of really nice shoes make us feel good in our heads - at the extreme opposite end of our bodies.  ~Levende Waters

The only man who really needs a tail coat is a man with a hole in his trousers.  ~John Taylor

Do men who have got all their marbles go swimming in lakes with their clothes on?  ~P.G. Wodehouse

I simply can't understand
Why swimsuits are in such demand
They're soggy and damp,
Bind like a clamp,
And hold about three pounds of sand!
~D.R. Benson

Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, ssockdle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!  ~Herman Melville

What do nudists wear on casual Fridays?  ~Author Unknown

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition:  it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.  ~Quentin Bell

Stretch pants - the garment that made skiing a spectator sport.  ~Author Unknown

Why is it considered seductive for women to wear beautiful clothes?  Wouldn't it make more sense to wear something so ugly that a guy couldn't wait to take it off you?  ~Flash Rosenberg

As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime.  ~John Ruskin

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims

Where's the man could ease a heart
Like a satin gown?
~Dorothy Parker, "The Satin Dress"

Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.  ~Sydney J. Harris

The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes.  The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.  ~Thomas Carlyle

The dress must not hang on the body but follow its lines.  It must accompany its wearer and when a woman smiles the dress must smile with her.  ~Madeleine Vionnet

You have to have the kind of body that doesn't need a girdle in order to get to pose in one.  ~Carolyn Kenmore

Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.  ~Jane Austen

All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?  ~George Bernard Shaw

Every uniform corrupts one's character.  ~Max Frisch

After all there is something about a wedding-gown prettier than in any other gown in the world.  ~Douglas William Jerrold

Fashion is like the id.  It makes you desire things you shouldn't.  ~Bob Morris

It's always the badly dressed people who are the most interesting.  ~Jean Paul Gaultier

Clothes are inevitable.  They are nothing less than the furniture of the mind made visible.  ~James Laver, Style in Costume

She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.  ~Woody Allen, Getting Even, 1973

On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent:  if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do.  ~Elizabeth Bowen

For your own sake you should give her a new gown; for variety of dresses rouses desire, and makes an old mistress seem every day a new one.  ~William Wycherley

Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.  ~Epictetus

High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.  ~Christopher Morley

I don't know who invented the high heel, but all men owe him a lot.  ~Marilyn Monroe

Dresses for breakfasts, and dinners, and balls;
Dresses to sit in, and stand in, and walk in;
Dresses to dance in, and flirt in, and talk in;
Dresses in which to do nothing at all;
Dresses for Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall.
~William Allen Butler, "Nothing to Wear"

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

Clothes can suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie, and apply subtle pressure while their wearer is speaking frankly and straightforwardly of other matters.  ~Anne Hollander

When I free my body from its clothes, from all their buttons, belts, and laces, it seems to me that my soul takes a deeper, freer breath.  ~August Strindberg

Fashion is architecture:  it is a matter of proportions.  ~CoCo Chanel

It's not what you wear - it's how you take it off.  ~Author Unknown

Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.  ~Janet Lane

Fashion Law:  If the shoe fits, it's ugly.  ~Author Unknown

Like every good man, I strive for perfection, and, like every ordinary man, I have found that perfection is out of reach - but not the perfect suit.  ~Edward Tivnan

Sweater, n.:  garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.  ~Ambrose Bierce

Adornment is never anything except a reflection of the heart.  ~Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone.  ~Georg Simmel

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.  ~Quentin Crisp

To be a fashionable woman is to know yourself, know what you represent, and know what works for you.  To be "in fashion" could be a disaster on 90 percent of women.  You are not a page out of Vogue.  ~Author Unknown

The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.  
~Robert Harling, Steel Magnolias

If I were a cat, what would make me purr?  A pair of really comfortable blue jeans, and massages.  ~Cinnamon Stomberger

Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.  ~Philip Dormer Stanhope

His clothes fit him so ill, and constrain him so much, that he seems rather their prisoner than their proprietor.  ~Philip Dormer Stanhope

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?  ~Source Unknown

She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies.  ~Mavis Gallant

Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.  ~Elsa Schiaparelli

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.  ~Frederick G. Banting

There is nothing touches our imagination so much as a beautiful woman in a plain dress.  ~Joseph Addison

Your Business clothes are naturally attracted to staining liquids.  This attraction is strongest just before an important meeting.  ~Scott Adams

But I do mean to say, I have heard her declare,
When at the same moment she had on a dress
Which cost five hundred dollars, and not a cent less,
And jewelry worth tem times more, I should guess,
That he had not a thing in the wide world to wear!
~William Allen Butler, "Nothing to Wear"

If your sister is in a tearing hurry to go out and cannot catch your eye, she's wearing your best sweater.  ~Pam Brown

Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.  ~William Hazlitt, On the Clerical Character, 1819

 A nudist is simply a human being without artificial additives.  ~Author Unknown

If honor be your clothing, the suit will last a lifetime; but if clothing be your honor, it will soon be worn threadbare.  ~William Arnot

I love America, and I love American women.  But there is one thing that deeply shocks me - American closets.  I cannot believe one can dress well when you have so much.  ~Andrée Putman

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.  ~Mark Twain

A part of this strangeness of dress is that it links the biological body to the social being, and public to private.  ~Elizabeth Wilson

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

The best-dressed woman is one whose clothes wouldn't look too strange in the country.  ~Hardy Amies

A skirt is no obstacle to extemporaneous sex, but it is physically impossible to make love to a girl while she is wearing trousers.  ~Helen Lawrenson

Did you hear about the Scottish drag queen?  He wore pants.  ~Lynn Lavner

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.  ~Dorothy Parker

Clothes therefore, must be truly a badge of greatness; the insignia of the superiority of man over all other animals, for surely there could be no other reason for wearing the hideous things.  ~Edgar Rice Burroughs

Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?  ~Roland Barthes

On the fourth day of telecommuting, I realized that clothes are totally unnecessary.  ~Scott Adams, "Dilbert"

Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.  ~Honoré de Balzac

He who sleeps in the raw, is in for a nude awakening.  ~Author Unknown

The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.  ~Jean Cocteau

All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.  ~Lin Yutang

I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant.  They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes.  ~Yves Saint Laurent

I want to die with my blue jeans on.  ~Andy Warhol

You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump.  Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.  ~Elizabeth Bibesco

Clothes make a statement.  Costumes tell a story.  ~Mason Cooley

What a man most enjoys about a woman's clothes are his fantasies of how she would look without them.  ~Brendan Francis

Clothes are never a frivolity:  they always mean something.  ~James Laver

Those hot pants of hers were so damned tight, I could hardly breathe.  ~Benny Hill

If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater... suggest that he wear a tail.  ~Fran Lebowitz

Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper's Bazaar while waiting at the dentist's to have grasped that the purpose of fashion is to make A Statement.  My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, "Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won't Be Naked."  ~Molly Ivins

The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.  ~Cecil Beaton

Never wear anything that panics the cat.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

No one in the world needs a mink coat but a mink.  ~Murray Banks

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., "Over the Teacups," 1891

No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.  ~Sheik Abd-al-Kadir

Over second and third cups flow matters of high finance, high state, common gossip and low comedy.  [Coffee] is a social binder, a warmer of tongues, a soberer of minds, a stimulant of wit, a foiler of sleep if you want it so.  From roadside mugs to the classic demi-tasse, it is the perfect democrat.  ~Author Unknown

No coffee can be good in the mouth that does not first send a sweet offering of odor to the nostrils.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

A morning without coffee is like sleep.  ~Author Unknown

I believe humans get a lot done, not because we're smart, but because we have thumbs so we can make coffee.  ~Flash Rosenberg

As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold.  ~Author Unknown

Mothers are those wonderful people who can get up in the morning before the smell of coffee.  ~Author Unknown

Coffee is the best thing to douse the sunrise with.  ~Terri Guillemets

Conscience keeps more people awake than coffee.  ~Author Unknown

Way too much coffee.  But if it weren't for the coffee, I'd have no identifiable personality whatsoever.  ~David Letterman

Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation.  ~Author Unknown

Decaffeinated coffee is the devil's blend.  ~Author Unknown

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion.  Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place.  Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind.  The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters.  Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.  ~Honore de Balzac, "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee"

Decaffeinated coffee is kind of like kissing your sister.  ~Bob Irwin

I bought a decaffeinated coffee table, you can't even see a difference.  ~Author Unknown

Decaf?  No, it's dangerous to dilute my caffeine stream.  ~Author Unknown

Chocolate, men, coffee - some things are better rich.  ~Author Unknown

Coffee has two virtues:  it is wet and warm.  ~Dutch Proverb

Coffee, the finest organic suspension ever devised.  ~Star Trek: Voyager

Petroleum and coffee had no value a few centuries ago.  ~Author Unknown

He was my cream, and I was his coffee -
And when you poured us together, it was something.
~Josephine Baker

I've just arrived in New York City.  What a place!  Just smell those skyscrapers.  Had breakfast at a little deli on Ninth Avenue.  Cheese Danish and a cup of coffee, black as a moonless night.  Hit the spot.  ~From the television show Twin Peaks by David Lynch  (Thanks, Rachel)

Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank.  ~Alphonse Allais

Coffee smells like freshly ground heaven.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Caffeine isn't a drug, it's a vitamin!  ~Author Unknown

Deja Brew:  The feeling that you've had this coffee before.  ~Author Unknown

There's nothing sweeter than a cup of bitter coffee.  ~Rian Aditia

I orchestrate my mornings to the tune of coffee.  ~Terri Guillemets

Forever:  Time it takes to brew the first pot of coffee in the morning.  ~Author Unknown

A fig for partridges and quails,
ye dainties I know nothing of ye;
But on the highest mount in Wales
Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.
~Jonathon Swift

Don't drink coffee in the morning.  It will keep you awake until noon.  ~Author Unknown

Coffee, which makes the politicians wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.
~Alexander Pope

Be a coffee-drinking individual - espresso yourself!  ~Author Unknown

I make serious coffee - so strong it wakes up the neighbors.  ~Author Unknown

Suave molecules of Mocha stir up your blood, without causing excess heat; the organ of thought receives from it a feeling of sympathy; work becomes easier and you will sit down without distress to your principal repast which will restore your body and afford you a calm, delicious night.  ~Prince Tallyrand

In America you can buy bucket-sized cups of coffee in any flavour you like other than coffee-flavour.  ~Author Unknown

Coffee in styrofoam is against my religion.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

All's fair in love and war - and coffee.  ~Pam Brady, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone, South Park, "Gnomes," original airdate Dec 16, 1998

You know you've been playing too much Nethack when you refer to coffee as a potion of sleep resistance.  ~Sweeney Todd Lundgren

I never drink coffee at lunch.  I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon.  ~Ronald Reagan

Man does not live by coffee alone.  Have a danish.  ~Author Unknown

Coffee, n.  break fluid.  ~Author Unknown

This coffee tastes like mud!  Well, it was ground this morning.  ~Old Vaudeville joke

I like my coffee strong, not lethal!  ~M*A*S*H

I don't have a problem with caffeine.  I have a problem without caffeine!  ~Author Unknown

Behind every successful woman is a substantial amount of coffee.  ~Stephanie Piro

C:\COFFEE.POT missing (A)bort (R)etry (F)all asleep?  ~Author Unknown

If it ain't caffeinated, it ain't coffee!  ~Author Unknown

Coffee and tobacco are complete repose.  ~Turkish Proverb

I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee.  ~Carly Simon

In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.  ~Jeff Bezos

Herbal tea tastes so much better when it's coffee.  ~Author Unknown

Black as the devil, Hot as hell,
Pure as an angel, Sweet as love.
~Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord

Coffee in England is just toasted milk.  ~Author Unknown

Ultimate office automation - networked coffee machines.  ~Author Unknown

Everybody should believe in something.  I believe I'll have another coffee.  ~Author Unknown

Decaf is like masturbating with an oven mitt!  ~Robin Williams

Coffee is not my cup of tea.  ~Author Unknown

Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze.
It maketh me to wake in green pastures:
It leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses.
It restoreth my buzz:
It leadeth me in the paths of consciousness for its name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of addiction,
I will fear no Equal:
For thou art with me; thy cream and thy sugar they comfort me.
Thou preparest a carafe before me in the presence of The Starbucks:
Thou anointest my day with pep; my mug runneth over.
Surely richness and taste shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the House of Mochas forever.
~Author Unknown

C:>COFFEE.COM error.  Contact programmer J. Valdez.  ~Author Unknown

Coffee:  The first peripheral!  ~Author Unknown

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.  ~T.S. Eliot

Actually, this seems to be the basic need of the human heart in nearly every great crisis - a good hot cup of coffee.  ~Alexander King

Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water.  ~The Women's Petition Against Coffee, 1674

A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Coffee makes me invincible.  But when the cup is empty, I return to mere mortal.  ~Terri Guillemets

It's amazing how the world begins to change through the eyes of a cup of coffee!  ~Donna A. Favors

I like my coffee like my women:  hot, strong, steamy.  ~Author Unknown

Retirement is one great big giant coffee break.  ~Author Unknown

My blood type is Folgers.  ~Author Unknown

All the coffee in Columbia won't make me a morning person.  ~Author Unknown

Do I like my coffee black?  There are other colors?  ~Author Unknown

I don't understand decaf, it's like sex without the sex.  ~A.C. Van Cherub

Nothing is sad on a beautiful morning save to look down and realize you just had the last sip of coffee and the mug sits indifferently empty.  ~Terri Guillemets

Don't laugh at the coffee.  Some day you, too, may be old and weak.  ~Author Unknown

It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity.  I bet this kind of thing does not happen to heroin addicts.  I bet that when serious heroin addicts go to purchase their heroin, they do not tolerate waiting in line while some dilettante in front of them orders a hazelnut smack-a-cino with cinnamon sprinkles.  ~Dave Barry

COFFEE.SYS Not Found:  User startup disabled.  ~Author Unknown

Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.  ~Jonathan Swift

I'd stop drinking coffee, but I'm no quitter.  ~Author Unknown

The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself.  ~Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case, 1995

RISING.SUN detected: (A)nother coffee, (C)old shower, (S)leep?  ~Author Unknown

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.  ~Paul Erdos

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups:  alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat.  ~Alex Levine

I'll quit coffee.  It won't be easy drinking my Bailey's straight, but I'll get used to it.  It'll still be the best part of waking up.  ~From the television show Will and Grace

Caffeine Allocation Error:  COFFEE.SYS missing, Programmer halted.  ~Author Unknown

if(pot.coffee=EMPTY) {programmer->;brain=OFF};  ~Author Unknown

Docs?  Oh, you mean the stuff you wipe up coffee with?  ~Author Unknown

Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.  ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Given enough coffee, I could rule the world.   ~Author Unknown

I think if I were a woman I'd wear coffee as a perfume.  ~John Van Druten



Academe, n.:  An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.  Academy, n.:  A modern school where football is taught.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.  ~John Ciardi


Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities:  the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.  ~Abbott Lawrence Lowell


A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.  ~Theodore Roosevelt


If you have a college degree you can be absolutely sure of one thing... you have a college degree.  ~Author Unknown


If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.  ~Robert Goheen, Time, 23 June 1961


It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.  ~Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951


A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.  ~W.H. Auden


The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving.  ~Russell Green


A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D.  Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B.  ~"Fats" Domino


Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or they didn't.  ~L.L. Hendren


College is the best time of your life.  When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?  ~David Wood


A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.  ~Robert Maynard Hutchins


Does college pay?  They do if you are a good open-field runner.  ~Will Rogers


A college education shows a man how little other people know.  ~Thomas Chandler Haliburton


The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.  ~J. Frank Dobie


I never graduated from Iowa, but I was only there for two terms - Truman's and Eisenhower's.  ~Alex Karras


The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.  ~Sydney J. Harris


College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.  ~Elbert Hubbard


College is a place to keep warm between high school and an early marriage.  ~George Gobel


A liberal-arts education is supposed to provide you with a value system, a standard, a set of ideas, not a job.  ~Caroline Bird


I learned three important things in college - to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes.  ~Agnes DeMille, Dance to the Piper, 1952


The new appears as a minority point of view, and hence is unpopular.  The function of a university is to give it a sanctuary.  ~Martin H. Fischer


I have a degree in liberal arts.  Do you want fries with that?  ~Author unknown, as seen on a T-shirt


Hitler destroyed the German university with design; we destroyed ours without.  ~Martin H. Fischer


No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.  ~J. Robert Oppenheimer


The purpose of primary education is the development of your weak characteristics; the purpose of university education, the development of your strong.  ~Nevin Fenneman


I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments.  Of course they graduate the best - it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country.  They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money - provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.  ~Peter DeVries


Standardization is the fertilizer of college education.  A little may be useful, but flowers do not grow in pure manure.  ~Martin H. Fischer


The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money.  ~Author Unknown


The elective system offered a bewildering freedom of choice, leaving some graduates with the impression that they had nibbled at dozens of canapés of knowledge and never had their fill.  ~Ted Morgan


The quality of a university is measured more by the kind of student it turns out than the kind it takes in.  ~Robert J. Kibbee


A place where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


A university is a college with a stadium seating over 40,000.  ~Leonard L. Levinson




In all parts of the Old World, as well as of the New, it was evident that Columbus had kindled a fire in every mariner's heart.  That fire was the harbinger of a new era, for it was not to be extinguished.  ~Charles Kendall Adams


Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.  ~Robert F. Kennedy


A ship in harbor is safe - but that is not what ships are for.  ~John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic


I also hate those holidays that fall on a Monday where you don't get mail, those fake holidays like Columbus Day.  What did Christopher Columbus do, discover America?  If he hadn't, somebody else would have and we'd still be here.  Big deal.  ~John Waters, quoted in The Portable Curmudgeon Redux, compiled & edited by Jon Winokur, 1992


One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.  ~André Gide


When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, "Ours."  ~Vine Deloria, Jr.


He completed the universe, he achieved the physical unity of the globe.  ~Lamartine


Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies.
~George Santayana


What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.  ~Margot Asquith


Columbus had all the spirit of a crusader, and, at the same time, the investigating nature of a modern man of science.  ~Edmund Arthur Helps


Whose indomitable spirit changed the face of the earth for us.  ~Edmund Arthur Helps


If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.  ~Arthur Goldberg


Every one of us has in him a continent of undiscovered character.  Blessed is he who acts the Columbus to his own soul.  ~Author Unknown


His bark
The daring mariner shall urge far o'er
The Western wave, a smooth and level plain,
Albeit the earth is fashioned like a wheel.
~Luigi Pulci


He gave the world another world.  ~George Santayana


So Columbus said, somebody show me the sunset and somebody did and he set sail for it,
And he discovered America and they put him in jail for it,
And the fetters gave him welts,
And they named America after somebody else.
~Ogden Nash, Columbus


Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.  ~John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 1929


America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole.  ~Bobcat Goldthwaite


We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.  ~John Fiske


For all mankind that unstained scroll unfurled,
Where God might write anew the story of the World.
~Edward Everett Hale


With this humble instrumentality did it please Providence to prepare the theatre for those events by which a new dispensation of liberty was to be communicated to man.  ~Edward Everett


Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.  ~Author Unknown


Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered.  I myself would say that it had merely been detected.  ~Oscar Wilde


Aborigines, n.:  Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country.  They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


He gained a world; he gave that world
Its grandest lesson:  "On! sail on!"
~Joaquin Miller


He stands in history as the completer of the globe.  ~John Sterling


Columbus went around the world in 1492.  That isn't a lot of strokes when you consider the course.  ~Lee Trevino


Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States.  Ask any Indian.  ~Robert Orben


Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.  ~Author Unknown


The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.  ~Marcel Proust


Columbus dreamed of an unknown shore,
At the rim of a far-flung sky.
~Author Unknown


He stands out among the beacon lights of history as a man of vision dominated by a definite purpose.  ~John George Jones


Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.  ~Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics"


Was this his face, and these the finding eyes
That plucked a new world from the rolling seas?
~George Edward Woodberry


Mistakes are the portals of discovery.  ~James Joyce


The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it.  ~Robert L. Park, in The New York Times, 7 December 1999


Hardly a name in profane history is more august than his.  Hardly another character in the world's record has made so little of its opportunities.  His discovery was a blunder; his blunder was a new world; the New World is his monument!  ~Justin Winsor


What faith in man must in our new world beat,
Thinking how once he saw before his face
The west and all the host of stars retreat
Into the silent infinite of space!
~George Edward Woodberry


He leaves in the background of fame all other navigators whose names are written in the priceless annals of discovery.  ~Emilio Castelar




To get something done a committee should consist of no more than three people, two of whom are absent.  ~Robert Copeland


A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.  ~Milton Berle


To kill time, a committee meeting is the perfect weapon.  ~Author Unknown


If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."  ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into committees.  That'll do them in.  ~Author Unknown


Our age will be known as the age of committees.  ~Ernest Benn


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


If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.  ~Arthur Goldberg


A committee is an animal with four back legs.  ~John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy


It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.  ~H.L. Mencken


A "Normal" person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee.  You know, "Each person puts in a pretty color and it comes out gray."  ~Alan Sherman


Football is a mistake.  It combines two of the worst things about American life.  It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.  ~George Will


A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.  ~Elbert Hubbard


A camel looks like a horse that was planned by a committee.  ~Author Unknown


A committee is a group of the unwilling chosen form the unfit, to do the unnecessary.  ~Author Unknown


If you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee.  ~Author Unknown


Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club?... Creative ideas do not spring from groups.  They spring from individuals.  The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam.  ~Alfred Whitney Griswold


We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.  ~Frank Moore Colby


I don't believe a committee can write a book.  It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps, but I don't believe it can write a book.  ~Arnold Toynbee


There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee.  ~Lester J. Pourciau


Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.  ~Katharine Whitehorn


Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith


People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.  ~Thomas Sowell




I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.  I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.  ~George Bernard Shaw


The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor.  ~Hubert H. Humphrey


One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion.  One is not just a man.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell


While the spirit of neighborliness was important on the frontier because neighbors were so few, it is even more important now because our neighbors are so many.  ~Lady Bird Johnson


Each of us is a being in himself and a being in society, each of us needs to understand himself and understand others, take care of others and be taken care of himself.  ~Haniel Long


We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.  ~Franklin Delano Roosevelt


Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


"Independence"... [is] middle-class blasphemy.  We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.  ~G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion, 1912


A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes - so check your value to the community.  ~Martin H. Fischer


On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.  ~Adlai E. Stevenson


I nod to a passing stranger, and the stranger nods back, and two human beings go off, feeling a little less anonymous.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Man's greatest blunder has been in trying to make peace with the skies instead of making peace with his neighbors.  ~Elbert Hubbard


In the end, poverty, putridity and pestilence; work, wealth and worry; health, happiness and hell, all simmer down into village problems.  ~Martin H. Fischer


A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's.  ~Richard Whately


We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.  ~Herman Melville


Few of us could bear to have ourselves for neighbors.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


When any fit of gloominess, or perversion of mind, lays hold upon you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaints.  ~Samuel Johnson

If you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

You can overcome anything if you don't bellyache.  ~Bernard M. Baruch

I think that the insane desire one has sometimes to bang and kick grumblers and peevish persons is a Divine instinct.  ~Robert Hugh Benson

Oh, wouldn't the world seem dull and flat with nothing whatever to grumble at?  ~W.S. Gilbert

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.  ~Jane Wagner

Untold suffering seldom is.  ~Franklin P. Jones

I will not be as those who spend the day in complaining of headache, and the night in drinking the wine that gives it.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity, and consume your own smoke with an extra draft of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.  ~William Osler

In trying to get our own way, we should remember that kisses are sweeter than whine.  ~Author Unknown

I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.  ~Joe Walsh

Do not listen to those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious.  ~Og Mandino

It is no use to grumble and complain;
It's just as cheap and easy to rejoice;
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain -
Why, rain's my choice.
~James Whitcomb Riley

Sweat silently.  Let's have no squawking about a little expenditure of energy.  ~Martin H. Fischer

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.  ~Randall Jarrell

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.  ~Antoine Rivarol

The tendency to whining and complaining may be taken as the surest sign symptom of little souls and inferior intellects.  ~Lord Jeffrey

People that pay for things never complain.  It's the guy you give something to that you can't please.  ~Will Rogers

Instead of complaining that the rosebush is full of thorns, be happy that the thorn bush has roses.  ~Proverb

To make a criticism is a bit like complaining about the shape of the Pyramids.  ~Author Unknown

The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.  ~Ronald Firbank

There is no effect more disproportionate to its cause than the happiness bestowed by a small compliment.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Some folks pay a compliment like they went down in their pocket for it.  ~Kin Hubbard

Women are never disarmed by compliments; men always are.  ~Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1899

'Twas never merry world
Since lowly feigning was called compliment.
~William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your effort to believe it.  ~Wilson Mizner

I can live for two months on a good compliment.  ~Mark Twain

What flatterers say, try to make true.  ~German Proverb

Pay with compliments and you will always be wealthy.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

It is great to get praise from the lips of taciturnity.  ~John Addington Symonds

A compliment is usually accompanied with a bow, as if to beg pardon for paying it.  ~A.W. Hare & J.C. Hare, Guesses at Truth

Men prefer brief praise, pitched high; women are satisfied with praise in a lower key, just so it goes on and on.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.  ~Lord Chesterfield

Current among men,
Like coin, the tinsel clink of compliment.
~Lord Alfred Tennyson, Princess

Flatterers look like friends, as wolves like dogs.  ~George Chapman

A person given to barefaced flattery, will usually balance the account with interest in your absence.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

It is hard to resist a flatterer who gets it right.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

God was just showing off when he created you.  ~From the movie Keeping the Faith

Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.  ~George Moore

That guy has muscles in places most people don't have places.  ~Bucky Waters, on Tom Hammonds

Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.
~Hartley Coleridge

The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.  ~Edward Thomas

Marge, you're as pretty as Princess Leia and as smart as Yoda.  ~Homer Simpson

Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.  ~Doug Larson

If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into committees.  That'll do them in.  ~Author Unknown

The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.  ~Author Unknown

Never let a computer know you're in a hurry.  ~Author Unknown

To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.  ~Bill Vaughan, 1969 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Treat your password like your toothbrush.  Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.  ~Clifford Stoll

User, n.  The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."  ~Dave Barry

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.  ~Edsger W. Dijkstra

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.  ~Joseph Campbell

Computing is not about computers any more.  It is about living.  ~Nicholas Negroponte

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
~David Dixon, 1998, winning entry of the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

Computers, huh?  I've heard it all boils down to just a bunch of ones and zeroes.... I don't know how that enables me to see naked women, but however it works, God bless you guys.  ~From the television show King of Queens, spoken by the character Doug Heffernan

After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.  ~John Pierce

Hardware:  where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is.  Software:  where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is.  ~Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top

But they are useless.  They can only give you answers.  ~Pablo Picasso, about computers

Computers have lots of memory but no imagination.  ~Author Unknown

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
~Suzie Wagner,  1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

As network administrator I can take down the network with one keystroke.  It's just like being a doctor but without getting gooky stuff on my paws.  ~Scott Adams ("Dogbert")

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.  ~Scott Adams

Database:  the information you lose when your memory crashes.  ~Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.  ~Mitch Ratcliffe

Back up my hard drive?  How do I put it in reverse?  ~Author Unknown

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.  ~Andy Rooney

Don't anthropomorphize computers - they hate it.  ~Author Unknown

Hardware:  the parts of a computer that can be kicked.  ~Jeff Pesis

I haven't lost my mind; I have a tape back-up somewhere.  ~Author Unknown

I just wish my mouth had a backspace key.  ~Author Unknown

Spreadsheet:  a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.  ~Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top

Don't explain computers to laymen.  Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.  ~Robert A. Heinlein

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.  ~One of Murphy's Laws of Technology

A picture is worth a thousand words but it takes 3,000 times the disk space.  ~Author Unknown

If it draws blood, it's hardware.  ~Author Unknown

In God we trust, all others we virus scan.  ~Author Unknown

It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy.  Computers have to become human-literate.  ~Nicholas P. Negroponte

Rebooting is a wonder drug - it fixes almost everything.  ~Garrett Hazel, "Help Desk Blues," 2002

A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind.  ~Joseph Weizenbaum

Jesus saves!  The rest of us better make backups.  ~Author Unknown

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.  ~John F. Kennedy

RAM disk is not an installation procedure.  ~Author Unknown

The attention span of a computer is only as long as its power cord.  ~Author Unknown

The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec/sec.  ~Marcus Dolengo

The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little.  ~Eric Porterfield

Industry executives and analysts often mistakenly talk about strategy as if it were some kind of chess match.  But in chess, you have just two opponents, each with identical resources, and with luck playing a minimal role.  The real world is much more like a poker game, with multiple players trying to make the best of whatever hand fortune has dealt them.  In our industry, Bill Gates owns the table until someone proves otherwise.  ~David Moschella

Do files get embarrassed when they're unzipped?  ~Author Unknown

What do you call a doctor that fixes websites?  A URLologist.  ~Author Unknown

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that
~Margaret Segall,  1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.  ~Edsger W. Dijkstra

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.  ~Sydney J. Harris

There are 10 types of people in this world:  those who understand binary and those who don't.  ~Author Unknown

There are three kinds of death in this world.  There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network.  ~Guy Almes

Truth is, I wouldn't know a gigabyte from a snakebite.  ~Dolly Parton

Computers are like air conditioners.  They work fine until you start opening windows.  ~Author Unknown

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
~Peter Rothman,  1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven.  I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.  ~Bill Gates

There are two major products that came out of Berkeley:  LSD and UNIX.  We do not believe this to be a coincidence.  ~Jeremy S. Anderson

My computer kept beating the pants off me at chess, until I discovered that it was no match against me at kickboxing.  ~Author Unknown

Stay the patient course
Of little worth is your ire
The network is down
~David Ansel,  1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about.  It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work.  The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!  ~Richard P. Feynman

There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer.  ~J.H. Goldfuss

Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software.  ~Author Unknown

I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.  ~Dave Barry

A user and his leisure time are soon parted.  ~Author Unknown

Apathy Error:  Don't bother striking any key.  ~Author Unknown

At least my pencil never crashes!  ~Author Unknown

There is a chasm
of carbon and silicon
the software can't bridge
~Rahul Sonnad,  1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

DOS computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide.  Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form.  ~Author Unknown

Home is where you hang your @.  ~Author Unknown

To have no errors
Would be life without meaning
No struggle, no joy
~Brian M. Porter,  1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

I wish life had an Undo function.  ~Author Unknown

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

If Bill Gates had a dime for every time Windows crashes... oh, wait a minute, he already does.  ~Author Unknown

In the old days, people robbed stagecoaches and knocked off armored trucks.  Now they're knocking off servers.  ~Richard Power

Mac users swear by their computers.  PC users swear at their computers.  ~Author Unknown

I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end."  ~Douglas Adams

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.  ~Werner von Braun

Microsoft, where quality is job 1.1.  ~Author Unknown

Software is slowing faster than hardware is accelerating.  ~Martin Reiser, quoted by Nicklaus Wirth, 1995, which spawned "Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away," author unknown, referring to CEOs of Intel and Microsoft

Some people can hack it, others can't.  ~Author Unknown

The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!  ~Richard Feynman

Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.  ~Doug Gwyn

Unix is simple.  It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.  ~Dennis Ritchie

Unix never says "please."  ~Rob Pike

The Unix philosophy basically involves giving you just enough rope to hang yourself.  And then a couple of feet more, just to be sure.  ~Author Unknown

Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result.  ~Alan Turing, about computers

What boots up must come down.  ~Author Unknown

Windows is just DOS in drag.  ~Author Unknown

Computers must be female.  No one but the creator understands their internal logic.  The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.  The message "Bad command or file name" is about as informative as, "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, then I'm certainly not going to tell you."  Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for later retrieval.  As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.  ~Author Unknown

Computers must be male.  As soon as you commit to one you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model.  In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.  Big power surges knock them out for the rest of the day.  ~Author Unknown

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.  ~Eleanor Roosevelt

It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes.  ~Sally Field

Don't let people drive you crazy when you know it's in walking distance.  ~Author Unknown

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven.
~William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.  ~David Brinkley

It's not who you are that holds you back, it's who you think you're not.  ~Author Unknown

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.  ~Roderick Thorp, Rainbow Drive

It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.  ~W.C. Fields

Whether you think you can or think you can't - you are right.  ~Henry Ford

I quit being afraid when my first venture failed and the sky didn't fall down.  ~Allen H. Neuharth

If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.  ~Vincent Van Gogh

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know.  Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.  ~Buckminster Fuller

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 light from within.  ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Don't live down to expectations.  Go out there and do something remarkable.  ~Wendy Wasserstein

Success comes in cans, not cant's.  ~Author Unknown

Put your future in good hands - your own.  ~Author Unknown

What a fool, quoth he, am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty!  I have a key in my bosom, called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in Doubting Castle.  ~John Bunyan

I am not a has-been.  I am a will be.  ~Lauren Bacall

The light of starry dreams can only be seen once we escape the blinding cities of disbelief.  ~Shawn Purvis, ShawnPurvis.com

I'm not old enough to play baseball or football.  I'm not eight yet.  My mom told me when you start baseball, you aren't going to be able to run that fast because you had an operation.  I told Mom I wouldn't need to run that fast.  When I play baseball, I'll  just hit them out of the park.  Then I'll be able to walk.  ~Edward J. McGrath, Jr., "An Exceptional View of Life," quoted in Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen, 1993

If you really put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.  ~Author Unknown

Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.  ~Peter T. Mcintyre

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.  ~Anaïs Nin, Diary, 1969

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.  ~Richard Bach, Illusions

You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.  ~Michael Jordan

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.  ~Edmund Hillary

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

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.  ~Bruce Barton

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.  Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort.  ~Sydney Smith

Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway.  ~Mary Kay Ash

Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

Always act like you're wearing an invisible crown.  ~Author Unknown

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.  ~Paul Tillich

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.  ~Michel de Montaigne

People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet.  ~Sa'Di

It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.  ~Sally Kempton, Esquire, 1970

When the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, it may be that they take better care of it there.  ~Cecil Selig

Other people's opinion of you does not have to become your reality.  ~Les Brown

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
You're on your own.
And you know what you know.
You are the guy who'll decide where to go.
~Dr. Seuss

Confidence is preparation.  Everything else is beyond your control.  ~Richard Kline

Knock the "t" off the "can't."  ~Samuel Johnson

Sex appeal is fifty percent what you've got and fifty percent what people think you've got.  ~Sophia Loren

They are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.  ~Christian Bovee

We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.  ~Edgar Allan Poe

Your value is the product of your thoughts.  Do not miscalculate your self worth by multiplying your insecurities.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

If you doubt yourself, then indeed you stand on shaky ground.  ~Henrik Ibsen

Nothing reduces the odds against you like ignoring them.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.  ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1958, spoken by the character Holly Golightly

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.  ~Henry S. Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street, 1940, commonly misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

The horizon, to remind you of your courage, sends its gentle waves of confidence to kiss your feet.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Never dull your shine for somebody else.  ~Tyra Banks, America's Next Top Model, "The Girl Who Is Afraid of Heights," original airdate 17 October 2007

 If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.  ~Thomas Alva Edison

Always hold your head up, but be careful to keep your nose at a friendly level.  ~Max L. Forman

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.  ~William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1604

The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.  ~Ellen Goodman

I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate.  It was not a matter of bad or good luck.  When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.  ~Anaïs Nin

Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.  ~William Hazlitt

Your problem is you're... too busy holding onto your unworthiness.  ~Ram Dass

Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.  ~Michel de Montaigne 

If you are going to doubt something, doubt your limits.  ~Don Ward

It's me who is my enemy
Me who beats me up
Me who makes the monsters
Me who strips my confidence.
~Paula Cole, "Me," This Fire

The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.  ~Andrew Carnegie

Life marks us all down, so it's just as well that we start out by overpricing ourselves.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

A gold medal is a nice thing - but if you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it.  ~From Cool Runnings

Don't let anyone steal your dream.  It's your dream, not theirs.  ~Dan Zadra

If I am not for myself, who will be?  ~Pirke Avoth

All of us have wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.  ~Charles Dickens

We all have our limitations, but when we listen to our critics, we also have theirs.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Self-love seems so often unrequited.  ~Anthony Powell

Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.  ~Henry David Thoreau

There are offences given and offences not given but taken.  ~Izaak Walton

Do not doubt the goodness in you.  It is inappropriate.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Men harm others by their deeds, themselves by their thoughts.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows.  ~John Powell

Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.  ~Veronica A. Shoffstall, "After a While," 1971

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.  ~Epicurus

If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.  ~Nicholas de Chamfort

I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.  ~Louisa May Alcott

How often in life we complete a task that was beyond the capability of the person we were when we started it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.  That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.  Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.  We all derive from the same source.  There is no mystery about the origin of things.  We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.  ~Henry Miller, Sexus

Pay no attention to what the critics say.  A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.  ~Jean Sibelius

Self-confidence grows on trees, in other people's orchards.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.  ~African Proverb

The best way to gain self-confidence is to do what you are afraid to do.  ~Author Unknown

Be proud to wear you.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Be humble, for the worst thing in the world is of the same stuff as you; be confident, for the stars are of the same stuff as you.  ~Nicholai Velimirovic

Great tranquility of heart is his who cares for neither praise nor blame.  ~Thomas à Kempis

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.  ~André Dubus

Chiefly the mold of a man's fortune is in his own hands.  ~Francis Bacon

God wisely designed the human body so that we can neither pat our own backs nor kick ourselves too easily.  ~Author Unknown

We probably wouldn't worry about what people think of us if we could know how seldom they do.  ~Olin Miller

As soon
Seek roses in December, ice in June;
Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff;
Believe a woman or an epitaph,
Or any other thing that's false, before
You trust in critics.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"

You're never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.  ~Lou Holtz and John Heisler, The Fighting Spirit

[Self-]assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.  ~George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, 1921

Mediocrity is a hand-rail.  ~Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Mes pensées

All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.... Build, therefore, your own world.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Oliver Wendell Holmes once attended a meeting in which he was the shortest man present.  "Dr. Holmes," quipped a friend, "I should think you'd feel rather small among us big fellows."  "I do," retorted Holmes, "I feel like a dime among a lot of pennies."  ~Author Unknown

The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.  ~Sonya Friedman

We are like the little branch that quivers during a storm, doubting our strength and forgetting we are the tree - deeply rooted to withstand all of life's upheavals.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs.  Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.  ~E.F. Schumacher

Many men are like unto sausages:  Whatever you stuff them with, that they will bear in them.  ~Alexi Konstantinovich Tolstoy

Only as high as I reach can I grow,
Only as far as I seek can I go,
Only as deep as I look can I see,
Only as much as I dream can I be.
~Karen Ravn

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.  We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small does not serve the world.  There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.  We are all meant to shine, as children do.  We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.  It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.  ~Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles," 1992 (commonly misattributed to Nelson Mandela, 1994 inauguration speech)

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.  ~Gene Fowler, Skyline, 1961

No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.  ~William Ellery Channing, 1838 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Don't think you're on the right road just because its a well-beaten path.  ~Author Unknown

Most people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions.  ~Author Unknown

Stubborness does have its helpful features.  You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow.  ~Glen Beaman

Read, every day, something no one else is reading.  Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.  Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do.  It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.  ~Christopher Morley

You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note.  ~Doug Floyd

The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.  ~Rita Mae Brown, Venus Envy

A "Normal" person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee.  You know, "Each person puts in a pretty color and it comes out gray."  ~Alan Sherman

Labels are for filing.  Labels are for clothing.  Labels are not for people.  ~Martina Navratilova

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.  ~Colin Wilson

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.  ~Dr. Seuss

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature made us individuals, as she did the flowers and the pebbles; but we are afraid to be peculiar, and so our society resembles a bag of marbles, or a string of mold candles.  Why should we all dress after the same fashion?  The frost never paints my windows twice alike.  ~Lydia Maria Child

Do not follow where the path may lead.  Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities.  The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary.  ~Albert Einstein

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.  ~Bertrand Russell

Not all those who wander are lost.  ~J.R.R. Tolkien

You have enemies?  Good.  That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.  ~Winston Churchill

We are half ruined by conformity; but we should be wholly ruined without it.  ~Charles Dudley Warner

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.  ~Voltaire

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.  ~J.K. Galbraith

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me.  The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.  ~George Bernard Shaw

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.  ~John Fischer

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.  ~Norman Mailer

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.  ~Mark Twain

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.  If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened.  But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.  ~John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Doubt is healthy.  It tests one's convictions.  ~From the movie Haunted

Before you can break out of prison, you must first realize you're locked up.  ~Author Unknown

Ain't no man can avoid being average, but there ain't no man got to be common.  ~Satchel Paige

One who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints.  ~Proverb

Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing.  Find your own path, and stay on it.  ~Paul Vixie

I may not be different, but I'm definitely not the same.  ~William J. Dybus

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.  ~Herman Melville

We need - and should encourage and honour - not only discoverers of facts hitherto unknown but explorers of ideas and rethinkers of values.  ~Walter Moberly, The Crisis in the University

If you don't control your mind, someone else will.  ~John Allston

In the moment of our creation we receive the stamp of our individuality; and much of life is spent in rubbing off or defacing the impression.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out.  ~Stephen A. Kallis, Jr.

To be dragged in the wake of the passive flock and to pass a hundred and one times beneath the shears of the shepherd, or to die alone like a brave eagle on a rocky crag of a great mountain: that is the dilemma.  ~Praxedis Guerrero, RegeneraciÓn, 18 February 1911

I guess I've spent my life listening to what wasn't being said.  ~Eli Khamarov, America Explained!

Human beings, for all their pretensions, have a remarkable propensity for lending themselves to classification somewhere within neatly labeled categories.  Even the outrageous exceptions may be classified as outrageous exceptions!  ~W.J. Reichmann

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.  ~Wilson Mizner

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.  ~Eric Hoffer, Passionate State of Mind, 1955

If you keep doing things like you've always done them, what you'll get is what you've already got.  ~Author Unknown

When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ, they showed me this picture of three oranges and a pear.  They asked me which one is different and does not belong, they taught me different was wrong.  ~Ani Difranco

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.  ~George Bernard Shaw

What we call human nature in actuality is human habit.  ~Jewel Kilcher, Pieces of You

It's a rash man who reaches a conclusion before he gets to it.  ~Jacob Levin

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.  ~Clarence Darrow

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.  ~Raymond E. Feist

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.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage.  But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us - and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.  ~Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

My theory is that the hardest work anyone does in life is to appear normal.  ~From the movie Ed TV

I don't rent space to anyone in my head.  ~Anonymous man on Candid Camera, answering Allen Funt's question about why he had not gotten upset

Only dead fish swim with the stream.  ~Malcolm Muggeridge

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.  ~G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903

Just because something is tradition doesn't make it right.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

And what is a good citizen?  Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual.  Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point.  A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.  ~H.L. Mencken

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.  ~Alexander Hamilton

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.  ~Fritz Perls

Don't let them tame you.  ~Isadora Duncan

One dog barks at something, and a hundred bark at the bark.  ~Chinese Proverb

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery.  A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause.  ~Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.  ~Anatole France

Crossing over the boundaries we've been taught to live within is a tough business.  But I'm getting the idea they're not so formidable.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.  ~Quentin Crisp

Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.  ~H.G. Wells, Crux Ansata

Fashion is more powerful than any tyrant.  ~Latin Proverb

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it - even if I have said it - unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.  ~Buddha

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.  ~Adlai Stevenson, speech, Princeton, 1954

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.  ~Juan Ramon Jimenez

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds.
~Bob Marley

The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by other people's rules, while quietly playing by your own.  ~Michael Korda

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.  I'm frightened of the old ones.  ~John Cage

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs.  But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.  ~Max Beerbohm

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.  ~Albert Camus

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.  ~William Faulkner

No.  ~President Jimmy Carter's daughter Amy, when asked if she had any message for the children of America

People still retain the errors of their childhood, their nation, and their age, long after they have accepted the truths needed to refute them.  ~Condorcet, Progress of the Human Mind, 1794

I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations.  ~Mary Wortley Montagu

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.  ~Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871

The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.  ~Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic, 1799

There are some men who turn a deaf ear to reason and good advice, and willfully go wrong for fear of being controlled.  ~La Bruyère, Characters, 1688

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," 1841

The most damaging phrase in the language is:  "It's always been done that way."  ~Grace Hopper

A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.  ~Robert Peel

The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading "Keep Off."  ~Carl Sandburg

Habit rules the unreflecting herd.  ~William Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 1822

The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb.  This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.  ~Albert Einstein, letter to Sigmund Freud, 30 July 1932

The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.  ~Henrik Ibsen

If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking.  ~George S. Patton

Yield to all and you will soon have nothing to yield.  ~Aesop, "The Man and His Two Wives," Fables

Conformity is that jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.  ~John F. Kennedy

Our concern must be to live while we're alive... to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.  ~Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Every man is a reformer until reform tramps on his toes.  ~Edgar Watson Howe, Country Town Sayings, 1911

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or that our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than we suspect of what we think.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.  ~Vincent Van Gogh

I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.  ~Henry Bessemer (discovered new method of producing steel)

If you believe everything you read, you better not read.  ~Japanese Proverb

I merely observe that all living things are manipulated.  As long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly.  Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can't be thwarted.  ~Orson Scott Card

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.  ~Walter Bagehot

Public opinion... requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.  ~Walter Bagehot, Biographical Studies, 1907

Unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed.  ~D.H. Lawrence

We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is.  Someone - our parents, teachers, analysts - hypnotizes us to "see" the world and construe it in the "right" way.  These others label the world, attach names and give voices to the beings and events in it, so that thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us.  The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we become undeaf, unblind and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meanings in the new book of our existence.  Be careful in your choice of hypnotists.  ~Sidney Jourard

I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side - I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts.  ~Bethania McKenstry

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.  ~Virginia Woolf

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.  ~Jonathan Swift

Every man who is truly a man must learn to be alone in the midst of all the others, and if need be against all the others.  ~Romain Rolland

Minorities are the stars of the firmament; majorities, the darkness in which they float.  ~Martin H. Fischer

And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will?  When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the will of others?  ~Galileo Galilei

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body.  He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.  ~George Santayana

We must not overlook the role that extremists play.  They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.  ~Abraham Flexner, Universities, 1930

I don't want to give up anymore.  I want to be strong and stand for what I think even in the face of those most spiteful.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice.  Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.  ~E.H. Chapin

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity:  monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine.  The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man:  members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.  ~Thomas Szasz

If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself and your dreams.  ~Clive Barker

How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.  ~Alfred de Musset

Orthodoxy:  That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note-Book, 1927

If you do not agree with the prevalent point of view, be ready to explain why.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.  ~Christopher Morley

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.  ~John Stuart Mill

We submit to the majority because we have to.  But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect.  ~Ambrose Bierce, Epigrams

Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.  ~Robert Ingersoll, Individuality

Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance.  ~Mark Twain, 1907, letter to Harriet E. Whitmore

Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, address, Columbia University, 31 May 1954

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

I believe in rules.  Sure I do.  If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?  ~Leo Durocher

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt.  He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the ssockal cord would fully suffice.  ~Albert Einstein

Never assume the obvious is true.  ~William Safire, Sleeper Spy

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.  ~Mark Twain

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.  ~Mark Twain

History does not teach fatalism.  There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.  People get the history they deserve.  ~Charles de Gaulle

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.  ~Seneca

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.  ~Marshall McLuhan

They will say that you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence.  The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.  ~Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957 (Thanks, Mary)

Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

History is particularly important in throwing light on the source of our attitudes about sex because many of the assumptions we make are not necessarily scientific or rational but holdovers of past belief systems that are no longer held by modern society.  ~Vern Bullough

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.  ~Bill Vaughan

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.  ~Moritz Guedemann

I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity.  ~Bill Veeck

If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.  ~Katherine Hepburn

To be a genuine individualist requires a great deal of strength and courage.  It is never easy to chart new territory, to cross new frontiers, or to introduce subtle shadings to an established color.  ~Toller Cranston

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved.  Do you suppose I care?  A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!  My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made.  It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I'd not do so.  ~Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade

When some folks agree with my opinions I begin to suspect I'm wrong.  ~Kin Hubbard

Custom meets us at the cradle and leaves us only at the tomb.  ~Robert Ingersoll, Individuality

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.  ~S.I. Hayakawa

You laugh at me because I am different; I laugh because you are all the same.  ~Daniel Knode

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow.  So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.  ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life.  The only completely consistent people are the dead.  ~Aldous Huxley

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.  ~Bernard Berenson, Notebook, 1892

The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.  ~Foe Ancis

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.  ~George Bernard Shaw

My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant's bill of fare.
And, when they were served,
he regarded them with a penetrating stare.
Then he spoke great words of wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
"To eat these things," said my uncle,
"You must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what's solid,
but you must spit out the air!"
And as you partake of the world's bill of fare,
that's darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.
~Theodore Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), from a commencement address

What makes you think that human beings are sentient and aware?  There's no evidence for it.  Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable.  For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.  The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.  Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their "beliefs."  The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings.  But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all.  We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists.  Any other view of our species is a self-congratulatory delusion.  ~Michael Crichton, The Lost World

Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.  ~Margaret Mitchell

A new idea is delicate.  It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip, and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.  ~Charlie Brower

I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.  ~William H. Mauldin

All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.  ~Paul Simon

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,
By reiteration chiefly.
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 1856

False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.  ~Joseph De Maistre

From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

I am not eccentric.  It's just that I am more alive than most people.  I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.  ~Dame Edith Sitwell

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.  ~Lillian Hellman

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.  ~Mohandas K. Gandhi, quoted in E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.  ~William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990

God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains.  If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Trade Center every two weeks.  ~Environmental Defense Fund advertisement, Christian Science Monitor, 1990

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.  ~Author Unknown

Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world.  ~Pam Shaw

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.  ~Eric Hoffer

You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.  ~Vernon Howard

The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.  ~Mad Magazine

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other.  It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.  Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash.  The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.  ~John Berger

Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.  ~Channing E. Phillips, speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.  ~Elwyn Brooks White

I may be a pessimist, but the philosophy of anti-thrift just now coming into being seems to me the greatest danger to the peace of the world.  ~Adriano Tilgher

There must be more to life than having everything!  ~Maurice Sendak

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.  ~Francis H. Bradley

Mammon, n.:  The god of the world's leading religion.  ~Ambrose Bierce

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.  ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

He who buys what he does not need steals from himself.  ~Author Unknown

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.  ~Unknown

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.  ~Edward Abbey

The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more.  ~Kin Hubbard

In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.  ~Richard Bach

Forethought and temperance are the virtues which produced thrift, and with thrift the economic progress of society.  And those are the virtues which today are gravely compromised.  ~Adriano Tilgher

Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist.  At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.  ~George Orwell

Who covets more, is evermore a slave.  ~Robert Herrick

The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have - and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.  ~Paul Heyne



It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.  ~Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, 1945


God made the country, and man made the town.  ~William Cowper, The Task


When I go out into the countryside and see the sun and the green and everything flowering, I say to myself Yes indeed, all that belongs to me!  ~Henri Rousseau


I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.  ~Sydney Smith


People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only townspeople had immortal souls, and that it was only in the city that the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had an unobscured glow.  ~George William Russell


I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.  ~Leonardo da Vinci


Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher quality of life not because of what it has, but rather because of what it does not have!  ~Don A. Dillman


Anybody can be good in the country.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray


There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets.  ~Samuel Johnson


Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds,
Exhilarate the spirit, and restore
The tone of languid nature.
~William Cowper


When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country.  ~William Hazlitt, Table Talk


As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration.  I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children.  ~John Adams


I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.  ~Vita Sackville-West, Country Notes


My father asserted that there was no better place to bring up a family than in a rural environment.... There's something about getting up at 5 a.m., feeding the stock and chickens, and milking a couple of cows before breakfast that gives you a lifelong respect for the price of butter and eggs.  ~Bill Vaughan


Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.  ~Samuel Johnson  (Thanks, Frank Lynch)

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.  ~Ambrose Redmoon

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every day you either see a scar or courage.  Where you dwell will define your struggle.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.  ~Winston Churchill

Courage doesn't always roar.  Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow.  ~Mary Anne Radmacher

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.  ~Mark Twain

People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.  ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.  Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, 1894

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.  ~Dan Rather

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do.  There can be no courage unless you're scared.  ~Edward Vernon Rickenbacker

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.  ~Marvin Kitman

Coward:  A man in whom the instinct of self-preservation acts normally.  ~Sultana Zoraya

Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid.  ~Franklin P. Jones

Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

If God wanted us to be brave, why did He give us legs?  ~Marvin Kitman

Coward:  One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.  ~Ambrose Bierce

Sometimes the biggest act of courage is a small one.  ~Lauren Raffo

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.  ~Ernest Hemingway, Men at War, 1942

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.  ~Thomas Fuller

Fear and courage are brothers.  ~Proverb

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.  ~C.S. Lewis

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.  ~John F. Kennedy

One man with courage makes a majority.  ~Andrew Jackson

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.  ~Raymond Lindquist

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.  ~Michel de Montaigne

When we are afraid we ought not to occupy ourselves with endeavoring to prove that there is no danger, but in strengthening ourselves to go on in spite of the danger.  ~Mark Rutherford

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

Courage, in the final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence.  ~Kurt Goldstein

To live with fear and not be afraid is the final test of maturity.  ~Edward Weeks

A man of courage never wants weapons.  ~Author Unknown

Do not look upon this world with fear and loathing.  Bravely face whatever the gods offer.  ~Morihei Ueshiba

Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if you have to dig a little.  ~Tori Amos

It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.  ~Aesop

A brave arm makes a short sword long.  ~Author Unknown

No one has yet computed how many imaginary triumphs are silently celebrated by people each year to keep up their courage.  ~Henry S. Haskins

There is no such thing as bravery; only degrees of fear.  ~John Wainwright

Look at hopelessness in the face and say: "We are simply not meant to be together."  Hold courage's hand and walk away.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

I'm not funny.  What I am is brave.  ~Lucille Ball

Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.  ~Charles Kennedy

For without belittling the courage with which men have died, we should not forget those acts of courage with which men have lived.  ~John F. Kennedy

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.  ~Dorothy Bernard

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.  ~George Smith Patton

Courage is... the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.  ~David Ben-Gurion

Courage is knowing what not to fear.  ~Plato

Optimism is the foundation of courage.  ~Nicholas Murray Butler

Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.  ~Diane de Poitiers

To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.  ~Coventry Patmore

Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.  ~John Wayne

Necessity does the work of courage.  ~Nicholas Murray Butler

Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.  ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1678

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.  ~G.K. Chesterton

Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.  ~Horace Smith

Courage is to feel the daily daggers of relentless steel and keep on living.  ~Douglas Malloch

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.  ~Albert Camus

Courage is nine-tenths context.  What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.  ~Joseph Epstein 

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

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.  ~Arthur Koestler

Courage is a kind of salvation.  ~Plato

Valor is a gift.  Those having it never know for sure if they have it till the test comes.  And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.  ~Carl Sandburg

Courage ought to have eyes as well as arms.  ~H.G. Bohn

You can't test courage cautiously.  ~Anne Dillard

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned.  When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.  ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

I believe that courage is the sum of strength and wisdom.  You take away wisdom from the equation - courage may turn to rage.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.  ~Jean Paul Richter

Have the courage to live.  Anyone can die.  ~Robert Cody

Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.  ~Thomas de Quincey

All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.  ~Grant Wood

As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists.  ~Joan Gussow

A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out of a garden.  ~Samuel Johnson

The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.
~Ogden Nash

When a cow laughs, does milk come out her nose?  ~Author Unknown

I guess cows aren't into the four food groups, especially when they are two of them.  ~Anthony Clark

All is not butter that comes from the cow.  ~Proverb

Opie, you haven't finished your milk.  We can't put it back in the cow, you know.  ~From The Andy Griffith Show

Condensed milk is wonderful.  I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans.  ~Fred Allen

The friendly cow, all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 feet per second, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter.  ~Dave Barry

Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of the field in hopes that the cow will back up to them.  ~Elbert Hubbard

A mind of the caliber of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.  ~George Bernard Shaw

The cow is nothing but a machine which makes grass fit for us people to eat.  ~John McNulty

Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.  ~Proverb

Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.  ~Mark Twain

Who was the first guy that look at a cow and said, "I think that I'll drink whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them?"  ~Bill Watterson

Milk the cow, but do not pull off the udder.  ~Greek Proverb

If happiness truly consisted in physical ease and freedom from care, then the happiest individual would not be either a man or a woman; it would be, I think, an American cow.  ~William Lyon Phelps

Whoever needs milk, bows to the animal.  ~Yiddish Saying

The human body has no more need for cows' milk than it does for dogs' milk, horses' milk, or giraffes' milk.  ~Michael Klaper

Tongue - a variety of meat, rarely served because it clearly crosses the line between a cut of beef and a piece of a dead cow.  ~Bob Ekstrom

I'd rather kiss a mad cow on the muzzle than a smoker on the mouth.  ~Paul Carvel

I go about looking at horses and cattle.  They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young.  I am sick with envy of them.  ~Sherwood Anderson

To laugh is human but to moo is bovine.  ~Author Unknown

There's nothing like sitting back and talking to your cows.  ~Russell Crowe

There's something about getting up at 5 a.m., feeding the stock and chickens, and milking a couple of cows before breakfast that gives you a lifelong respect for the price of butter and eggs.  ~Bill Vaughan

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.  ~Henry Louis Mencken

Custard:  A detestable substance produced by a malevolent conspiracy of the hen, the cow, and the cook.  ~Ambrose Bierce

He who lets the goat be laid on his shoulders is soon after forced to carry the cow.  ~Italian Proverb

Greatness alone in not enough, or the cow would outrun the hare.  ~Proverb

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.  ~Dennis Wholey

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.  ~Lord Chesterfield

We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box.  ~Robert Fulghum

Life is about using the whole box of crayons.  ~RuPaul

Stop counting crayons, just draw pictures.  ~Mark Scharenbroich

A box of new crayons!  Now they're all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect.  Soon they'll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors.  Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic.  ~Bill Watterson

If you want an interesting party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone.  ~Robert Fulghum

Never invest in any idea you can't illustrate with a crayon.  ~Peter Lynch

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon.  A happiness weapon.  A beauty bomb.  And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one.  It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air.  Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas.  And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight.  Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in.  With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest.  And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.  ~Robert Fulghum

Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.  ~Al Hirschfeld

Actually, all education is self-education.  A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education.  What you receive is like the outlines in a child's coloring book.  You must fill in the colors yourself.  ~Louis L'Amour

Give crayons.  Adults are disturbingly impoverished of these magical dream sticks.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Beauty without colour seems somehow to belong to another world.  ~Murasaki Shikibu

Art is your personal diary where you may color your thoughts and emotions on a page.  ~Sara, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Coloring outside the lines is a fine art.  ~Kim Nance

Life is like a box of crayons.  Most people are the eight-color boxes, but what you're really looking for are the 64-color boxes with the sharpeners on the back.  I fancy myself to be a 64-color box, though I've got a few missing.  It's okay though, because I've got some more vibrant colors like periwinkle at my disposal.  I have a bit of a problem though in that I can only meet the eight-color boxes.  Does anyone else have that problem?  I mean, there are so many different colors of life, of feeling, of articulation, so when I meet someone who's an eight-color type I'm like, "hey girl, magenta!" and she's like, "oh, you mean purple!" and she goes off on her purple thing, and I'm like, "no - I want magenta!"  ~John Mayer

Colors are the smiles of nature.  ~Leigh Hunt

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.  ~G.K. Chesterton

I wish I were a white crayon, that way no one could use me.  ~Author Unknown

Certain peer pressures encourage little fingers to learn how to hold a football instead of a crayon.  Rumors circulate around the schoolyard:  kids who draw or wear white socks and bring violins to school on Wednesdays might have cooties.  I confess to having yielded to these pressures.  ~Chris Van Allsburg

My childhood smells like a box of Crayola crayons.  ~Terri Guillemets

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue.  Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid. ~Jules Feiffer

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.  ~Claude Monet

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.  ~A.S. Byatt

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.  ~Paul Gauguin

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?  Can one really explain this?  No.  ~Pablo Picasso

Poured a cup of hot sepia coffee in a wisteria flowered mug, dandelion sunshine spilling through the periwinkle sky.  ~Terri Guillemets

I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colors.  I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.  ~Winston Churchill

My skin is kind of sort of brownish
Pinkish yellowish white.
My eyes are greyish blueish green,
But I'm told they look orange in the night.
My hair is reddish blondish brown,
But it's silver when it's wet.
And all the colors I am inside
Have not been invented yet.
~Shel Silverstein, "Colors"

Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.  ~Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Pink is not just a color, it's an attitude.  ~Author Unknown

Your attitude is like a box of crayons that color your world.  Constantly color your picture gray, and your picture will always be bleak.  Try adding some bright colors to the picture by including humor, and your picture begins to lighten up.  ~Allen Klein



The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.  ~Henry Maudsley


When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.  ~Kahlil Gibran


Let your tears come.  Let them water your soul.  ~Eileen Mayhew


Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion.  I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.  ~Kurt Vonnegut


Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.  ~Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860


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


Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.  ~Christian Nevell Bovee


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


Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.  ~Antoine Rivarol


Let your tears flow and where they go, let your sorrows follow.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com


A woman wears her tears like jewelry.  ~Author Unknown


Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.  ~Hosea Ballou


To weep is to make less the depth of grief.  ~William Shakespeare, King Henry the Sixth


It is some relief to weep; grief is satisfied and carried off by tears.  ~Ovid


Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.  ~Golda Meir


Tears are the safety valve of the heart when too much pressure is laid on it.  ~Albert Smith


Tears are Gods gift to us.  Our holy water.  They heal us as they flow.  ~Rita Schiano, Sweet Bitter Love, 1997, published by The Reed Edwards Company


Every woman is wrong until she cries, and then she is right - instantly.  ~Sam Slick (Thomas Chandler Haliburton)


Women are never landlocked:  they're always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Tears are Summer showers to the soul.  ~Alfred Austin, Savonarola


Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.
~Dorothy Parker


Tears are the silent language of grief.  ~Voltaire, A Philosophical Dictionary


Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.  ~Robert Harling, Steel Magnolias


What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.  ~Jewish Proverb


Every tear should live its purpose.  Don't ever wipe the reason away.  ~JessicaSimpson


I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry.  I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week.  I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar


The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.  ~Isak Dinesen


Unless you have been very, very lucky, you have undoubtedly experienced events in your life that have made you cry.  So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.  ~Lemony Snicket


More grievous than tears is the sight of them.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


I often want to cry.  That is the only advantage women have over men - at least they can cry.  ~Jean Rhys


It is such a secret place, the land of tears.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince




I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.  ~Eleanor Roosevelt


Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.  ~Bernard Baruch


The cure for boredom is curiosity.  There is no cure for curiosity.  ~Dorothy Parker  (Thanks, Kaitlin)


I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.  ~Franklin P. Adams


I have no special talents.  I am only passionately curious.  ~Albert Einstein


Be curious always!  For knowledge will not acquire you; you must acquire it.  ~Sudie Back


Curiosity is a willing, a proud, an eager confession of ignorance.  ~S. Leonard Rubinstein, Writing: A Habit of Mind


The important thing is not to stop questioning.  Curiosity has its own reason for existing.  One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.  ~Albert Einstein


Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.  ~James Stephens, The Crock of Gold





Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.  ~Arnold Edinborough





Curiosity is only vanity.  Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk.  We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées


I keep six honest serving-men,
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
~Rudyard Kipling


Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.  ~David Sedaris


There are no foolish questions, and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.  ~Charles Proteus Steinmetz


The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.  ~Ralph W. Sockman


The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.  ~Bishop Mandell Creighton




There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain.  They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern.  ~Edgar A. Shoaff


It is not a fragrant world.  ~Raymond Chandler


I don't answer the phone.  I get the feeling whenever I do that there will be someone on the other end.  ~Fred Couples


I love mankind - it's people I can't stand.  ~Charles M. Schulz, Go Fly a Kite, Charlie Brown


Sarcasm is the sour cream of wit.  ~Author Unknown


There is no such thing as inner peace.  There is only nervousness and death.  ~Fran Lebowitz


A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  ~Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, 1893


I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.  ~W. Somerset Maugham


[I] put the question directly to myself:  "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant:  would this be a great joy and happiness to you?"  And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!"  ~John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1909


When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.  ~William Shakespeare, King Lear


Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more.
~William Cowper


Life is one long process of getting tired.  ~Samuel Butler


Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.  ~Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1704


Of the demonstrably wise there are but two:  those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied by drink.  ~Mark Twain, Note-Book, 1935


Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral?  Is it because we are not the person involved?  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894


The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Nothing is more miserable than man,
Of all upon the earth that breathes and creeps.
~Homer, Iliad


Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew.  ~William Shakespeare, Hamlet


I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it raging and roaring like a wild beast in its den.  It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free and ending just where it began.  ~William Hazlitt


The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.  ~G.K. Chesterton


Not to be born at all would be the best thing for man, never to behold the sun's scorching rays; but if one is born, then one is to press as quickly as possible to the portals of Hades, and rest there under the earth.  ~Thiognis


We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.  ~Kenneth Clark


Men hate to be misunderstood, and to be understood makes them furious.  ~Edgar Saltus


Things are not as bad as they seem.  They are worse.  ~Bill Press


I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities.  It is the only pleasure I have left.  ~Voltaire


He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind.  ~Willa Cather


We semaphore from ship to ship, but they're sinking, too.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Nothing begins, and nothing ends, that is not paid with moan; for we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.  ~Francis Thompson


Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.  ~Ernest Hemingway  (Thanks, Schanna)


Sometimes you wake up in the morning and wish your parents had never met.  ~Bill Fitch






We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.  ~Djuna Barnes


The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness.  ~Martin Esslin


[T]he army of wrongness rampant in the world might as well march over me.  ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1958


I see it all perfectly:  there are two possibilities, one can either do this or do that.  My honest opinion and friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it, you will regret both.  ~Kierkegaard


Comfort, or revelation:  God owes us one of these, but surely not both.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Janie's a pretty typical teenager - angry, insecure, confused.  I wish I could tell her that's all going to pass, but I don't want to lie to her.  ~Alan Ball, American Beauty, 1999


I like long walks, especially when they're taken by people who annoy me.  ~Fred Allen


My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.  ~Jean Rostand


You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd.  You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.  It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced.  In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers.  That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.  ~Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden


Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.  ~Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby


I would ask something more of this world, if it had something more.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Happy endings are only stories that haven't finished yet.  ~Simon Kinberg, Mr. & Mrs. Smith


It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyze before we can live happily in this world.  ~Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort


He seems
To have seen better days, as who has not
Who has seen yesterday?
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Werner


Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.  ~David T. Wolf


The only thing that could spoil a day was people.  People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.  ~Ernest Hemingway


That I could clamber to the frozen moon
And draw the ladder after me.
~Author Unknown


I do not believe in revealed religion - I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without speculating on another.  ~Lord Byron, 1778-1824, letter to Rev. Francis Hodgson, 1811


The mad are happy, the sane ignorant; those of us stuck on the sane side of madness or the mad fringe of sanity are in a purgatorial cage.  ~Anonymous


Many of us go through life feeling as an actor might feel who does not like his part, and does not believe in the play.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


If there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart.  ~Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy


My heart is glass, daily shattered.  ~Jaesse Tyler


The enthusiastic, to those who are not, are always something of a trial.  ~Alban Goodier


All our lives we are putting pennies - our most golden pennies - into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.  ~William Makepeace Thackeray


Man is the cruelest animal.  At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1892


Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.  ~Horace Walpole


Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.  ~Lemony Snicket


I grieve for life's bright promise, just shown and then withdrawn.  ~William Cullen Bryant


Medvedénko:  "Why do you always wear black?"
Masha:  "I am in mourning for my life."
~Anton Chekhov, The Seagull


There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.  ~Maya Angelou, PBS, 28 March 1988


A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people.  ~Peter McArthur


How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will.  ~Albert Einstein



God made everything out of nothing.  But the nothingness shows through.  ~Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, 1942


Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.  ~James Thurber, Further Fables for Our Time, 1956


This world is gradually becoming a place
Where I do not care to be any more.
~John Berryman


Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too.  But it never helps.  ~Lemony Snicket


The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.  ~Charles de Gaulle 


All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy.
~Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1651


You have come into a hard world.  I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


Paradoxical as it sounds, many intellectuals prefer life in the mud to life in clear water.  ~Martin H. Fischer


It's just life - wake up and smell the thorns.  ~From the movie Meet Joe Black



I had a lover's quarrel with the world.  ~Robert Frost, The Lesson for Today, 1942




Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.  ~William Stafford


How can we know the dancer from the dance?  ~William Butler Yeats


There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.  ~Edwin Denby


Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance.  ~Mr. Miyagi, The Next Karate Kid, 1994


We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.  ~Japanese Proverb


On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


Nobody cares if you can't dance well.  Just get up and dance.  ~Dave Barry


Dancing is like dreaming with your feet!  ~Constanze


The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music.  Bodies never lie.  ~Agnes de Mille


Dancing faces you towards Heaven, whichever direction you turn.  ~Terri Guillemets


Dancers are the messengers of the gods.  ~Martha Graham


Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.  ~Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle


You can dance anywhere, even if only in your heart.  ~Author Unknown


Dancing: the vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.  ~Ted Shawn, Time, 25 July 1955


Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.  ~George Balanchine


There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.  ~Vicki Baum


To dance is to be out of yourself.  Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.  ~Agnes De Mille


Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.  ~Faith Whittlesey


Dancing with the feet is one thing, but dancing with the heart is another.  ~Author Unknown


Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance till you drop.
~W.H. Auden


In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.  ~Martha Graham


It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a dancer.  ~Shanna LaFleur


I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance.  ~George Balanchine






Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.  ~Charles Baudelaire


Dance first.  Think later.  It's the natural order.  ~Samuel Beckett


Stifling an urge to dance is bad for your health - it rusts your spirit and your hips.  ~Terri Guillemets


I am a dancer.  I believe that we learn by practice.  Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living.... In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit.  One becomes in some area an athlete of God.  ~Martha Graham, c.1953


Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...  ~Susan Polis Shutz


Dancing is the poetry of the foot.  ~John Dryden


Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is not mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.  ~Havelock Ellis


Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we should dance.  ~Author Unknown


Dance is the hidden language of the soul.  ~Martha Graham


Dancing is moving to the music without stepping on anyone's toes, pretty much the same as life.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.  ~Martha Graham


Through dancing many maidens have been unmaidened, whereby I may say it is the storehouse and nursery of bastardy.  ~John Northbrooke


Shake it 'til the moon becomes the sun.  ~Vada Nobles, Carl Sturken, Evan Rogers, and Alisha Brooks, "Pon de Replay," performed by Rihanna


Movement never lies.  It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.  ~Martha Graham


Dance is a song of the body.  Either of joy or pain.  ~Martha Graham


The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.  ~Mata Hari


We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive... and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.  ~D.H. Lawrence


Dancing is the world's favorite metaphor.  ~ Kristy Nilsson


And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer.  For the dance is his ideal.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


Light quirks of music, broken and uneven,
Make the soul dance upon a jig to Heav'n.
~Alexander Pope, Moral Essays


Do you think dyslexic people have difficulty dancing to "Y.M.C.A."?  ~Dave Sokolowski


Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.  ~Ezra Pound


I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what it too deep to find for words.  ~Ruth St. Denis


Talk about dance?  Dance is not something to talk about.  Dance is to dance.  ~Peter Saint James


Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.  ~Kurt Vonnegut


Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.  ~John Wain


To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak.  ~Hopi Indian Saying


They who love dancing too much seem to have more brains in their feet than in their head.  ~Terence


Dance is a delicate balance between perfection and beauty.  ~Author Unknown


Socrates learned to dance when he was seventy because he felt that an essential part of himself had been neglected.  ~Source Unknown


Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain.  ~Author Unknown


Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.  ~William James




To a father growing old nothing is dearer than a daughter.  ~Euripides


A daughter is a gift of love.  ~Author Unknown


A son is a son till he takes him a wife, a daughter is a daughter all of her life.  ~Irish Saying


Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter.  In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.  ~Joseph Addison


Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.  ~Jim Bishop


A daughter may outgrow your lap, but she will never outgrow your heart.  ~Author Unknown


Daughter am I in my mother's house, but mistress in my own.  ~Rudyard Kipling


A mother's treasure is her daughter.  ~Catherine Pulsifer, Inspirational Words of Wisdom


A daughter is a little girl who grows up to be a friend.  ~Author Unknown


How the mother is to be pitied who hath handsome daughters!  Locks, bolts, bars, and lectures of morality are nothing to them: they break through them all.  They have as much pleasure in cheating a father and mother, as in cheating at cards.  ~John Gay


Mothers and daughters are closest, when daughters become mothers.  ~Author Unknown


If you would have a good wife, marry one who has been a good daughter.  ~Thomas Fuller


A daughter is the happy memories of the past, the joyful moments of the present, and the hope and promise of the future.  ~Author Unknown


A daughter is a day brightener and a heart warmer.  ~Author Unknown


Many a man wishes he were strong enough to tear a telephone book in half - especially if he has a teenage daughter.  ~Guy Lombardo


Many an Irish property was increased by the lace of a daughter's petticoat.  ~Irish Proverb


He that would the daughter win, must with the mother first begin.  ~English Proverb


A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity, that ever were written.  ~Thomas Jefferson


I have three daughters and I find as a result I played King Lear almost without rehearsal.  ~Peter Ustinov


Any astronomer can predict with absolute accuracy just where every star in the universe will be at 11.30 tonight.  He can make no such prediction about his teenage daughter.  ~James T. Adams






A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self.  ~Author Unknown


As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.  ~Oscar Wilde


The mother-daughter relationship is the most complex.  ~Wynonna Judd


What the daughter does, the mother did.  ~Jewish Proverb


Fame is rot; daughters are the thing.  ~James Matthew Barrie


The woman who bore me is no longer alive, but I seem to be her daughter in increasingly profound ways.  ~Johnnetta Betsch Cole


There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.  ~John Gregory Brown


My eleven year old daughter mopes around the house all day waiting for her breasts to grow.  ~Bill Cosby


Clever father, clever daughter; clever mother, clever son.  ~Russian Proverb


As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.  ~Solomon Ibn Gabirol


Ability is what will get you to the top if the boss has no daughter.  ~Author Unknown


And thou shalt in thy daughter see,
This picture, once, resembled thee.
~Ambrose Philips


Of all the haunting moments of motherhood, few rank with hearing your own words come out of your daughter's mouth.  ~Victoria Secunda


A father is always making his baby into a little woman.  And when she is a woman he turns her back again.  ~Enid Bagnold


A busy mother makes slothful daughters.  ~Portuguese Proverb


Daughters are like flowers, they fill the world with beauty, and sometimes attract pests.  ~Author Unknown


The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage.  A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, "Daddy, I need to ask you something," he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan.  ~Garrison Keillor


And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.  ~Victoria Secunda


A father is available to help his daughter balance both her love and her anger toward her mother, to moderate the inevitable emotional extremes in the intense mother-daughter equation.  With Daddy's steadying influence daughters can learn to be comfortable with healthy anger, rather than feeling that they must be eternal good girls who must at all costs conceal it.  ~Victoria Secunda


We've begun to raise daughters more like sons, but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.  ~Gloria Steinem


Every mother hopes that her daughter will marry a better man than she did, and is convinced that her son will never find a wife as good as his father did.  ~Martin Andersen-Nex


Suddenly, through birthing a daughter, a woman finds herself face to face not only with an infant, a little girl, a woman-to-be, but also with her own unresolved conflicts from the past and her hopes and dreams for the future.... As though experiencing an earthquake, mothers of daughters may find their lives shifted, their deep feelings unearthed, the balance struck in all relationships once again off kilter.  ~Elizabeth Debold and Idelisse Malave


Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.  ~Gloria Naylor


A father... knows exactly what those boys at the mall have in their depraved little minds because he once owned such a depraved little mind himself.  In fact, if he thinks enough about the plans that he used to have for young girls, the father not only will support his wife in keeping their daughter home but he might even run over to the mall and have a few of those boys arrested.  ~Bill Cosby


God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.  ~Author Unknown

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.  ~Mark Twain

I'm not afraid of death.  It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.  ~Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon, 1929

There is always death and taxes; however, death doesn't get worse every year.  ~Author Unknown

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.  ~Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.  ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Gaily I lived as ease and nature taught,
And spent my little life without a thought,
And am amazed that Death, that tyrant grim,
Should think of me, who never thought of him.
~René Francois Regnier

The fear of death follows from the fear of life.  A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.  ~Mark Twain

We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears.  We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.  ~David Sarnoff

Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.  ~Francis Bacon, Essays

If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn't going to be much fun.  ~From the television show Roseanne

Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.  ~Henry Van Dyke

He who doesn't fear death dies only once.  ~Giovanni Falcone

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.  It is as though they were traveling abroad.  ~Marcel Proust

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality
~Emily Dickinson

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.  ~Percival Arland Ussher

The idea is to die young as late as possible.  ~Ashley Montagu

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.  ~Lord Byron

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.  ~Euripides

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up.  I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something.  Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery.  People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap.  Who wants flowers when you're dead?  Nobody.  ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1945

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.  ~Leonardo Da Vinci

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.  ~Alice Walker

I shall not die of a cold.  I shall die of having lived.  ~Willa Cather

Death is a distant rumor to the young.  ~Andrew A. Rooney

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.  ~Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death.  ~Kenneth Patchen

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery.  He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does.  In place of this we have death.  ~Charles Sanders Peirce

Death, the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath.  ~John Donne

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.  ~Seneca

Years, following years, steal something every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.
~Horace

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation.  For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.  ~Albert Einstein

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.  ~Socrates

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight....
Not people die but worlds die in them.
~Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "People"

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go.  ~Jean de La Fontaine

Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.  ~Attributed to George Carlin

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.  ~Erik H. Erikson

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  ~Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky

Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.  ~Herodotus

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future.  It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.  ~Marcel Proust

Thou art not dead! Thou art the whole
Of life that quickens in the sod.
~Charles Hanson Towne

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.  ~Tennessee Williams, "The Rose Tattoo"

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.  ~Madame de Stael

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.  ~Edvard Munch

There's nothing certain in a man's life except this:  That he must lose it.  ~Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Death is not the greatest loss in life.  The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.  ~Norman Cousins

The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Death is a debt we all must pay.  ~Euripides

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

People living deeply have no fear of death.  ~Anaiïs Nin, Diary, 1967

To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.  Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses:  so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man

Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.  ~George Bernard Shaw

I knew a man who once said, "death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back."  ~From the movie Gladiator

Our birth is nothing but our death begun.  ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

I want a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant clergyman.  I want to hedge my bets.  ~Wilson Mizner

No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well.  ~Plato

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?  ~Kahlil Gibran, from "The Prophet"  (Thanks, Roxalanne)

Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor.  ~Homer, Iliad

Death is the surest calculation that can be made.  ~Ludwig Bchner, Force and Matter

Suicide is man's way of telling God, "You can't fire me - I quit."  ~Bill Maher, on Politically Incorrect, 1995

Suicide is... the sincerest form of criticism life gets.  ~Wilfred Sheed, The Good Word, 1978

After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.  ~J.K. Rowling

You will never find that life for which you are looking.  When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.  ~The Epic of Gilgamesh

Death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits.
~John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

My soul is full of whispered song;
My blindness is my sight;
The shadows that I feared so long
Are all alive with light.
~Alice Cary, Dying Hymn

God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality.  ~Jacques Rigaut, Pensées

Embalm, v.:  To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds.  By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew.  The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility.  We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and the rose are languishing for a nibble at his glutaeus maximus.  ~Ambrose Bierce

He first deceas'd; She for a little tri'd
To live without him: lik'd it not, and di'd.
~Henry Worton

The goal of all life is death.  ~Sigmund Freud

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight.  Not people die but worlds die in them.  ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Death is a release from the impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and the hard service of the flesh.  ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

For death,
Now I know, is that first breath
Which our souls draw when we enter
Life, which is of all life center.
~Edwin Arnold

When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.  ~H.L. Mencken

Oh, for the time when I shall sleep 
Without identity.
~Emily Bronte

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.  ~Charles de Gaulle

And they die an equal death - the idler and the man of mighty deeds.  ~Homer, Iliad

Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death.
~Witter Bynner, "The Patient to the Doctors"

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident - It is as common as life.  ~Henry David Thoreau, 11 March 1842, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream.
~Ryokan

To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.  ~C.G. Jung

Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure.  ~Mortimer Collins

Death is patiently making my mask as I sleep.  Each morning I awake to discover in the corners of my eyes the small tears of his wax.  ~Philip Dow

For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.  ~William Penn

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Paradise -
I see flowers
from the cottage where I lie.
~Yaitsu's death poem, 1807

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.  ~Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

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

On a large enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

God made death so we'd know when to stop.  ~Steven Stiles

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.  That signifies nothing.  For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.  ~Albert Einstein

There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death.  ~Harvey Cushing

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.  ~Stewart Alsop

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.  ~Thomas Browne, An Essay on Death

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.  ~Doris Day

Well, right now... I'm not dead.  But when I am, it's like... I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.... An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees.  ~J.J. Furnas

Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again.
~George Eliot, The Choir Invisible

Die, v.:  To stop sinning suddenly.  ~Elbert Hubbard

I intend to live forever.  So far, so good.  ~Steven Wright

I wouldn't mind dying - it's the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me.  ~R. Geis

Anyhow, it's not so bad.... I mean, when you're dead, you just have to be yourself.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

You can be a king or a street sweeper,
but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.
~Robert Alton Harris

Death is life's way of telling you you're fired.  ~Author Unknown

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.  ~John Muir



He looks the whole world in the face for he owes not any man.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


The only man who sticks closer to you in adversity than a friend is a creditor.  ~Author Unknown


Who goeth a borrowing
Goeth a sorrowing.
~Thomas Tusser


Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need most.  ~American Proverb


Wouldst thou shut up the avenues of ill,
Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson


In God we trust; all others must pay cash.  ~American Saying


Creditors have better memories than debtors.  ~Benjamin Franklin


Promises make debt, and debt makes promises.  ~Dutch Proverb


Another way to solve the traffic problems of this country is to pass a law that only paid-for cars be allowed to use the highways.  ~Will Rogers


Debt, n.  An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


Debt is the worst poverty.  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732


Buy what thou hast no Need of and ere long thou shalt sell thy Necessaries.  ~Benjamin Franklin


There are plenty of ways to get ahead.  The first is so basic I'm almost embarrassed to say it:  spend less than you earn.  ~Paul Clitheroe


No man's credit is as good as his money.  ~E.W. Howe, Sinner Sermons


Who recalls when folks got along without something if it cost too much?  ~Kin Hubbard


Today, there are three kinds of people:  the have's, the have-not's, and the have-not-paid-for-what-they-have's.  ~Earl Wilson


Christmas is the season when you buy this year's gifts with next year's money.  ~Author Unknown


When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage.  ~Bill Balance


Credit buying is much like being drunk.  The buzz happens immediately and gives you a lift.... The hangover comes the day after.  ~Joyce Brothers


Bankruptcy stared me in the face, but one thought kept me calm; soon I'd be too poor to need an anti-theft alarm.  ~Gina Rothfels


Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.  ~Author Unknown


A peacefulness follows any decision, even the wrong one.  ~Rita Mae Brown

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.  ~William James

It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.  ~Roy Disney

Choices are the hinges of destiny.  ~Attributed to both Edwin Markham and Pythagoras

Consider what you think justice requires, and decide accordingly.  But never give your reasons; for your judgment will probably be right, but your reasons will certainly be wrong.  ~Lord Mansfield

Some persons are very decisive when it comes to avoiding decisions.  ~Brendan Francis

When one bases his life on principle, 99 percent of his decisions are already made.  ~Author Unknown

You've got a lot of choices.  If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.  ~Steven D. Woodhull (U.S. geologist, 1976-)

Life is the sum of all your choices.  ~Albert Camus

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.  ~David Russell

Although every man believes that his decisions and resolutions involve the most multifarious factors, in reality they are mere oscillation between flight and longing.  ~Herman Broch

Indecision becomes decision with time.  ~Author Unknown

Do not plant your dreams in the field of indecision, where nothing ever grows but the weeds of "what-if."  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant.  ~Anthony Robbins

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.  ~Flora Whittemore

To decide is to walk facing forward with nary a crick in your neck from looking back at the crossroads.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon

Decisions become easier when your will to please God outweighs your will to please the world.  ~Anso Coetzer

In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.  ~T.S. Eliot

Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions.  ~Author Unknown

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reconsider, v.  To seek a justification for a decision already made.  ~Ambrose Bierce

The inability to make a decision has often been passed off as patience.  ~Author Unknown

Everything is something you decide to do, and there is nothing you have to do.  ~Denis Waitley

Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.  ~Johnny Carson

A dentist at work in his vocation always looks down in the mouth.  ~George D. Prentice

Every tooth in a man's head is more valuable than a diamond.  ~Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605

If suffering brought wisdom, the dentists office would be full of luminous ideas.  ~Mason Cooley

You don't have to brush your teeth - just the ones you want to keep.  ~Author Unknown

Some tortures are physical
And some are mental,
But the one that is both
Is dental.
~Ogden Nash

Too many of today's children have straight teeth and crooked morals.  ~Unknown high school principal

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Dentist:  a prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coin out of your pocket.  ~Ambrose Bierce

I find that most men would rather have their bellies opened for five hundred dollars than have a tooth pulled for five.  ~Martin H. Fischer

For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently.
~William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

We do have a zeal for laughter in most situations, give or take a dentist.  ~Joseph Heller

Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.  ~William R. Alger

If a patient cannot clean his teeth, no dentist can clean them for him.  ~Martin H. Fischer

An aching tooth is better out than in.
To lose a rotting member is a gain.
~Richard Baxter, Poetical Fragments

My health plan doesn't cover dental, so I enrolled my teeth as 32 dependents, each needing a complete physical once a year.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A man loses his illusions first, his teeth second, and his follies last.  ~Helen Rowland

There are two things in life that a sage must preserve at every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth.  Some evils admit of consolations, but there are no comforters for dyspepsia and the toothache.  ~Henry Lytton Bulwer

You know, sometimes a man just can't satisfy all of a woman's desires.  Which is why God invented dental floss.  ~Author Unknown

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.  ~Mark Twain

The tongue is ever turning to the aching tooth.  ~Thomas Fuller

I've been to the dentist several times so I know the drill.  ~Author Unknown

Some old women and men grow bitter with age; the more their teeth drop out, the more biting they get.  ~George D. Prentice

I had very good dentures once.  Some magnificent gold work.  It's the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.  ~Graham Greene

I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identified by their dental records.  What I can't understand is, if they don't know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?  ~Paul Merton

Tooth decay was a perennial national problem that meant a mouthful of silver for patients, and for dentists a pocketful of gold.  ~Claudia Wallis

Life is uncertain.  Eat dessert first.  ~Ernestine Ulmer

I doubt whether the world holds for anyone a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice cream.  ~Heywood Broun

Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate.  ~Sandra Boynton

I want to have a good body, but not as much as I want dessert.  ~Jason Love

Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos.  ~Don Kardong

Stressed spelled backwards is desserts.  Coincidence?  I think not!  ~Author Unknown

There are two kinds of people in the world:  those who love chocolate, and communists.  ~Leslie Moak Murray

Vegetables are a must on a diet.  I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread and pumpkin pie.  ~Jim Davis

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.  ~Carl Sagan

Ice cream is exquisite.  What a pity it isn't illegal.  ~Voltaire

Always serve too much hot fudge sauce on hot fudge sundaes.  It makes people overjoyed, and puts them in your debt.  ~Judith Olney

A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around.  ~E.W. Howe

Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate!  ~Attributed to Sandra J. Dykes

Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.  ~Judith Viorst

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.  ~Fernando Pessoa

I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman:  subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert.  Delicately made up, not highly rouged.  Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts.  ~Graham Kerr

Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone.  ~Jim Fiebig

Don't wreck a sublime chocolate experience by feeling guilty.  ~Lora Brody

Cookies are made of butter and love.  ~Norwegian Proverb

There are four basic food groups:  milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, and chocolate truffles.  ~Author Unknown

Seize the moment.  Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart.  ~Erma Bombeck

Self-discipline implies some unpleasant things to me, including staying away from chocolate and keeping my hands out of women's pants.  ~Oleg Kiselev

I don't drown my sorrows; I suffocate them with chocolate.  ~Author Unknown

Ice cream is happiness condensed.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

If you get melted chocolate all over your hands, you're eating it too slowly.  ~Author Unknown

Chocolate is like medicine - but as with medicine, the key is the proper dose.  Don't overdo it.  ~Edward "Grandpa" Jones

If there's no chocolate in heaven, I'm not going.  ~Author Unknown

'Twill make old women young and fresh,
Create new motions of the flesh.
And cause them long for you know what,
If they but taste of chocolate.
~James Wadworth

Fruit only angers my need for chocolate.  ~Jason Love

After eating chocolate you feel godlike, as though you can conquer enemies, lead armies, entice lovers.  ~Emily Luchetti

If your sweet tooth says candy - your wisdom tooth says Cerreta.  ~Slogan of the Cerreta Candy Company in Glendale, Arizona (cerreta.com)

Chocolate is the answer.  Who cares what the question is.  ~Author Unknown

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.  That's my philosophy.  ~Thornton Wilder

There's nothing better than a good friend, except a good friend with chocolate.  ~Linda Grayson, "The Pickwick Papers"

Man cannot live on chocolate alone, but woman sure can.  ~Author Unknown

I don't think a really good pie can be made without a dozen or so children peeking over your shoulder as you stoop to look in at it every little while.  ~John Gould

If not for chocolate, there would be no need for control top pantyhose.  An entire garment industry would be devastated.  ~Author Unknown

Never trust a skinny ice cream man.  ~Ben Cohen

I'd give up chocolate, but I'm no quitter!  ~Author Unknown

Happiness is life served up with a scoop of acceptance, a topping of tolerance and sprinkles of hope, although chocolate sprinkles also work.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Save the earth.  It's the only planet with chocolate.  ~Author Unknown

Whipped cream isn't whipped cream at all unless it's been whipped with whips. Just as a poached egg isn't a poached egg unless it's been stolen from the woods in the dead of night!  ~Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Anything is good if it's made of chocolate.  ~Jo Brand

But I, when I undress me
Each night, upon my knees
Will ask the Lord to bless me
With apple-pie and cheese.
~Eugene Field

Pie...it fills the cracks of the heart.  Go away, pain.  ~Kevin James, Mall Cop

A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.  ~Author Unknown

The 12-step chocoholics program:  Never be more than 12 steps away from chocolate!  ~Terry Moore

I'll obey them in the winter when the doctors say to me
I must give up ham and ssockach, and obedient I'll be.
To relieve my indigestion in December they can try,
But there's none of them can stop me when it's time for cherry pie.
~Edgar A. Guest, The Milwaukee Journal, 1935 May 29

There's no diet list I'll follow that would rule out cherry pie.  ~Edgar A. Guest, The Milwaukee Journal, 1935 May 29

Ice cream cravings are not to be taken lightly.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

If any man has drunk a little too deeply from the cup of physical pleasure; if he has spent too much time at his desk that should have been spent asleep; if his fine spirits have become temporarily dulled; if he finds the air too damp, the minutes too slow, and the atmosphere too heavy to withstand; if he is obsessed by a fixed idea which bars him from any freedom of thought:  if he is any of these poor creatures, we say, let him be given a good pint of amber-flavored chocolate... and marvels will be performed.  ~Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.  ~Truman Capote

Money may talk, but chocolate sings.  ~Author Unknown

We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

God gave the angels wings, and he gave humans chocolate.  ~Author Unknown

All I really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt!  ~Charles Schulz

At no other time has Nature concentrated such a wealth of valuable nourishment into such a small space as in the cocoa bean.  ~Alexander von Humboldt

As with most fine things, chocolate has its season.  There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes:  any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.  ~Sandra Boynton

You can say this for ready-mixes - the next generation isn't going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother used to make.  ~Earl Wilson

Coffee makes it possible to get out of bed.  Chocolate makes it worthwhile.  ~Author Unknown

My favorite thing in the world is a box of fine European chocolates which is, for sure, better than sex.  ~Alicia Silverstone

Once in a young lifetime one should be allowed to have as much sweetness as one can possibly want and hold.  ~Judith Olney

Chocolate is an antidepressant, which is especially useful as you start to gain weight.  ~Jason Love

Scoops of mint ice cream with chips of chocolate cows.  ~Jim Bishop, "On the English Countryside," NY Journal-American, 28 September 1957, quoted in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations compiled by James B. Simpson

Carob works on the principle that, when mixed with the right combination of fats and sugar, it can duplicate chocolate in color and texture.  Of course, the same can be said of dirt.  ~Sandra Boynton

There's nothing wrong with me a little ice cream won't fix.    ~Author Unknown

Put "eat chocolate" at the top of your list of things to do today.  That way, at least you'll get one thing done.  ~Author Unknown

Everyone has a price - mine is chocolate.  ~Author Unknown

Ideas should be clear and chocolate thick.  Las cosas claras y el chocolate espeso.  ~Spanish Proverb

If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you.  But you have no chocolate!  I think of that again and again!  My dear, how will you ever manage?  ~Marquise de Sévigné

I don't cry over spilt milk, but a fallen scoop of ice cream is enough to ruin my whole day.  ~Terri Guillemets

Unless your name ends in Baskin or Robbins, I really can't fit you into my schedule right now.  ~Uniek Swain

After about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of that one.  And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate.  ~Mel Gibson, about what women want

Researchers have discovered that chocolate produced some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana.  The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but can't remember what they are.  ~Author Unknown

A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.  ~Anthelme Brillat-Savarin



When we lose twenty pounds... we may be losing the twenty best pounds we have!  We may be losing the pounds that contain our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty.  ~Woody Allen


Don't dig your grave with your own knife and fork.  ~English Proverb


Your stomach shouldn't be a waist basket.  ~Author Unknown


A diet is the penalty we pay for exceeding the feed limit.  ~Author Unknown


More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society


The cardiologist's diet:  If it tastes good, spit it out.  ~Author Unknown


One should eat to live, not live to eat.  ~Cicero, Rhetoricorum LV


Inside some of us is a thin person struggling to get out, but they can usually be sedated with a few pieces of chocolate cake.  ~Author Unknown


I've decided that perhaps I'm bulimic and just keep forgetting to purge.  ~Paula Poundstone


In the Middle Ages, they had guillotines, stretch racks, whips and cahins.  Nowadays, we have a much more effective torture device called the bathroom scale.  ~Stephen Phillips


It's okay to be fat.  So you're fat.  Just be fat and shut up about it.  ~Roseanne Barr


I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.  ~Jean Kerr, "Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall," The Snake Has All the Lines, 1958


People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas.  ~Author Unknown


When friends tell you how awesome you look, drop the "I still have more to go" crap.  You worked hard and you deserve the compliment!  ~Jillian Michaels


The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.  ~Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave


Albert Einstein, who discovered that a tiny amount of mass is equal to a huge amount of energy, which explains why, as Einstein himself so eloquently put it in a famous 1939 speech to the Physics Department at Princeton, "You have to exercise for a week to work off the thigh fat from a single Snickers."  ~Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 50


Avoid any diet that discourages the use of hot fudge.  ~Don Kardong


Reality check:  you can never, ever, use weight loss to solve problems that are not related to your weight.  At your goal weight or not, you still have to live with yourself and deal with your problems.  You will still have the same husband, the same job, the same kids, and the same life.  Losing weight is not a cure for life.  ~Phillip C. McGraw, The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Loss Freedom, 2003


If nature had intended our skeletons to be visible it would have put them on the outside of our bodies.  ~Elmer Rice


I keep trying to lose weight... but it keeps finding me!  ~Author Unknown


I never worry about diets.  The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.  ~Mae West


I've been on a diet for two weeks and all I've lost is fourteen days.  ~Totie Fields


Rich, fatty foods are like destiny:  they too, shape our ends.  ~Author Unknown


I'm on a seafood diet.  I see food and I eat it.  ~Author Unknown


The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your fat are really good friends.  ~Author Unknown


Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate!  ~Attributed to Sandra J. Dykes


Stressed spelled backwards is desserts.  Coincidence?  I think not!  ~Author Unknown


The biggest seller is cookbooks and the second is diet books - how not to eat what you've just learned how to cook.  ~Andy Rooney


Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.  ~Peter De Vries


If hunger is not the problem, then eating is not the solution.  ~Author Unknown


Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.  ~Author Unknown


If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model.  Kate Moss?  Well, she would have been the paintbrush.  ~Dawn French


No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat.  Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.  ~George Bernard Shaw


The first thing you lose on a diet is your sense of humor.  ~Author Unknown


Food is like sex:  when you abstain, even the worst stuff begins to look good.  ~Beth McCollister


I go up and down the scale so often that if they ever perform an autopsy on me they'll find me like a strip of bacon - a streak of lean and a streak of fat.  ~Texas Guinan


Life itself is the proper binge.  ~Julia Child


Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for they are sticking to their diets.  ~Author Unknown


I recently had my annual physical examination, which I get once every seven years, and when the nurse weighed me, I was shocked to discover how much stronger the Earth's gravitational pull has become since 1990.  ~Dave Barry


Dieting is wishful shrinking.  ~Author Unknown


It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.  ~Plutarch


Bigger snacks mean bigger slacks.  ~Author Unknown


I'm allergic to food.  Every time I eat it breaks out into fat.  ~Jennifer Greene Duncan






Food has replaced sex in my life; now, I can't even get into my own pants.  ~Author Unknown


A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.  ~Author Unknown


I have gained and lost the same ten pounds so many times over and over again my cellulite must have déjà vu.  ~Jane Wagner


It's not women's fault that diets don't work.  It's not perversity of lack of willpower.  God did this - in Her great wisdom.  ~Dr. Wayne Callaway


Where do you go to get anorexia?  ~Shelley Winters


To lengthen your life, shorten your meals.  ~Proverb


You can't lose weight by talking about it.  You have to keep your mouth shut.  ~Author Unknown


I think I just ate my willpower.  ~Author Unknown


If you really want to be depressed, weigh yourself in grams.  ~Jason Love


Brain cells come and brain cells go, but fat cells live forever.  ~Author Unknown


I am a nutritional overachiever.  ~Author Unknown


The second day of a diet is always easier than the first.  By the second day, you're off it.  ~Jackie Gleason


Saying yes to the skinny jeans by saying no to the donuts.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


Dieting is not a piece of cake.  ~Author Unknown


You know it's time to diet when you push away from the table and the table moves.  ~Quoted in The Cockle Bur


If food is your best friend, it's also your worst enemy.  ~Edward "Grandpa" Jones, 1978


I have a great diet.  You're allowed to eat anything you want, but you must eat it with naked fat people.  ~Ed Bluestone


A diet is a plan, generally hopeless, for reducing your weight, which tests your will power but does little for your waistline.  ~Herbert B. Prochnow


I'm not overweight.  I'm just nine inches too short.  ~Shelley Winters


Dieters live life in the fasting lane.  ~Author Unknown


Govern well thy appetite, lest Sin
Surprise thee, and her black attendant, Death.
~John Milton


People say that losing weight is no walk in the park.  When I hear that I think, yeah, that's the problem.  ~Chris Adams


As for food, half of my friends have dug their graves with their teeth.  ~Chauncey M. Depew


I lied on my Weight Watchers list.  I put down that I had 3 eggs... but they were Cadbury chocolate eggs.  ~Caroline Rhea


To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.  ~Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876


I'm on a 90-day wonder diet.  Thus far, I've lost 45 days.  ~Author Unknown


The commonest form of malnutrition in the western world is obesity.  ~Mervyn Deitel


Flabbergasted, adj.  Appalled over how much weight you have gained.  ~Author Unknown


I'm in shape.  Round is a shape... isn't it?  ~Author Unknown


Your body is a temple, not a drive-through.  ~Author Unknown


I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades.  I've lost a total of 789 pounds.  By all accounts, I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.  ~Erma Bombeck


My advice if you insist on slimming:  Eat as much as you like - just don't swallow it.  ~Harry Secombe


I am not a glutton - I am an explorer of food.  ~Erma Bombeck


Forget about calories - everything makes thin people thinner, and fat people fatter.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.  ~Benjamin Franklin


When I buy cookies I eat just four and throw the rest away.  But first I spray them with Raid so I won't dig them out of the garbage later.  Be careful, though, because that Raid really doesn't taste that bad.  ~Janette Barber


Clogged with yesterday's excess, the body drags the mind down with it.  ~Horace


They are sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.  ~William Shakespeare


We never repent of having eaten too little.  ~Thomas Jefferson, 1825


Obesity is a condition which proves that the Lord does not help those who help themselves and help themselves and help themselves.  ~Author Unknown


History is apt to judge harshly those who sacrifice tomorrow for today.  ~Harold MacMillan


It would be far easier to lose weight permanently if replacement parts weren't so handy in the refrigerator.  ~Hugh Allen


A waist is a terrible thing to mind.  ~Tom Wilson


I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.  ~Author Unknown


The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates.  ~Dave Barry


I'm not afraid of heights, just widths.  ~Steven Wright  (Note: This is used out of its original context here, to fit into a dieting theme. Original quote is "I took my dog for a walk around the building - on the ledge. I'm not afraid of heights, just widths.")


Gluttony is not a secret vice.  ~Orson Welles


If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information:  french-fried potatoes are out.  ~Jean Kerr


All people are made alike -
of bones and flesh and dinner -
Only the dinners are different.
~Gertrude Louise Cheney


My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four.  Unless there are three other people.  ~Orson Welles


We're the country that has more food to eat than any other country in the world, and with more diets to keep us from eating it.  ~Author Unknown


If I can't have too many truffles I'll do without.  ~Colette


The only way to lose weight is to check it as airline baggage.  ~Peggy Ryan


Fat is not a moral problem.  It's an oral problem.  ~Jane Thomas Noland


Never eat more than you can lift.  ~Miss Piggy


If you wish to grow thinner, diminish your dinner.  ~H.S. Leigh


Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.  ~Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave


There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.  ~Mark Twain


Probably nothing in the world arouses more false hopes than the first four hours of a diet.  ~Dan Bennett


Obesity is really widespread.  ~Joseph O. Kern II


She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when."  ~P.G. Wodehouse


Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow ye diet.  ~Lewis C. Henry


My wife is a light eater.  As soon as it's light, she starts to eat.  ~Henny Youngman


I bought a talking refrigerator that said "Oink" every time I opened the door.  It made me hungry for pork chops.  ~Marie Mott


Another good reducing exercise consists in placing both hands against the table edge and pushing back.  ~Robert Quillen


Don't go out of your weigh to please anyone but yourself.  ~Author Unknown




Diplomacy:  The art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock.  ~Wynn Catlin


Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.  ~Daniele Vare


A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.  ~Robert Frost


Diplomat:  A person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.  ~Caskie Stinett, Out of the Red, 1960


Diplomats are useful only in fair weather.  As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.  ~Charles de Gaulle


Diplomacy is to do and say
The nastiest thing in the nicest way.
~Bisaac Goldberg


When a diplomat says yes he means perhaps; when he says perhaps he means no; when he says no he is no diplomat.  ~Author Unknown


A diplomat's life is made up of three ingredients:  Protocol, Geritol, and alcohol.  ~Adlai E. Stevenson


A Foreign Secretary is forever poised between the cliché and the indiscretion.  ~Harold MacMillan


An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth.  ~Henry Wotton, Reliquiæ Wottonianæ


Diplomacy:  The business of handling a porcupine without disturbing the quills.  ~Author Unknown


I must acknowledge, once and for all, that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis.  ~Star Trek, Mr. Spock




There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.  ~Ben Williams


The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.  ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912


From the dog's point of view, his master is an elongated and abnormally cunning dog.  ~Mabel Louise Robinson


Dogs are miracles with paws.  ~Attributed to Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy


Man is a dog's idea of what God should be.  ~Holbrook Jackson


The dog is the only animal that has seen his god.  ~Author Unknown


Dogs' lives are too short.  Their only fault, really.  ~Agnes Sligh Turnbull


My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.  ~Edith Wharton


We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults.  Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.  ~George Eliot


I think dogs are the most amazing creatures; they give unconditional love.  For me they are the role model for being alive.  ~Gilda Radner


I think we are drawn to dogs because they are the uninhibited creatures we might be if we weren't certain we knew better.  They fight for honor at the first challenge, make love with no moral restraint, and they do not for all their marvelous instincts appear to know about death.  Being such wonderfully uncomplicated beings, they need us to do their worrying.  ~George Bird Evans, Troubles with Bird Dogs


Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.  ~Agnes Repplier


One reason a dog can be such a comfort when you're feeling blue is that he doesn't try to find out why.  ~Author Unknown


Scratch a dog and you'll find a permanent job.  ~Franklin P. Jones


I talk to him when I'm lonesome like; and I'm sure he understands.  When he looks at me so attentively, and gently licks my hands; then he rubs his nose on my tailored clothes, but I never say naught thereat.  For the good Lord knows I can buy more clothes, but never a friend like that.  ~W. Dayton Wedgefarth


When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!  ~David Starr Jordan


Properly trained, a man can be dog's best friend.  ~Corey Ford


If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.  ~Phil Pastoret


With the exception of women, there is nothing on earth so agreeable or necessary to the comfort of man as the dog.  ~Edward Jesse, Anecdote of Dogs


The dog is a yes-animal, very popular with people who can't afford to keep a yes-man.  ~Robertson Davies


Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.  ~Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter


My goal in life is to be as good of a person my dog already thinks I am.  ~Author Unknown


If dogs could talk, it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.  ~Andy Rooney


A dog is not "almost human" and I know of no greater insult to the canine race than to describe it as such.  ~John Holmes


If you get to thinking you're a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else's dog around.  ~Will Rogers


An old dog, even more than an old spouse, always feels like doing what you feel like doing.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The more I see of man, the more I like dogs.  ~Mme. de Staël


Did you ever notice when you blow in a dog's face he gets mad at you?  But when you take him in a car he sticks his head out the window.  ~Steve Bluestone


To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.  ~Aldous Huxley


They never talk about themselves but listen to you while you talk about yourself, and keep up an appearance of being interested in the conversation.  ~Jerome K. Jerome


Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in?  I think that is how dogs spend their lives.  ~Sue Murphy


Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.  ~Roger Caras


The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's.  ~Mark Twain, letter to W.D. Howells, 2 April 1899


The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.  ~Ambrose Bierce






A dog is one of the remaining reasons why some people can be persuaded to go for a walk.  ~O.A. Battista


In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi human.  The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.  ~Edward Hoagland


If dogs could talk, perhaps we would find it as hard to get along with them as we do with people.  ~Karel Čapek


An old dog, even more than an old spouse, always feels like doing what you feel like doing.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, and all the Virtues of Man, without his Vices.  This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the Memory of Boatswain, a Dog.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog"


The dog was created specially for children.  He is the god of frolic.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


The greatest love is a mother's; then a dog's; then a sweetheart's.  ~Polish Proverb


A man may smile and bid you hail
Yet wish you to the devil;
But when a good dog wags his tail,
You know he's on the level.
~Author Unknown


Dogs have given us their absolute all.  We are the center of their universe.  We are the focus of their love and faith and trust.  They serve us in return for scraps.  It is without a doubt the best deal man has ever made.  ~Roger Caras


No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.  ~Herman Melville, Redburn. His First Voyage, 1849


Anybody who doesn't know what soap tastes like never washed a dog.  ~Franklin P. Jones


Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound.  Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat.  ~Oxford Union Society, London, Rule 46


A cat, after being scolded, goes about its business.  A dog slinks off into a corner and pretends to be doing a serious self-reappraisal.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


In the world which we know, among the different and primitive geniuses that preside over the evolution of the several species, there exists not one, excepting that of the dog, that ever gave a thought to the presence of man.  ~Maurice Maeterlinck


Happiness is a warm puppy.  ~Charles M. Schulz


No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.  ~Christopher Morley


If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater... suggest that he wear a tail.  ~Fran Lebowitz


Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.  ~Dave Barry


A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.  ~Ogden Nash


Amount of time it takes for a dog to "do its business" is directly proportional to outside temperature + suitability of owner's outerwear.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue.  ~Author Unknown


Whoever said you can't buy happiness forgot little puppies.  ~Gene Hill


I loathe people who keep dogs.  They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.  ~Author Unknown


Ever wonder where you'd end up if you took your dog for a walk and never once pulled back on the leash?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.  ~Andy Rooney


My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can.  That's almost $7.00 in dog money.  ~Joe Weinstein


I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.  ~G.K. Chesterton


If your dog is fat, you're not getting enough exercise.  ~Author Unknown


The dog wags his tail, not for you, but for your bread.  ~Portuguese Proverb


A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.  ~Robert Benchley


The best way to get a puppy is to beg for a baby brother - and they'll settle for a puppy every time.  ~Winston Pendelton


I am not your dog, but if every time you saw me, you gave me a backrub, I would run to greet you, too.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Life is like a dog sled team.  If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.  ~Lewis Grizzard


You ask of my companions.  Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog as large as myself that my father bought me.  They are better than human beings, because they know but do not tell.  ~Emily Dickinson


There is no faith which has never yet been broken, except that of a truly faithful dog.  ~Konrad Lorenz


If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.  ~Woodrow Wilson


Dogs, the foremost snobs in creation, are quick to notice the difference between a well-clad and a disreputable stranger.  ~Albert Payson Terhune


You think dogs will not be in heaven?  I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson


To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.  ~Milan Kundera


When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.  ~Edward Abbey


A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.  ~Josh Billings


I wonder what goes through his mind when he sees us peeing in his water bowl.  ~Penny Ward Moser


A dog can express more with his tail in seconds than his owner can express with his tongue in hours.  ~Author Unknown


Ever wonder where you'd end up if you took your dog for a walk and never once pulled back on the leash?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I love a dog.  He does nothing for political reasons.  ~Will Rogers


Children are for people who can't have dogs.  ~Author Unknown


I named my dog Stay so I can say, "Come here, Stay.  Come here, Stay."  ~Steven Wright


When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog along to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes.  The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.  ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


If you can look at a dog and not feel vicarious excitement and affection, you must be a cat.  ~Author Unknown


The more one gets to know of men, the more one values dogs.  ~Alphonse Toussenel


When a dog wants to hang out the "Do Not Disturb" sign, as all of us do now and then, he is regarded as a traitor to his species.  ~Ramona C. Albert


Both humans and dogs love to play well into adulthood, and individuals from both species occasionally display evidence of having a conscience.  ~Jon Winokur


The pug is living proof that God has a sense of humor.  ~Margo Kaufman


Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other.  ~Robert Benchley


I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.  ~Rita Rudner


Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs.  ~Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat


Labradors [are] lousy watchdogs.  They usually bark when there is a stranger about, but it is an expression of unmitigated joy at the chance to meet somebody new, not a warning.  ~Norman Strung


Newfoundland dogs are good to save children from drowning, but you must have a pond of water handy and a child, or else there will be no profit in boarding a Newfoundland.  ~Josh Billings


Bulldogs are adorable, with faces like toads that have been sat on.  ~Colette


The nose of the bulldog has been slanted backwards so that he can breathe without letting go.  ~Winston Churchill


I like a bit of mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog; they're the best for everyday.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.  ~H.F. Hedge

Dreams are answers to questions we haven't yet figured out how to ask.  ~X-Files

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.  ~Elias Canetti

Dreams are only thoughts you didn't have time to think about during the day.  ~Author Unknown

A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.  ~The Talmud

Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.  ~Marsha Norman

A dream has power to poison sleep.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mutability"

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.  ~William Dement

Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions.  ~Edgar Cayce

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.  ~Rene Descartes, "Meditations on First Philosophy"

Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.  ~Henri Amiel

There's a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams.  ~Stoddard King, Jr.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.  ~E.M. Cioran, The Tempation to Exist

Pay attention to your dreams - God's angels often speak directly to our hearts when we are asleep.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.  ~Evelyn Waugh

Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.  ~Gail Godwin

That which the dream shows is the shadow of such wisdom as exists in man, even if during his waking state he may know nothing about it.... We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.  ~Paracelsus, quoted in The Dream Game

Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams.  ~Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence

Recall the old story of the rather refined young man who preferred sex dreams to visiting brothels because he met a much nicer type of girl that way.  ~Vivian Mercer

I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long.  If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

For dhrames always go by conthraries, my dear.  ~Samuel Lover, Rory O' More

Our dreams disturb us because they refuse to pander to our fondest notions of ourselves.  The closer one looks, the more they seem to insist upon a challenging proposition: You must live truthfully.  Right now.  And always.  Few forces in life present, with an equal sense of inevitability, the bare-knuckle facts of who we are, and the demands of what we might become.  ~Marc Ian Barasch

In a dream you are never eighty.  ~Anne Sexton

In dreams, we enter a world that's entirely our own.  ~Steven Kloves, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (movie)

I'll take the dream I had last night,
And put it in my freezer,
So someday long and far away,
When I'm an old grey greezer,
I'll take it out and thaw it out,
This lovely dream I've frozen,
And boil it up and sit me down
And dip my old cold toes in.
~Shel Silverstein, "Frozen Dream," A Light in the Attic

I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams.... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.  ~Andre Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism," 1924

A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.  ~Erich Fromm  (Thanks, Sarah)

Some colors exist in dreams that are not present in the waking spectrum.  ~Terri Guillemets

The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant

Codi:  "So you think we all just have animal dreams.  We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives."
Loyd:  "Only if you have an ordinary life.  If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more inteligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake.  ~Erich Fromm

For a dreamer, night's the only time of day.  ~From the movie Newsies

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right.... We sleeping wake, and waking sleep.  ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1580

If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a 'fix' of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.  ~Rob Stampfli

I don't do drugs.  I am drugs.  ~Salvador Dali

All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.  ~Thomas Szasz

Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison.  ~John Hardwick

Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric system.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

If God dropped acid, would he see people?  ~Steven Wright

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society.  If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

I tried sniffing Coke once, but the ice cubes got stuck in my nose.  ~Author Unknown

Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use?  It's nice to be number one, but we can fix that.  All we need to do is start the war on education.  If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics.  ~Leighann Lord

Avoid all needle drugs - the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.  ~Abbie Hoffman

Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.  ~Lily Tomlin

Drugs may be the road to nowhere, but at least they're the scenic route.  ~Author Unknown

Half the modern drugs could well be thrown out the window except that the birds might eat them.  ~Martin H. Fischer, Fischerisms

A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.  ~Eric Hodgins

I've never had a problem with drugs.  I've had problems with the police.  ~Keith Richards

It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously.  And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.  ~Jean Cocteau

I'm in favor of it as long as it's multiple choice.  ~Kurt Rambis, on drug testing

I don't know.  I never smoked AstroTurf.  ~Tug McGraw, when asked if he preferred grass or AstroTurf, April 1974

It is easy to get a thousand prescriptions but hard to get one single remedy.  ~Chinese Proverb

In the 1960s, people took acid to make the world weird.  Now the world is weird, and people take Prozac to make it normal.  ~Author Unknown

God made pot.  Man made beer.  Who do you trust?  ~Graffiti

Herb is the healing of a nation, alcohol is the destruction.  ~Bob Marley

 I don't like people who take drugs.  Customs agents, for example.  ~Author Unknown

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!  ~Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Part II

You know you're a grownup when your houseplants are alive and you can't smoke any of them.  ~Author Unknown

I will lift mine eyes unto the pills.  Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-coloured, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one.  It is an age of pills.  ~Malcolm Muggeridge, 1962

I will lift up mine eyes unto the pills.  Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-coloured, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one.  It is an age of pills.  ~Malcolm Muggeridge

Cocaine is God's way of saying you're making too much money.  ~Robin Williams

He does not need opium.  He has the gift of reverie.  ~Anais Nin

Drugs are very much a part of professional sports today, but when you think about it, golf is the only sport where the players aren't penalized for being on grass.  ~Bob Hope



Every day is Earth Day.  ~Author Unknown


I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.  ~A Chieftan from Nigeria


We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.  ~Native American Proverb


There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth.  We are all crew.  ~Marshall McLuhan, 1964


Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.  ~Henry David Thoreau


There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all.  ~Robert Orben


I'm not an environmentalist.  I'm an Earth warrior.  ~Darryl Cherney, quoted in Smithsonian, April 1990


Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.  ~Bill Vaughn, quoted in Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon, 1987


For 200 years we've been conquering Nature.  Now we're beating it to death.  ~Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990


I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.  ~John Muir, 1913, in L.M. Wolfe, ed., John Muir, John of the Mountains:  The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938


I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.  ~Elwyn Brooks White, Essays of E.B. White, 1977


A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist.  If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it's taken personally.  Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about his power.  His fairness.  His very existence.  But if a world mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple.  She never claimed conceited omnipotence.  She has countless others clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves.  To Her elder offspring She says - go raid the fridge.  Go play outside.  Go get a job.  Or, better yet, lend me a hand.  I have no time for idle whining.  ~David Brin


Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.  ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1963


Take nothing but pictures.
Leave nothing but footprints.
Kill nothing but time.
~Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a caving society


Humankind has not woven the web of life.  We are but one thread within it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  All things are bound together.  All things connect.  ~Chief Seattle, 1855


Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God made life simple.  It is man who complicates it.  ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, July 1972


After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world.  ~Pam Shaw


Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.  ~John Muir


Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
~George Carlin


Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away.  ~Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990


Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.  ~David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978


It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What the Dickens is going on here?  ~Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in National Academy of Sciences, Improving Risk Communication, 1989


Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.  ~Juvenal, Satires


There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on 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.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.  ~Brooke Medicine Eagle


You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.  ~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964


And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.  ~William Shakespeare


Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.  ~Cree Indian Proverb


The resurrection gives my life meaning and direction and the opportunity to start over no matter what my circumstances.  ~Robert Flatt

Easter says you can put truth in a grave, but it won't stay there.  ~Clarence W. Hall

It is the hour to rend thy chains,
The blossom time of souls.  ~Katherine Lee Bates

The joyful news that He is risen does not change the contemporary world.  Still before us lie work, discipline, sacrifice.  But the fact of Easter gives us the spiritual power to do the work, accept the discipline, and make the sacrifice.  ~Henry Knox Sherrill

Could life so end, half told; its school so fail?
Soul, soul, there is a sequel to thy tale!
~Robert Mowry Bell

Easter is the demonstration of God that life is essentially spiritual and timeless.  ~Charles M. Crowe

Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer;
Death is strong, but Life is stronger;
Stronger than the dark, the light;
Stronger than the wrong, the right...
~Phillips Brooks, "An Easter Carol"

Let every man and woman count himself immortal.  Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection.  Let him say not merely, "Christ is risen," but "I shall rise."  ~Phillips Brooks

On Easter Day the veil between time and eternity thins to gossamer.  ~Douglas Horton

Easter spells out beauty, the rare beauty of new life.  ~S.D. Gordon

Celestial spirit that doth roll
The heart's sepulchral stone away,
Be this our resurrection day,
The singing Easter of the soul -
O gentle Master of the Wise,
Teach us to say: "I will arise."  ~Richard Le Gallienne

Easter is not a time for groping through dusty, musty tomes or tombs to disprove spontaneous generation or even to prove life eternal.  It is a day to fan the ashes of dead hope, a day to banish doubts and seek the slopes where the sun is rising, to revel in the faith which transports us out of ourselves and the dead past into the vast and inviting unknown.  ~Author unknown, as quoted in the Lewiston Tribune

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amid the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds.  ~Joseph Addison

Where man sees but withered leaves, God sees sweet flowers growing.  ~Albert Laighton

The fasts are done; the Aves said;
The moon has filled her horn
And in the solemn night I watch
Before the Easter morn.
So pure, so still the starry heaven,
So hushed the brooding air,
I could hear the sweep of an angel's wings
If one should earthward fare.
~Edna Dean Proctor, "Easter Morning"

But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.  ~Walter Raleigh

He takes men out of time and makes them feel eternity.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

For I remember it is Easter morn,
And life and love and peace are all new born.  ~Alice Freeman Palmer

Thou art the Sun of other days.
They shine by giving back the rays.
~John Keble, The Christian Year: Easter Days

We live and die; Christ died and lived!  ~John Stott

Awake, thou wintry earth -
Fling off thy sadness!
Fair vernal flowers, laugh forth
Your ancient gladness!  ~Thomas Blackburn, "An Easter Hymn"

Those have a short Lent, who owe money to be paid at Easter.  ~Benjamin Franklin

See the land, her Easter keeping,
Rises as her Maker rose.
Seeds, so long in darkness sleeping,
Burst at last from winter snows.
Earth with heaven above rejoices...  ~Charles Kingsley

'Twas Easter-Sunday. The full-blossomed trees
Filled all the air with fragrance and with joy.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Spanish Student

Once more to new creation Awake,
and death gainsay,
For death is swallowed up of life,
And Christ is risen today!  ~George Newell Lovejoy

Let the resurrection joy lift us from loneliness and weakness and despair to strength and beauty and happiness.  ~Floyd W. Tomkins

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou - Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.  ~Emily Bronte

And he departed from our sight that we might return to our heart, and there find Him.  For He departed, and behold, He is here.  ~St Augustine

Ye sleeping buds, break
Open your green cerements, and wake
To fragrant blossoming for His sweet sake.  ~Margaret French Patton

The story of Easter is the story of God's wonderful window of divine surprise.  ~Carl Knudsen

Angels, roll the rock away;
Death, yield up thy mighty prey:
See, He rises from the tomb,
Glowing with immortal bloom.  ~Thomas Scott, "Easter Angels"

Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol.  It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.  ~Wallace Stevens, 1916

Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.  ~Martin Luther

I think of the garden after the rain;
And hope to my heart comes singing,
At morn the cherry-blooms will be white,
And the Easter bells be ringing!  ~Edna Dean Proctor, "Easter Bells"

I lied on my Weight Watchers list.  I put down that I had 3 eggs... but they were Cadbury chocolate eggs.  ~Caroline Rhea

Well pleaseth me the sweet time of Easter
That maketh the leaf and the flower come out.  ~Bertran de Born

Easter tells us that life is to be interpreted not simply in terms of things but in terms of ideals.  ~Charles M. Crowe

God expects from men something more than at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress.  ~Robert South, Sermons



No man who worships education has got the best out of education.... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.  ~G.K. Chesterton


The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.  ~Bill Beattie


The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris


Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.  ~Albert Einstein


The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt


It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.  ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful, Ronald D. Fuchs, ed.


An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a
living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.  ~Author Unknown


If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.  ~Attributed to both Andy McIntyre and Derek Bok


It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.  ~G.M. Trevelyan


To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.  ~A.A. Milne


Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education.  Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization.  We must make our choice; we cannot have both.  ~Abraham Flexner


Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.  ~Edward Everett


Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.  ~Ezra Pound


Education should be exercise; it has become massage.  ~Martin H. Fischer


The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. ~Robert Maynard Hutchins


He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ~Victor Hugo


Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail.  What you gain at one end you lose at the other.  It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.  It won't fatten the dog.  ~Mark Twain


My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.  ~Robert Maynard Hutchins


Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.  ~Will Durant


Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?  ~Erich Fromm


Education aims to give you a boost up the ladder of knowledge.  Too often, it just gives you a cramp on one of its rungs.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.  ~William Haley


I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice.  That's what I call a liberal education.  ~Tallulah Bankhead


A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.  ~George Santayana






Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.  ~Malcolm S. Forbes


An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.  ~R. Baker


What does education often do?  It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.  ~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," 1890


Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use?  It's nice to be number one, but we can fix that.  All we need to do is start the war on education.  If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics.  ~Leighann Lord


What if man were required to educate his children without the help of talking animals.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.  To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education.  I call it intrusion.  ~Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie


If I had learned education I would not have had time to learn anything else.  ~Cornelius Vanderbilt


Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.  ~Aristotle


Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.  ~G.K. Chesterton


In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.  ~Michel de Montaigne


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


Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.  ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928


Learning, n.  The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.  ~William R. Inge


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


What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!  ~Grant Allen, 1894, commonly attributed with various wordings to Mark Twain (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.  ~Peter Drucker


If a man is a fool, you don't train him out of being a fool by sending him to university.  You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.  ~Desmond Bagley


Education is the movement from darkness to light.  ~Allan Bloom


Much education today is monumentally ineffective.  All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.  ~John W. Gardner


There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.  ~Will Rogers


Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire.  ~William Butler Yeats


Education, n.  That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.  ~Martin H. Fischer


With just enough learning to misquote.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"


There is only one Education, and it has only one goal:  the freedom of the mind.  Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal.  The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free.  An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.  ~Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian, September 1982


The regular course was Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.  ~Lewis Carroll


Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.  ~Roger Lewin


They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation.  What they mean is that we go to school longer.  It is not the same thing.  ~Richard Yates


I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver.  Then they would really be educated.  ~Al McGuire


The tragedy of education is played in two scenes - incompetent pupils facing competent teachers and incompetent teachers facing competent pupils.  ~Martin H. Fischer


A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it.  ~Brander Matthews


If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.  ~Heinrich Heine


You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day."  ~Peter Brodie


The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life.  ~Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, 1883


Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.  ~John Dewey


Who knows the difference between education and training?  For those of you with daughters, would you rather have them take sex education or sex training?  Need I say more?  ~Dennis Rubin


Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.  ~John Maynard Keynes


Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.  ~Daniel J. Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents


I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.  ~Michel Eyquem de Montaigne


Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throats.  ~Martin H. Fischer


It doesn't make much difference what you study, as long as you don't like it.  ~Finley Peter Dunne


Do you know the difference between education and experience?  Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.  ~Pete Seeger


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


Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education.  Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.  ~Albert Edward Wiggam


The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.  ~George Santayana


The founding fathers... provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education.  School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.  ~John Updike, The Centaur, 1963


You can get all A's and still flunk life.  ~Walker Percy


The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living.  That's one thing about a little education.  It spoils you for actual work.  The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.  ~Will Rogers


My parents told me, "Finish your dinner.  People in China and India are starving."  I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework.  People in India and China are starving for your job."  ~Thomas L. Friedman


All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.  ~George Eliot


Education is the transmission of civilization.  ~Ariel and Will Durant


The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.  ~Bishop Mandell Creighton


If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty."  You need the balance!  Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what.  Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.  ~Ivan Stang, High Weirdness By Mail


All the so-called "secrets of success" will not work unless you do.  ~Author Unknown

You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.  ~Author Unknown

Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more.  ~Edward H. Harriman

God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into its nest.  ~J.G. Holland

The one thing that matters is the effort.  It continues, whereas the end to be attained is but an illusion of the climber, as he fares on and on from crest to crest; and once the goal is reached it has no meaning.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

I've got a theory that if you give 100 percent all of the time, somehow things will work out in the end.  ~Larry Bird

The difference between try and triumph is a little umph.  ~Author Unknown

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

No one understands that you have given everything.  You must give more.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.  ~Thomas Edison

Men are made stronger on realization that the helping hand they need is at the end of their own arm.  ~Sidney J. Phillips

The person who is waiting for something to turn up might start with their shirt sleeves.  ~Garth Henrichs

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.  ~Attributed to both Vidal Sassoon and Donald Kendall

Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat.  ~Ann Landers

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures.  So I did ten times more work.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts.  This is the secret of success.  ~Swami Sivananda

Now I know, a refuge never grows
from a chin in the hand and a thoughtful pose
Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose.
~Indigo Girls

There's nothing like biting off more than you can chew, and then chewing anyway.  ~Mark Burnett

Hard work spotlights the character of people:  some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.  ~Sam Ewing

Though the barriers of life seem formidable, we find when we challenge them that they have no will.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains; much trouble, by taking trouble.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Some people dream of success... while others wake up and work hard at it.  ~Author Unknown

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.  ~Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.  ~Abraham Lincoln

The footprint of the owner is the best manure.  ~English Proverb

Those at the top of the mountain didn't fall there.  ~Author Unknown

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.  ~Will Rogers

We all have a path to take; sometimes it's hidden under the weeds, so you might have to work a little.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Most of us can easily do two things at once; what's all but impossible is to do one thing at once.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end.  It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it.  ~Margaret Thatcher

The only thing that ever sat its way to success was a hen.  ~Sarah Brown

Sweat is the cologne of accomplishment.  ~Heywood Hale Broun

Give your dreams all you've got and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.  ~William James

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gift, like genius, I often think only means an infinite capacity for taking pains.  ~Jane Ellice Hopkins

If you feel you are down on your luck, check the level of your effort.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.  ~Emile Zola

We work for praise, and dawdle once we have it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.  ~José Ortega y Gassett

People know you for what you've done, not for what you plan to do.  ~Author Unknown

Most people, upon reaching the top, look down and enjoy the view.  The smart money is on looking up and finding new mountains to climb.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

We gain no easier advantage than by relentlessly pursuing our goal while others pursue an advantage.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My morning choices are having a good tussle.  Procrastination was winning, but Make Your Bed & Good Breakfast just kicked his butt.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.  ~Benjamin Franklin

Man stands for long time with mouth open before roast duck flies in.  ~Chinese Saying

For us, there is only the trying.  The rest is not our business.  ~T.S. Eliot

There are no easy methods of learning difficult things; the method is to close your door, give out that you are not at home, and work.  ~Joseph de Maistre

Yes, to be a good parent, you have to sacrifice, but this is not a requirement of parenting, it is a requirement of being good at something.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.  ~Ulysses S. Grant

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.  ~Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961

Success is a ladder you cannot climb with your hands in your pockets.  ~American Proverb

God gave us two ends - one to sit on and one to think with.  Success depends on which one you use.  Head you win, tail you lose.  ~Author Unknown

Doors don't slam open.  ~John M. Shanahan, The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time (In Two Lines or Less)

About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age.  ~Gloria Pitzer

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.   ~Walter Linn

Many people think they want things, but they don't really have the strength, the discipline.  They are weak.  I believe that you get what you want if you want it badly enough.  ~Sophia Loren

Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still.  ~Chinese Proverb

We lack resolve and blame fate, mistaking the drift for the tides.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.  ~Plutarch

He who is outside his door has the hardest part of his journey behind him.  ~Dutch Proverb

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.  ~Confucius, Analects

To give vent now and then to his feelings, whether of pleasure or discontent, is a great ease to a man's heart.  ~Francesco Guicciardini

Let's not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.  ~Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Men are no more immune from emotions than women; we think women are more emotional because the culture lets them give free vent to certain feelings, "feminine" ones, that is, no anger please, but it's okay to turn on the waterworks.  ~Una Stannard

But are not this struggle and even the mistakes one may make better, and do they not develop us more, than if we kept systematically away from emotions?  ~Vincent Van Gogh

One's suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields - even to sadness.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate

Emotion turning back on itself, and not leading on to thought or action, is the element of madness.  ~John Sterling

The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.  ~Jim Rohn

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.  ~Claude Debussy

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Too much emotion is like none at all.  ~Du Mu, translated

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.  ~Andre Gide

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.  ~Roger Ebert

Eventually you come to realize that most people aren't looking for a fight but for someone to surrender to.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If you don't manage your emotions, then your emotions will manage you.  ~Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman, Transforming Anxiety

We got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout.  ~June Carter Cash

Feelings are much like waves, we can't stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf.  ~Jonatan Mårtensson

Melancholic madness strapped to your chest and you have no way of releasing the fear.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.  ~Albert Einstein

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.  ~Mark Twain

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.  ~Dale Carnegie



Love one another and you will be happy.  It's as simple and as difficult as that.  ~Michael Leunig


I dreamed of a wedding of elaborate elegance,
A church filled with family and friends.
I asked him what kind of a wedding he wished for,
He said one that would make me his wife.
~Author Unknown


[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.  ~Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally


Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


True love stories never have endings.  ~Richard Bach


Spouse:  someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single.  ~Author Unknown


Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.  ~Emily Brontë


Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs.  ~Ovid


Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.  ~Henry Van Dyke


Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.  ~Albert Einstein


Grow old with me!  The best is yet to be.  ~Robert Browning


The Oriole weds his mottled mate,
The Lily weds the bee;
Heaven's marriage ring is round the earth,
Let me bind thee?
~Author Unknown


My whole heart for my whole life.  ~French saying used on poesy rings


The highest happiness on earth is marriage.  ~William Lyon Phelps


A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasnt put there to stay -
Love isnt love
'Til you give it away.
~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, "You Are Sixteen (Reprise)"


We're all a little weird.  And life is a little weird.  And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love.  ~Robert Fulghum, True Love


Two souls, one heart.  ~French saying used on poesy rings


Love is a game that two can play and both win.  ~Eva Gabor


Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart.  ~Author Unknown


Without love, what are we worth?  Eighty-nine cents!  Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.  ~M*A*S*H, Hawkeye






He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.  ~Leo Tolstoy


The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate


Love would never be a promise of a rose garden unless it is showered with light of faith, water of sincerity and air of passion.  ~Author Unknown


Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.  ~Zelda Fitzgerald


All things do go a-courting,
In earth, or sea, or air,
God hath made nothing single
But thee in His world so fair.
~Emily Dickinson


Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.  ~Marcel Proust


What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


My heart to you is given:
Oh, do give yours to me;
We'll lock them up together,
And throw away the key.
~Frederick Saunders


It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.  ~Rita Rudner


Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Newlyweds become oldyweds, and oldyweds are the reasons that families work.  ~Author Unknown


Chains do not hold a marriage together.  It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.  ~Simone Signoret


For you see, each day I love you more
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
~Rosemonde Gerard


Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate.  ~Barnett R. Brickner


Never get married in the morning, because you never know who you'll meet that night.  ~Paul Hornung


The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation.  It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through eternity.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Love seems the swiftest but it is the slowest of all growths.  No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.  ~Mark Twain


Three rings of marriage are the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffering.  ~Author Unknown


A fellow ought to save a few of the long evenings he spends with his girl till after they're married.  ~Kin Hubbard


A man without a wife is like a vase without flowers.  ~African Proverb


A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.  ~Andre Maurois




Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.  ~Henry David Thoreau


The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.  ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923


There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.  ~Mohandas K. Gandhi


There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all.  ~Robert Orben


It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill.  It was yours.  ~Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25 February 1990


Modern technology
Owes ecology
An apology.
~Alan M. Eddison


In America today you can murder land for private profit.  You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.  ~Paul Brooks, The Pursuit of Wilderness, 1971


Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find.  ~Quoted in Time


Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.  ~William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990


When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50.  When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded.  ~Pat Brown, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985


Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.  ~Henrik Tikkanen


I'm not an environmentalist.  I'm an Earth warrior.  ~Darryl Cherney, quoted in Smithsonian, April 1990


I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security.  Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad.  Otherwise what is there to defend?  ~Robert Redford, Yosemite National Park dedication, 1985


Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated


We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732


Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!  ~Paul MacCready, Jr.


We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.  ~Native American Proverb


There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth.  We are all crew.  ~Marshall McLuhan, 1964


Newspapers:  dead trees with information smeared on them.  ~Horizon, "Electronic Frontier"


They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.  ~James G. Watt, quoted in Newsweek, 8 March 1982


I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.  ~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973


The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.  ~Ralph Nader, quoted in Linda Botts, ed., Loose Talk, 1980


We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.  ~Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac


The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.  ~Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958


The packaging for a microwavable "microwave" dinner is programmed for a shelf life of maybe six months, a cook time of two minutes and a landfill dead-time of centuries.  ~David Wann, Buzzworm, November 1990


So bleak is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century.  ~Philip Shabecoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978


Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.  ~John Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957


And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use.  And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried:  "Look at this Godawful mess."  ~Art Buchwald, 1970


The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach.  Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows.  ~Paul A. Samuelson, Newsweek, 12 June 1967


Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.  ~Bill Vaughn


For 200 years we've been conquering Nature.  Now we're beating it to death.  ~Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990


If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.  ~Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect, 1959


I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.  ~Elwyn Brooks White, Essays of E.B. White, 1977


The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.  ~Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, États et empires de la lune, 1656


Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.  ~Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland


Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
~George Carlin


A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist.  If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it's taken personally.  Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about his power.  His fairness.  His very existence.  But if a world mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple.  She never claimed conceited omnipotence.  She has countless others clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves.  To Her elder offspring She says - go raid the fridge.  Go play outside.  Go get a job.  Or, better yet, lend me a hand.  I have no time for idle whining.  ~David Brin


Why do people give each other flowers?  To celebrate various important occasions, they're killing living creatures?  Why restrict it to plants?  "Sweetheart, let's make up.  Have this deceased squirrel."  ~The Washington Post


Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.  ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1964


When you defile the pleasant streams
And the wild bird's abiding place,
You massacre a million dreams
And cast your spittle in God's face.
~John Drinkwater


A virgin forest is where the hand of man has never set foot.  ~Author Unknown


When a man says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know that he has none.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1857


I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.  ~Author Unknown


When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.  ~David Orr


We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.  ~Francis Bacon


There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.  ~Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion and Other Essays






Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature?  Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window?  When the only wild animal he knows is a rat - glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum?  When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?  ~Frank N. Ikard, North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Houston, March 1968


How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?  ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, November 1939


It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood.  ~Bernand De Voto, Fortune, June 1947


Take care of the earth and she will take care of you.  ~Author Unknown


We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.  ~Wallace Stegner, letter to David E. Pesonen of the Wildland Research Center, 3 December 1960 (Thanks, Bekah)


Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity.  ~E. Knight


Opie, you haven't finished your milk.  We can't put it back in the cow, you know.  ~Aunt Bee Taylor, The Andy Griffith Show


The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty.  The activist is the man who cleans up the river.  ~Ross Perot


Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.  ~Richard Bach


It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.  ~Ansel Adams


We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them.  We say we love trees, yet we cut them down.  And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are loved.  ~Author Unknown


Take nothing but pictures.
Leave nothing but footprints.
Kill nothing but time.
~Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a caving society


Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?  ~Pierre Troubetzkoy


For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.  ~Richard P. Feynman


Humankind has not woven the web of life.  We are but one thread within it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  All things are bound together.  All things connect.  ~Chief Seattle, 1855


When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.  ~John Muir


You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.  ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755


Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations.  ~David Gerrold


Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall.  He will end by destroying the earth.  ~Albert Schweitzer, quoted in James Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer


The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children.  ~Paul R. Ehrlich


Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth.  ~Ian McHarg


Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God made life simple.  It is man who complicates it.  ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, July 1972


The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself.  ~Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953


The old Lakota was wise.  He knew that man's heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.  ~Chief Luther Standing Bear


The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing.  ~Loudon Wainwright


Every day is Earth Day.  ~Author Unknown


Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust?  ~Lane Olinghouse


Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit.  If you violate her laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.  ~Luther Burbank


Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake.... During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast.  ~William Rathje, The Economist, 8 September 1990


Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away.  ~Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990


How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?... Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore.  ~Anonymous Wintu Woman


Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature.  We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.  ~Dave Foreman, Harper's, April 1990


The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.  ~Carl Sagan


The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.  ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871


Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.  ~Henry David Thoreau, "Chesuncook," The Maine Woods, 1848


Man maketh a death which Nature never made.  ~Edward Young


It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life.  ~Rachel Carson


God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains.  If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What the Dickens is going on here?  ~Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in National Academy of Sciences, Improving Risk Communication, 1989


Man is a complex being:  he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.  ~Gil Stern


Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock.  Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history.  Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.  ~Stephen Jay Gould, "Our Allotted Lifetimes," The Panda's Thumb, 1980


Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.  ~David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978


The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.  ~Irving Babbitt


Drive Nature forth by force, she'll turn and rout
The false refinements that would keep her out.
~Horace, Odes


Nature always strikes back.  It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.  ~Rene Dubos, Medical Utopias, 1961


In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment.  ~Richard Wilkinson


Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher [quality of life] not because of what it has, but rather because of what it does not have!  ~Don A. Dillman, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1977


We have been god-like in the planned breeding of our domesticated plants, but rabbit-like in the unplanned breeding of ourselves.  ~Arnold Toynbee


Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.  ~Rene Dubos, Mirage of Health, 1959


Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.  ~Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America, 1956


Waste is a tax on the whole people.  ~Albert W. Atwood


It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854


The rose has thorns only for those who would gather it.  ~Chinese Proverb


Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.  ~Jean Arp


We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.  ~Albert Einstein


Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given.  But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer.  Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.  ~Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 1897


A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty.  ~Albert Einstein, 1950


A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things - including man.  All life forms obey Nature's demands - except man, who has found ways of ignoring them.  ~Eugene M. Poirot, Our Margin of Life, 1978


When you use a manual push mower, you're "cutting" down on pollution and the only thing in danger of running out of gas is you!  ~Grey Livingston


After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world.  ~Pam Shaw


As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us:  "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, "They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them."  ~U Thant, speech, 1970


The command "Be fruitful and multiply" was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people.  ~William Ralph Inge, More Lay Thoughts of a Dean, 1931


Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, was a major factor in the development of the Western worldview.... A basic Christian belief was that God gave humans dominion over creation, with the freedom to use the environment as they saw fit.  Another important Judeo-Christian belief predicted that God would bring a cataclysmic end to the Earth sometime in the future.  One interpretation of this belief is that the Earth is only a temporary way station on the soul's journey to the afterlife.  Because these beliefs tended to devalue the natural world, they fostered attitudes and behaviors that had a negative effect on the environment.  ~Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000:  Protecting Our Global Environment, 1996


For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.  ~Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962


I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things.  Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer.  So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors.  In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe.  ~William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man, 1974






If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.  If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.  ~Edward O. Wilson


Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him.  But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead.  ~Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics, 1977


Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but when I told that story around the campfire, nobody got scared.  ~Jack Handey


The human race will be the cancer of the planet.  ~Julian Huxley, attributed


Man will survive as a species for one reason:  He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo.  And that is the tragedy.  It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.  ~René Dubos, quoted in Life, 28 July 1970


One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal.  At least one execution for that offense is recorded.  But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.  ~Glenn T. Seaborg, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speech, Argonne National Laboratory, 1969


Our children may save us if they are taught to care properly for the planet; but if not, it may be back to the Ice Age or the caves from where we first emerged.  Then we'll have to view the universe above from a cold, dark place.  No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic crap, broken pay phones, drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television.  Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea.  ~Jimmy Buffet, Mother Earth News, March-April 1990


Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.  ~Channing E. Phillips, speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970


The days a man spends fishing or spends hunting should not be deducted from the time that he's on earth.  In other words, if I fish today, that should be added to the amount of time I get to live.  That's the way I look at recreation.  That's why I'll be a big conservation, environmental President, because I plan to fish and hunt as much as I possibly can.  ~George Bush, quoted in Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1988


The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of decadence.  It has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer believes in its destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and has retired from history to pet itself.  ~Henry Fairlie, quoted in Conservation Foundation Letter, November 1981


The exquisite sight, sound, and smell of wilderness is many times more powerful if it is earned through physical achievement, if it comes at the end of a long and fatiguing trip for which vigorous good health is necessary.  Practically speaking, this means that no one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.  ~Garrett Hardin, The Ecologist, February 1974


The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves.  We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies.  ~Al Gore


Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day.  But teach a man how to fish, and he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years.  ~Charles Haas


You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers.  So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin.  Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother.  Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.  If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.  ~Native American Wisdom


The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing.  Not so with technology.  ~E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973


The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey;
Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money.
~Kenneth E. Boulding, "The Ballad of Ecological Awareness," in M. Taghi Farvar and John P. Milton, eds., The Careless Technology, 1972


There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.  ~Brooke Medicine Eagle


This is a beautiful planet and not at all fragile.  Earth can withstand significant volcanic eruptions, tectonic cataclysms, and ice ages.  But this canny, intelligent, prolific, and extremely self-centered human creature had proven himself capable of more destruction of life than Mother Nature herself.... We've got to be stopped.  ~Michael L. Fischer, Harper's, July 1990


Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them.  But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.  ~Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons, 1953


To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance.  ~Buddha


To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.  ~Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907


Today's world is one in which the age-old risks of humankind - the drought, floods, communicable diseases - are less of a problem than ever before.  They have been replaced by risks of humanity's own making - the unintended side-effects of beneficial technologies and the intended effects of the technologies of war.  Society must hope that the world's ability to assess and manage risks will keep pace with its ability to create them.  ~J. Clarence Davies, quoted in Conservation Foundation, State of the Environment: An Assessment at Mid-Decade, 1984


U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Trade Center every two weeks.  ~Environmental Defense Fund advertisement, Christian Science Monitor, 1990


Water flows uphill towards money.  ~Anonymous, saying in the American West, quoted by Ivan Doig in Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986


Living in the midst of abundance we have the greatest difficulty in seeing that the supply of natural wealth is limited and that the constant increase of population is destined to reduce the American standard of living unless we deal more sanely with our resources.  ~W.H. Carothers


We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men as anything but a void.  The "waste howling wilderness" of Deuteronomy is typical.  The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated land which is occupied "only" by wild animals.  Places not used by us are "wastes."  Areas not occupied by us are "desolate."  Could the desolation be in the soul of man?  ~John A. Livingston, in Borden Spears, ed., Wilderness Canada, 1970


We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home because we have made the Earth inhospitable, even uninhabitable.  For if we do not solve the environmental and related social problems that beset us on Earth - pollution, toxic contamination, resource depletion, prejudice, poverty, hunger - those problems will surely accompany us to other worlds.  ~Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000:  Protecting Our Global Environment, 1996


Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.  ~Edward Abbey


We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.  ~Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," 1967


The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.  By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.  ~Lynn I. White, Jr., Science, 10 March 1967


The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.  ~René Dubos, The Wooing of Earth, 1980


We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age.  If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one:  the ecological collapse of the planet.  ~Jeremy Rifkin, World Press Review, 30 December 1989


Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo:  not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.  ~Lewis Mumford


When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal.  When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.  ~Joseph Wood Krutch


When some high-sounding institute states that a compound is harmless or a process free of risk, it is wise to know whence the institute or the scientists who work there obtain their financial support.  ~Lancet, editorial on the "medical-industrial complex," 1973


When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.... When we build houses, we make little holes.  When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things.  We shake down acorns and pinenuts.  We don't chop down the trees.  ~Wintu Indian, quoted in Julian Burger, The Gaia Atlas of First Peoples, 1990


We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems.  ~Janet Holmes  Court


With laissez-faire and price atomic,
Ecology's Uneconomic,
But with another kind of logic
Economy's Unecologic.
~Kenneth E. Boulding, in Frank F. Darling and John P. Milton, eds., Future Environments of North America, 1966


You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it.  We are a long way in this country from taking individual responsibility for the environmental problem.  ~William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA administrator, New York Times, 30 November 1988


Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat.  If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.  ~Michael Fox, Sierra, November-December 1990


Loyd:  "It has to do with keeping things in balance.  It's like the spirits have made a deal with us.  We're on our own.  The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying:  We know how nice you're being.  We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took.  Sorry if we messed up anything.  You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."
Codi:  "Like a note you'd send somebody after you'd stayed in their house?"
Loyd:  "Exactly like that.  'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch.  I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup.  Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.'"
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief.  Or stupid.  A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today.  Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air.  ~Changing Times magazine


People are pretty much alike.  It's only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities.  ~Linda Ellerbee

Equal distribution of wealth does not mean we all should be millionaires - it only means no one should die of hunger.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.  ~Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950

Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven.  ~Yiddish Proverb

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men.  ~Ignazio Silone

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.  ~Italian Proverb

In the democracy of the dead all men at last are equal.  There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.  ~John James Ingalls

We didn't all come over on the same ship, but we're all in the same boat.  ~Bernard M. Baruch

As experience widens, one begins to see how much upon a level all human things are.  ~Joseph Farrell

Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast.  There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.  ~Malcolm X

Before God we are all equally wise and equally foolish.  ~Albert Einstein

The longer we live, the more we find we are like other persons.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold.... The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated

It is well to know something of the manners of various peoples, in order more sanely to judge our own, and that we do not think that everything against our modes is ridiculous, and against reason, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to think.  ~René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 1637 (translated)

All the people like us are We,
And everyone else is They.
~Rudyard Kipling, We and They, 1926

While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.  ~Eugene V. Debs, Cleveland, 1917

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this:  That you are dreadfully like other people.  ~James Russell Lowell, "Democracy Address," Birmingham, England, 6 October 1884

There is no saint without a past, and no sinner without a future.  ~Shri Haidakhan Babaji

The tears of the red, yellow, black, brown and white man are all the same.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.  ~Isa Upanishad

Death and dice level all distinction.  ~Samuel Foote, The Minor

There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
~Edward Wallis Hoch

It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least.  There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.  ~Robert Ingersoll, A Lay Sermon



Some folks never exaggerate - they just remember big.  ~Attributed to both Audrey Snead and Chi Chi Rodriguez


An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper.  ~Kahlil Gibran


Nothing makes a fish bigger than almost being caught.  ~Author Unknown


If you add to the truth, you subtract from it.  ~The Talmud


Exaggeration is to paint a snake and add legs.  ~Proverb


There are people so addicted to exaggeration they can't tell the truth without lying.  ~Josh Billings


Man is inclined to exaggerate almost everything - except his own mistakes.  ~Author Unknown


To exaggerate is to weaken.  ~Jean François de La Harpe, Melanie, 1770


Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.  ~Hosea Ballou


By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them.  Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.  ~Jose Ortega y Gasset


All news is an exaggeration of life.  ~Daniel Schorr


All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.  ~Nicolas Chamfort


There is no one who does not exaggerate.  In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.  ~William Alger


Never exaggerate your faults, your friends will attend to that.  ~Bob Edwards


'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive.  ~Eliza Cook


There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.  ~George Eliot


What makes us discontented with our condition is the absurdly exaggerated idea we have of the happiness of others.  ~French Proverb


We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike.  We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.  ~Honore de Balzac


Some so speak in exaggerations and superlatives that we need to make a large discount from their statements before we can come at their real meaning.  ~Tryon Edwards


We overstate the ills of life, and take
Imagination... down our earth to rake...
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man.  Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration.  A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.  ~Willa Sibert Cather


Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Exaggeration is in the course of things.  Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality.  Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures.  It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.  ~Walt Disney


To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.  ~Henry David Thoreau


It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.  ~Mark Twain


Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness.  ~Voltaire


We aim above the mark, to hit the mark.  Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


How many may a man of diffusive conversation count among his acquaintances, whose lives have been signalized by numberless escapes; who never cross the river but in a storm, or take a journey into the country without more adventures than befel the knights-errant of ancient times in pathless forests or enchanted castles!  How many must he know, to whom portents and prodigies are of daily occurrence; and for whom nature is hourly working wonders invisible to every other eye, only to supply them with subjects of conversation?  ~Samuel Johnson


The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.  ~Jules Renard

Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.  ~Don Wilder and Bill Rechin

Don't make excuses - make good.  ~Elbert Hubbard

He who excuses himself accuses himself.  ~Gabriel Meurier, Trésor des sentences

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.  ~Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

Maybe you don't like your job, maybe you didn't get enough sleep, well nobody likes their job, nobody got enough sleep.  Maybe you just had the worst day of your life, but you know, there's no escape, there's no excuse, so just suck up and be nice.  ~Ani Difranco

How strange to use "You only live once" as an excuse to throw it away.  ~Bill Copeland

Don't do what you'll have to find an excuse for.  ~Proverb

No one ever excused his way to success.  ~Dave Del Dotto

Excuses are the tools with which persons with no purpose in view build for themselves great monuments of nothing.  ~Steven Grayhm

And oftentimes excusing of a fault
Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.
~William Shakespeare

Bad excuses are worse than none.  ~Thomas Fuller

A lie is an excuse guarded.  ~Jonathan Swift

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you.  Never excuse yourself.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

If you don't want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.  ~Yiddish Proverb

We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.  ~Marcus Fabius Quintilian

Whoever wants to be a judge of human nature should study people's excuses.  ~Hebbel

There is no such thing as a list of reasons.  There is either one sufficient reason or a list of excuses.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We have more ability than will power, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.  ~Franois de la Rochefoucauld

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.  ~Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.  ~Edward R. Murrow

Pessimism is an excuse for not trying and a guarantee to a personal failure.  ~Bill Clinton

I attribute my success to this:  I never gave or took an excuse.  ~Florence Nightingale

We weave our excuses around events.
Thin, poor quality cloth of justification
Poor substitutes for the heavy tribal blankets
Once we wove to wrap our children.
~Phillip Pulfrey, "Cloth," Beyond Me, www.originals.net

Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.  ~Ambrose Bierce

Every vice has its excuse ready.  ~Publilius Syrus

We are all manufacturers - some make good, others make trouble, and still others make excuses.  ~Author Unknown

One of the most important tasks of a manager is to eliminate his people's excuses for failure.  ~Robert Townsend

Success is a tale of obstacles overcome, and for every obstacle overcome, an excuse not used.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

An excuse is a skin of a reason stuffed with a lie.  ~Billy Sunday

Your letter of excuses has arrived.  I receive the letter but do not admit the excuses except in courtesy, as when a man treads on your toes and begs your pardon - the pardon is granted, but the joint aches, especially if there is a corn upon it.  ~Lord Byron

Bad men excuse their faults; good men abandon them.  ~Author Unknown

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.  ~Benjamin Franklin

It is wise to direct your anger towards problems - not people, to focus your energies on answers - not excuses.  ~William Arthur Ward

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.  ~Aesop

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.  ~George Washington

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.  ~Rudyard Kipling

The person who really wants to do something finds a way; the other person finds an excuse.  ~Author Unknown

If you always make excuses to not follow through you deserve the weight of anxiety on your chest.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

Justifying a fault doubles it.  ~French Proverb

If God had intended me to make excuses for who I am, He would have given me better excuses.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.  ~John Burroughs

The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own.  No apologies or excuses.  No one to lean on, rely on, or blame.  The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it.  This is the day your life really begins.  ~Bob Moawad

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

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.  ~Russell Baker

Sometimes I wish I had a terrible childhood, so that at least I'd have an excuse.  ~Jimmy Fallon

A true friend sees past your excuses to the real reason it's not your fault.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Never ruin an apology with an excuse.  ~Kimberly Johnson

Exercise should be regarded as tribute to the heart.  ~Gene Tunney

Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.  ~Edward Stanley

If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all.  ~Joey Adams

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.  ~Plato

Physical fitness can neither be achieved by wishful thinking nor outright purchase.  ~Joseph Pilates

Fitness - if it came in a bottle, everybody would have a great body.  ~Cher

There are really only two requirements when it comes to exercise.  One is that you do it.  The other is that you continue to do it.  ~The New Glucose Revolution for Diabetes by Jennie Brand-Miller, Kaye Foster-Powell, Stephen Colagiuri, Alan W. Barclay

There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted.  ~Thomas de Quincey

The only exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions, running down their friends, side-stepping responsibility, and pushing their luck!  ~Author Unknown

Movement is a medicine for creating change in a person's physical, emotional, and mental states.  ~Carol Welch

A man's health can be judged by which he takes two at a time - pills or stairs.  ~Joan Welsh

The word aerobics came about when the gym instructors got together and said, "If we're going to charge $10 an hour, we can't call it jumping up and down."  ~Rita Rudner

I have to exercise in the morning before my brain figures out what I'm doing.  ~Marsha Doble

A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.  ~A.A. Milne

I get my exercise acting as pallbearer to my friends who exercise.  ~Chauncey Depew, also sometimes attributed in slightly different wording to Mark Twain

I really don't think I need buns of steel.  I'd be happy with buns of cinnamon.  ~Ellen DeGeneres

Commit to be fit.  ~Author Unknown

It is exercise alone that supports the spirits, and keeps the mind in vigor.  ~Marcus Tullius Cicero

The only valid excuse for not exercising is paralysis.  ~Moira Nordholt, feelgoodguru.com

My idea of exercise is a good brisk sit.  ~Phyllis Diller

Aerobics:  a series of strenuous exercises which help convert fats, sugars, and starches into aches, pains, and cramps.  ~Author Unknown

Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.  ~Norman Mailer

Exercise is a dirty word.  Every time I hear it, I wash my mouth out with chocolate.  ~Author Unknown

An hour of basketball feels like 15 minutes.  An hour on a treadmill feels like a weekend in traffic school.  ~David Walters

I consider exercise vulgar.  It makes people smell.  ~Alec Yuill Thornton

Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought,
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught,
The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend.
~John Dryden

People say that losing weight is no walk in the park.  When I hear that I think, yeah, that's the problem.  ~Chris Adams

If the poor overweight jogger only knew how far he had to run to work off the calories in a crust of bread he might find it better in terms of pound per mile to go to a massage parlor.  ~Christiaan Barnard

I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street.  ~Neil Armstrong on jogging, in an interview with Walter Cronkite

If your dog is fat, you're not getting enough exercise.  ~Author Unknown

You can cheat on your boyfriend or girlfriend but not on your workout.  ~Author Unknown

I am pushing sixty.  That is enough exercise for me.  ~Mark Twain

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.  ~Barbara Ehrenreich

Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.  ~Robert M. Hutchins

Learn all you can from the mistakes of others.  You won't have time to make them all yourself.  ~Alfred Sheinwold

Experience is not what happens to a man.  It is what a man does with what happens to him.  ~Aldous Leonard Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, 1932

Experience is a comb which nature gives us when we are bald.  ~Proverb

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.  ~Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid.  She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Following the Equator, 1897

The trouble with using experience as a guide is that the final exam often comes first and then the lesson.  ~Author Unknown

No physician is really good before he has killed one or two patients.  ~Hindu Proverb

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.  ~Auguste Rodin

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes along.  ~Samuel Butler, "Speech at the Somerville Club," 27 February 1895

Experience is what you got by not having it when you need it.  ~Author Unknown

Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.  ~Rita Mae Brown

If experience was so important, we'd never have had anyone walk on the moon.  ~Doug Rader

Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses:  We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.  ~John Keats

If you want to understand democracy, spend less time in the library with Plato, and more time in the buses with people.  ~Simeon Strunsky

You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands.  Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.  ~John Updike

Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes.  ~Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan, 1896

Do you know the difference between education and experience?  Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.  ~Pete Seeger

Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

Looking back, you realize that everything would have explained itself if you had only stopped interrupting.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.  ~Mark Twain

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.  ~Chinese Proverb

Experience makes more timid men than it does wise ones.  ~Josh Billings

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.  ~David T. Wolf

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.  ~Colette

Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.  ~Stephen Leacock, Literary Lapses, 1910

Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones.  ~Author Unknown

The problem is that when you get it, you're too damned old to do anything about it.  ~Jimmy Connors, on experience

In youth we learn; in age we understand.  ~Marie Ebner-Eschenbach

You start making progress in life when you realize that you don't always have to resume where you left off.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew.  ~Herb Caen

Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail.  ~Mark van Doren

As important as it is to keep picking yourself up and brushing yourself off, it's also important to stop tripping over your own two feet.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.  ~John Gardner

Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I learned more about economics from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years in college.  ~Hubert Humphrey, speech, 1960

The experience I gained at age 21 would be useful if I were ever 21 again. But I'm 71 and new at it and keep making age 71 mistakes.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

All that I know I learned after I was thirty.  ~Georges Clemenceau

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.  ~Laurence J. Peter

You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again.  Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing.  Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.  ~Stephen King, The Stand

Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself.  ~Thomas Jefferson

The road to wisdom?
- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
~Piet Hein, "The Road to Wisdom," Grooks, 1966

Life is trying things to see if they work.  ~Ray Bradbury

We have two lives - the one we learn with and the life we live after that.  ~Bernard Malamud, The Natural

The world is your school.  ~Martin H. Fischer

We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters, and one from the world.  The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.  ~Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Anything we tell our kids about life is a placemarker until they figure it out for themselves.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we'd all be millionaires.  ~Abigail Van Buren

Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.  ~Clarence Day, The Crow's Nest

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.  ~Andre Gide, Le traite du Narcisse, 1891

A man finds room in the few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life

There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.  ~Sir Thomas Browne

I've never seen a smiling face that was not beautiful.  ~Author Unknown

I have never been aware before how many faces there are.  There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty - they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.  ~Martin Buxbaum

An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy.... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.  ~Victor Hugo

A man's face is his autobiography.  A woman's face is her work of fiction.  ~Oscar Wilde

It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many millions of faces, there should be none alike.  ~Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.  ~William Shakespeare

The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions.  ~Cicero

My daddy's face is a study.  Winter moves into it and presides there.  His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees.  His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.  ~Toni Morrison

The face is more honest than the mouth will ever be.  ~Daphne Orebaugh

It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it.  ~Claudette Colbert, quoted in Kindling the Spirit by Lois P. Frankel

I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.  ~Lauren Bacall

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.  ~Cynthia Ozick, The Paris Review



If you're doing your best, you won't have any time to worry about failure.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


Failure is an event, never a person.  ~William D. Brown, Welcome Stress!


The only time you don't fail is the last time you try anything - and it works.  ~William Strong


I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.  ~Thomas Edison


I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.  ~Bill Cosby


There is no failure except in no longer trying.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Supposing you have tried and failed again and again.  You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.  ~Mary Pickford


Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.  ~Samuel Beckett


Failure doesn't mean you are a failure... it just means you haven't succeeded yet.  ~Robert Schuller


One fails forward toward success.  ~Charles F. Kettering


One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.  ~Anton Pavlovich Chekhov


A man may fall many times, but he won't be a failure until he says that someone pushed him.  ~Elmer G. Letterman


Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


Just once it might be instructive to pretend you're accepting an award for failure, just to see who you would thank.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?  ~G.K. Chesterton


They say President Wilson has blundered.  Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.  ~Thomas Edison


There are defeats more triumphant than victories.  ~Michel de Montaigne


Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit.  You have to fall back upon humanity and God.  ~Charles Horton Cooley


Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, "I have failed three times," and what happens when he says, "I am a failure."  ~S.I. Hayakawa


A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.  ~Elbert Hubbard


No man is a failure who is enjoying life.  ~William Feather


Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.  ~Henry Ford


Because a fellow has failed once or twice or a dozen times, you don't want to set him down as a failure till he's dead or loses his courage.  ~George Horace Lorimer


You can't have any successes unless you can accept failure.  ~George Cukor


There is no failure.  Only feedback.  ~Robert Allen


Failure changes for the better, success for the worse.  ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca


There is much to be said for failure.  It is more interesting than success.  ~Max Beerbohm, Mainly on the Air, 1946


You always pass failure on your way to success.  ~Mickey Rooney


Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it.  We learn only from failure.  ~Kenneth Boudling


Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson


It is a mistake to suppose that people succeed through success; they often succeed through failures.  ~Author Unknown


The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.  ~Lloyd Jones




Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
~William Butler Yeats, "The Land of Heart's Desire," 1894


Fairies are invisible and inaudible like angels.  But their magic sparkles in nature.  ~Lynn Holland


The fairy poet takes a sheet
Of moonbeam, silver white;
His ink is dew from daisies sweet,
His pen a point of light.
~Joyce Kilmer


Spread your wings and let the fairy in you fly!  ~Author Unknown


Nothing can be truer than fairy wisdom.  It is as true as sunbeams.  ~Douglas Jerrold


The fairies break their dances
And leave the printed lawn.
~A.E. Housman


Princess Edane... heard a voice singing on a May Eve like this, and followed half awake and half asleep, until she came into the Land of Faery, where nobody gets old and godly and grave, where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.  ~William Butler Yeats, "The Land of Heart's Desire," 1894


When the winds of March are wakening the crocuses and crickets,
Did you ever find a fairy near some budding little thickets,...
And when she sees you creeping up to get a closer peek
She tumbles through the daffodils, a playing hide and seek.
~Marjorie Barrows


[E]very time a child says, "I don't believe in fairies," there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.  ~James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan


This is a work of fiction.  All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence.  Or lack thereof.  ~Neil Gaiman


Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
~William Butler Yeats, "The Stolen Child"


A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History"


We the Fairies, blithe and antic,
Of dimensions not gigantic,
Though the moonshine mostly keep us,
Oft in orchards frisk and peep us.
~Thomas Randolph


Each fairy breath of summer, as it blows with loveliness, inspires the blushing rose.  ~Author Unknown


No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays in The Art of Writing


The wall is silence, the grass is sleep,
Tall trees of peace their vigil keep,
And the Fairy of Dreams with moth-wings furled
Plays soft on her flute to the drowsy world.
~Ida Rentoul Outhwaite


We call them faerie.  We don't believe in them.  Our loss.  ~Charles de Lint


And as the seasons come and go, here's something you might like to know.  There are fairies everywhere:  under bushes, in the air, playing games just like you play, singing through their busy day.  So listen, touch, and look around - in the air and on the ground.  And if you watch all nature's things, you might just see a fairy's wing.  ~Author Unknown


The Realm of Fairy is a strange shadow land, lying just beyond the fields we know.  ~Author Unknown


Blind folk see the fairies.
Oh, better far than we,
Who miss the shining of their wings
Because our eyes are filled with things
We do not wish to see.
~Rose Fyleman


A rustle in the wind reminds us a fairy is near.  ~Author Unknown


I believe in everything until it's disproved.  So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons.  It all exists, even if it's in your mind.  Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?  ~John Lennon


Soft moss a downy pillow makes, and green leaves spread a tent,
Where Faerie fold may rest and sleep until their night is spent.
The bluebird sings a lullaby, the firefly gives a light,
The twinkling stars are candles bright, Sleep, Faeries all, Good Night.
~Elizabeth T. Dillingham, "A Faery Song"






Wind chimes in your yard will serenade garden creatures - squirrels, fairies and angels.  ~Author Unknown


There never was a merry world since the fairies left off dancing, and the Parson left conjuring.  ~John Selden, "Parson," Table Talk, 1689


Any man can lose his hat in a fairy-wind.  ~Irish Saying


Garden fairies come at dawn,
Bless the flowers then they're gone.
~Author Unknown


If we opened our minds to enjoyment, we might find tranquil pleasures spread about us on every side.  We might live with the angels that visit us on every sunbeam, and sit with the fairies who wait on every flower.  ~Samuel Smiles


When I sound the fairy call,
Gather here in silent meeting,
Chin to knee on the orchard wall,
Cooled with dew and cherries eating.
Merry, merry, Take a cherry
Mine are sounder, Mine are rounder
Mine are sweeter, For the eater
When the dews fall.  And you'll be fairies all.
~Robert Graves, "Cherry-Time," Fairies and Fusiliers, 1918


Oh! where do fairies hide their heads,
When snow lies on the hills,
When frost has spoiled their mossy beds,
And crystallized their rills?
~Thomas Haynes Bayly


I think that people who can't believe in fairies aren't worth knowing.  ~Tori Amos


And though you should live in a palace of gold, or sleep in a dried up ditch,
You could never be as poor as the fairies are, and never as rich.
~Rose Fyleman


Buttercups in the sunshine look like little cups of gold.
Perhaps the Faeries come to drink the raindrops that they hold.
~Elizabeth T. Dillingham, "A Faery Song"


Raindrops are like fairy whispers.  ~Author Unknown


The little Plumpuppets are fairies of beds;
They have nothing to do but watch sleepyheads;
They turn down the sheets and they tuck you in tight,
And dance on your pillow to wish you good night!
~Christopher Morley


The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; lovers to bed; 'tis almost fairy time.  ~William Shakespeare


Deaf folk hear the fairies
However soft their song;
'Tis we who lose the honey sound
Amid the clamor all around
That beats the whole day long.
~Rose Fyleman


I'll seek a four-leaved shamrock in all thy fairy dells,
And if I find the charmed leaves, oh, how I'll weave my spells!
~Samuel Lover


The fairies went from the world, dear,
Because men's hearts grew cold:
And only the eyes of children see
What is hidden from the old...
~Kathleen Foyle


Come cuddle close in daddy's coat
Beside the fire so bright,
And hear about the fairy folk
That wander in the night.
~Robert Bird


Are those the magic fairy wands
glistening on the tree
or only winter icicles that I see?
~Author Unknown


[W]hen the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.  And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy.  So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.  ~James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan


Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.
~William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream


Deep within the winter forest among the snowdrift wide
You can find a magic place where all the fairies hide....
~Author Unknown


It's easy to believe in magic when you're young.  Anything you couldn't explain was magic then.  It didn't matter if it was science or a fairy tale.  Electricity and elves were both infinitely mysterious and equally possible - elves probably more so.  ~Charles de Lint


Faith is not without worry or care, but faith is fear that has said a prayer.  ~Author Unknown

Faith is like radar that sees through the fog.  ~Corrie Ten Boom, Tramp for the Lord

Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right.  ~John Donne

Faith is reason grown courageous.  ~Sherwood Eddy

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Fear knocked at the door.  Faith answered.  And lo, no one was there.  ~Author Unknown

If there was no faith there would be no living in this world.  We couldn't even eat hash with safety.  ~Josh Billings, His Complete Works, 1888

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.  ~E.M. Forster

Faith is spiritualized imagination.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.  ~J.R.R. Tolkien

Faith is courage; it is creative while despair is always destructive.  ~David S. Muzzey

Faith is a passionate intuition.  ~William Wordsworth

To me faith means not worrying.  ~John Dewey

At the point where hope would otherwise become hopelessness, it becomes faith.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Faith is putting all your eggs in God's basket, then counting your blessings before they hatch.  ~Ramona C. Carroll

Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.  ~Madeleine L'Engle

Every tomorrow has two handles.  We can take hold of it by the handle of anxiety, or by the handle of faith.  ~Author Unknown

Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

He who has faith has... an inward reservoir of courage, hope, confidence, calmness, and assuring trust that all will come out well - even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly.  ~B.C. Forbes

A faith of convenience is a hollow faith.  ~Father Mulcahy, M*A*S*H, "A Holy Mess," 1982

Faith makes things possible, not easy.  ~Author Unknown

Of course I doubt.  I do not practice a certainty.  I practice a faith.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

What is certainty but the refuge of those whose faith is not strong enough to entertain doubt.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.  ~Victor Hugo

Faith is raising the sail of our little boat until it is caught up in the soft winds above and picks up speed, not from anything within itself, but from the vast resources of the universe around us.  ~W. Ralph Ward

There must be a tomorrow, because my life overflows today.  ~Lois Chartrand

Faith... must be enforced by reason.... When faith becomes blind it dies.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

If you listed all the reasons for your faith, and all the things that make you cry, it would be essentially the same list.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Faith and doubt both are needed - not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve.  ~Lillian Smith

Sunbeams out of the clouds
Faith out of all my doubt.
~Terri Guillemets

As your faith is strengthened you will find that there is no longer the need to have a sense of control, that things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit.  ~Emmanuel

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.  ~Blaise Pascal

To accept on faith is the basic requirement for getting on with life.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Faith enables persons to be persons because it lets God be God.  ~Carter Lindberg

Weave in faith and God will find the thread.  ~Author Unknown

A little faith will bring your soul to heaven, but a lot of faith will bring heaven to your soul.  ~Author Unknown

Faith is believing that the outcome will be what it should be, no matter what it is.  ~Colette Baron-Reid

Faith can move mountains, but don't be surprised if God hands you a shovel.  ~Author Unknown

Sometimes, as practice for trying to convince myself that God exists, I try to convince my shadow that the sun exists.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains.... But it can put mountains where there are none.  ~Friedrich Nietzche, Human, All Too Human, 1879

Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.  ~George Seaton

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Faith makes the discords of the present the harmonies of the future.  ~Robert Collyer

Feed your faith and your fears will starve to death.  ~Author Unknown

As you reach for understanding, you find that your ladder of facts isn't long enough, and you try to extend it by adding a rung of faith.  Eventually you see that the task is hopeless, and you put away your ladder of facts and go get a ladder of faith.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life without faith in something is too narrow a space to live.  ~George Lancaster Spalding

I don't care how poor a man is; if he has family, he's rich.  ~Dan Wilcox and Thad Mumford, "Identity Crisis," M*A*S*H

Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life!  ~Albert Einstein

It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.  ~Johann Schiller

The family is a haven in a heartless world.  ~Attributed to Christopher Lasch

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do.  With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.  ~Margaret Mead

Families are like fudge - mostly sweet with a few nuts.  ~Author Unknown

The thing about family disasters is that you never have to wait long before the next one puts the previous one into perspective.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant

We all grow up with the weight of history on us.  Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.  ~Shirley Abbott

Family:  A social unit where the father is concerned with parking space, the children with outer space, and the mother with closet space.  ~Evan Esar

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.  ~Ogden Nash

The family.  We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.  ~Erma Bombeck

When you look at your life, the greatest happinesses are family happinesses.  ~Joyce Brothers

In some families, please is described as the magic word.  In our house, however, it was sorry.  ~Margaret Laurence

Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others.  Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

You don't choose your family.  They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.  ~Desmond Tutu

An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship.  ~Spanish Proverb

Blood's thicker than water, and when one's in trouble
Best to seek out a relative's open arms.
~Author Unknown

The happiness of the domestic fireside is the first boon of Heaven; and it is well it is so, since it is that which is the lot of the mass of mankind.  ~Thomas Jefferson, 1813

To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.  ~Barbara Bush

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family.  Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.  ~Jane Howard

In a houseful of toddlers and pets, you can start out having a bad day, but you keep getting detoured.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There is no cure for laziness but a large family helps.  ~Herbert Prochnov

Family quarrels are bitter things.  They don't go by any rules.  They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family.  Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted.  ~Paul Pearshall

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.  ~Nancy Mitford

Having a place to go - is a home.  Having someone to love - is a family.  Having both - is a blessing.  ~Donna Hedges

'Ohana means family - no one gets left behind, and no one is ever forgotten.  ~Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, Lilo & Stitch

The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.  ~Thomas Jefferson

And thank you for a house full of people I love.  Amen.  ~Terri Guillemets

The family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.  ~Dodie Smith

Family life is a bit like a runny peach pie - not perfect but who's complaining?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you.  ~Kendall Hailey, The Day I Became an Autodidact

In time of test, family is best.  ~Burmese Proverb

Family is just accident.... They don't mean to get on your nerves.  They don't even mean to be your family, they just are.  ~Marsha Norman

The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works is the family.  ~Lee Iacocca

Friends are God's apology for relations.  ~Hugh Kingsmill

They... threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow.  Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines.  Family life is like this - animated, but collateral.  ~Rose Macaulay

What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories.  ~George Eliot

At the end of the day, a loving family should find everything forgivable.  ~Mark V. Olsen and Will Sheffer, Big Love, "Easter"

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.  ~Letty Cottin Pogrebin

In a household of toddlers and pets, we discover this rule of thumb about happy families - that they are least two-thirds incontinent.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The informality of family life is a blessed condition that allows us to become our best while looking our worst.  ~Marge Kennedy

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.  ~George Santayana, The Life of Reason

We cannot destroy kindred:  our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break.  ~Marquise de Sévigné

The advantage of growing up with siblings is that you become very good at fractions.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.  ~Anthony Brandt

There's an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Family faces are magic mirrors.  Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.  ~Gail Lumet Buckley

If minutes were kept of a family gathering, they would show that "Members not Present" and "Subjects Discussed" were one and the same.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Are we not like two volumes of one book?  ~Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.  ~Fred Allen

What greater blessing to give thanks for at a family gathering than the family and the gathering.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit.  No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child.  He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.  ~Pearl S. Buck



Life is like a game of cards.  The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.  ~Jawaharlal Nehru


Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.  ~Kin Hubbard


On a windswept hill
by a billowing sea,
my destiny sits
and waits for me.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Failure and success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars.  But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.  ~E.M. Forester


If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow.  ~William McFee


Sometimes, perhaps, we are allowed to get lost that we may find the right person to ask directions of.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.  ~Diana Trilling


He that is born to be hanged shall never be drowned.  ~Author Unknown


Fate laughs at probabilities.  ~E.G. Bulwer-Lytton


They... who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
~Matthew Arnold, "Resignation," 1849


A door that seems to stand open must be a man's size, or it is not the door that Providence means for him.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.  ~Jean de La Fontaine


The last I heard from my destiny, it wanted me to make a legal U-Turn at my next opportunity.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Angels deliver Fate to our doorstep - and anywhere else it is needed.  ~Jessi Lane Adams


We cannot bear to regard ourselves simply as playthings of blind chance; we cannot admit to feeling ourselves abandoned.  ~Ugo Betti, Struggle till Dawn, 1949


You know that saying, that when God closes a door he opens a window, well, sometimes out of nowhere he'll do you one better and he'll kick a whole wall down.  ~Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan, Glee, "Furt"


Alas, by the time Fate caught up with my life, Chance had it all planned.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There is an unseen life that dreams us.  It knows our true direction and destiny.  We can trust ourselves more than we realize and we need have no fear of change.  ~John O'Donohue


Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.  So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.  You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.  This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.  ~Steve Jobs


It is sad when two people turn from the paths they're traveling, and their paths go on to cross without them.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant, filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.  ~Lemony Snicket


Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.  ~Albert Einstein


Our destiny hides among our free choices, disguised as the free-est of all.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I have a wife, I have sons:  all of them hostages given to fate.  ~Lucan


No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.  ~Plutarch


Fate, Chance, God's Will - we all try to account for our lives somehow.  What are the chances that two raindrops, flung from the heavens, will merge on a windowpane?  Gotta be Fate.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.  Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass."  "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply.  "We're raising boys."  ~Harmon Killebrew

He didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.  ~Clarence Budington Kelland

A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.  ~Author Unknown

Father! - to God himself we cannot give a holier name.  ~William Wordsworth

Love and fear.  Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.  ~Joseph Joubert

One father is more than a hundred Schoolemasters.  ~George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs, 1640

Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!  ~Lydia M. Child, Philothea: A Romance, 1836

Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament.  But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it.  ~Clarence Budington Kelland

A father is always making his baby into a little woman.  And when she is a woman he turns her back again.  ~Enid Bagnold

Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance.  ~Ruth E. Renkel

A father carries pictures where his money used to be.  ~Author Unknown

The father who would taste the essence of his fatherhood must turn back from the plane of his experience, take with him the fruits of his journey and begin again beside his child, marching step by step over the same old road.  ~Angelo Patri

My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

It is much easier to become a father than to be one.  ~Kent Nerburn, Letters to My Son: Reflections on Becoming a Man, 1994

The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity.  ~Jean Paul Richter

Any man can be a father.  It takes someone special to be a dad.  ~Author Unknown

The greatest gift I ever had
Came from God; I call him Dad!
~Author Unknown

I love my father as the stars - he's a bright shining example and a happy twinkling in my heart.  ~Terri Guillemets

Two little girls, on their way home from Sunday school, were solemnly discussing the lesson.  "Do you believe there is a devil?" asked one.  "No," said the other promptly.  "It's like Santa Claus:  it's your father."  ~Ladies' Home Journal, quoted in 2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs by Edward F. Murphy

Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever.  ~Author Unknown

My daddy, he was somewhere between God and John Wayne.  ~Hank Williams, Jr.

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.  ~Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.  ~Gloria Naylor

You will find that if you really try to be a father, your child will meet you halfway.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Sons are for fathers the twice-told tale.  ~Victoria Secunda, Women and Their Fathers, 1992

Why are men reluctant to become fathers?  They aren't through being children.  ~Cindy Garner

Fathers represent another way of looking at life - the possibility of an alternative dialogue.  ~Louise J. Kaplan, Oneness and Separateness: From Infant to Individual, 1978

There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.  ~John Gregory Brown, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, 1994

There are three stages of a man's life:  He believes in Santa Claus, he doesn't believe in Santa Claus, he is Santa Claus.  ~Author Unknown

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.  ~Bill Cosby

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Mark Twain but no evidence has yet been found for this (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

You block your dream when you allow your fear to grow bigger than your faith.  ~Mary Manin Morrissey

Nothing in life is to be feared.  It is only to be understood.  ~Marie Curie

Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.  ~Bill Cosby

Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop.  ~Usman B. Asif

Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Panic at the thought of doing a thing is a challenge to do it.  ~Henry S. Haskins

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable.  What he wants above everything else is safety.  ~Henry Louis Mencken

There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear.  ~George S. Patton

Many of our fears are tissue-paper-thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them.  ~Brendan Francis

There is much in the world to make us afraid.  There is much more in our faith to make us unafraid.  ~Frederick W. Cropp

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.  ~Andre Gide

Fear is faith that it won't work out.  ~Sister Mary Tricky

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.  ~Arnold Glasow

Fear is the father of courage and the mother of safety.  ~Henry H. Tweedy

Fear is the highest fence.  ~Dudley Nichols

Obstacles are like wild animals.  They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can.  If they see you are afraid of them... they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will slink out of sight.  ~Orison Swett Marden

Fear is the needle that pierces us that it may carry a thread to bind us to heaven.  ~James Hastings

To fear is one thing.  To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.  ~Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I Loved 

Fear has a large shadow, but he himself is small.  ~Ruth Gendler

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.  ~Shirley Maclaine

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.  ~Bertrand Russell

Every man, through fear, mugs his aspirations a dozen times a day.  ~Brendan Francis

Fear cannot take what you do not give it.  ~Christopher Coan

Fear is just your feelings asking for a hug.  ~Danielle Sanchez-Witzel and Michael Pennie, My Name is Earl, "South of the Border Part Uno/Dos," original airdate 7 December 2006, spoken by the character Joy Turner

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who fear life are already three parts dead.  ~Bertrand Russell

Fear makes us feel our humanity.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

A cheerful frame of mind, reinforced by relaxation... is the medicine that puts all ghosts of fear on the run.  ~George Matthew Adams

There are times when fear is good.  It must keep its watchful place at the heart's controls.  ~Aeschylus

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.  ~Samuel Butler

Fear is the cheapest room in the house.  I would like to see you living in better conditions.  ~Hāfez

Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.  ~German Proverb

If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all thinking, damages his personality and makes him a landlord to a ghost.  ~Lloyd Douglas

I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear.  ~Rosa Parks

A cat bitten once by a snake dreads even rope.  ~Arab Proverb

Don't fear, just live right.  ~Neal A. Maxwell

You are the one giving fear a leg to stand on. ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?  ~Maurice Freehill

Those that walk with fear will always be too busy hiding.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Fear:  False Evidence Appearing Real.  ~Author Unknown

Fear is a slinking cat I find beneath the lilacs of my mind.  ~Sophie Tunnell

I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear and which to creativeness.  Other things being equal, I would make the decision which had the larger number of creative reasons on its side.  ~Katharine Butler Hathaway

He who fears something gives it power over him.  ~Moorish Proverb

Feed your faith and your fears will starve to death.  ~Author Unknown

He who fears to suffer, suffers from fear.  ~French Proverb

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.  ~Mark Twain

Fear can be headier than whiskey, once man has acquired a taste for it.  ~Donald Dowes

The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1833

Anything I've ever done that ultimately was worthwhile... initially scared me to death.  ~Betty Bender

To lead is difficult when you're a follower of fear.  ~T.A. Sachs

I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change.... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says:  turn back.  ~Erica Jong

The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.  ~Lady Bird Johnson



Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed.  If I fail, no one will say, "She doesn't have what it takes."  They will say, "Women don't have what it takes."  ~Clare Boothe Luce


I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is:  I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a door mat or a prostitute.  ~Rebecca West, "Mr Chesterton in Hysterics: A Study in Prejudice," The Clarion, 14 Nov 1913, reprinted in The Young Rebecca, 1982


Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.  ~Andrea Dworkin


The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, "It's a girl."  ~Shirley Chisholm


Women belong in the house... and the Senate.  ~Author Unknown


I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts.  After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough.  ~Clarie Sargent, Arizona senatorial candidate


Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.  ~Faith Whittlesey


Never let the hand you hold, hold you down.  ~Author Unknown


I wish someone would have told me that, just because I'm a girl, I don't have to get married.  ~Marlo Thomas


Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their opressors.  ~Evelyn Cunningham


Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes.  There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.  ~Henry Kissinger


The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power.  You just take it.  ~Roseanne Barr


Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.  ~Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler


I am woman!  I am invincible!  I am pooped!  ~Author Unknown


I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.  ~Anaïs Nin


Man endures pain as an undeserved punishment; woman accepts it as a natural heritage.  ~Author Unknown


Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.  ~Timothy Leary


I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament.  ~Alanis Morissette, quoted in Reader's Digest, March 2000


I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want.  If that makes me a bitch, okay.  ~Madonna Ciccone


I was told that whistling wasn't ladylike, but I knew even then that women were simply not supposed to be that happy.  ~Anonymous, quoted in Kindling the Spirit by Lois P. Frankel


You don't have to be anti-man to be pro-woman.  ~Jane Galvin Lewis


When I see the elaborate study and ingenuity displayed by women in the pursuit of trifles, I feel no doubt of their capacity for the most herculean undertakings.  ~Julia Ward Howe


Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.  ~Joseph Conrad


History is herstory too.  ~Author Unknown


Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.  ~Lois Wyse


No woman is required to build the world by destroying herself.  ~Rabbi Sofer


I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist.  ~Sally Kempton, attributed


It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.  ~Susan B. Anthony


One of the things about equality is not just that you be treated equally to a man, but that you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man.  ~Marlo Thomas


There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.  ~Madeleine K. Albright


I ask no favors for my sex.... All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks.  ~Sarah Moore Grimké


I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns, and women join the unqualified men in running our government.  ~Cissy Farenthold


I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves.  ~Mary Wollstonecraft


There are very few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina.  All other jobs should be open to everybody.  ~Florynce Kennedy


The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.  ~Bella Abzug


Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try and give their best qualities to men - bring them softness, teach them how to cry.  ~Joan Baez, "Sexism Seen but not Heard," Los Angeles Times, 1974


I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career.  I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.  ~Gloria Steinem


Most women are one man away from welfare.  ~Gloria Steinem


I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly.  Tunafish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.  ~Barbara Grizzuti Harrison


Feminism directly confronts the idea that one person or set of people [has] the right to impose definitions of reality on others.  ~Liz Stanley and Sue Wise


I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead.  He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.  ~Robert Mueller


Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.  ~Susan B. Anthony


A man has every season while a woman only has the right to spring.  ~Jane Fonda


A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.  ~Gloria Steinem


How good does a female athlete have to be before we just call her an athlete?  ~Author Unknown


I've left Bethlehem, and I feel free.  I've left the girl I was supposed to be, and some day I'll be born.  ~Paula Cole, "Tiger," This Fire


The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.  ~Lucretia Mott






It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it.  ~Claudette Colbert, quoted in Kindling the Spirit by Lois P. Frankel


To tell a woman everything she may not do is to tell her what she can do.  ~Spanish Proverb


Women are not inherently passive or peaceful.  We're not inherently anything but human.  ~Robin Morgan


Men will often admit other women are oppressed but not you.  ~Sheila Rowbotham


Be plain in dress, and sober in your diet;
In short, my deary, kiss me, and be quiet.
~Mary Wortley Montagu, A Summary of Lord Lyttelton's Advice


Being a lady is an attitude.  ~Chuck Woolery, Love Connection


Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle.  ~Marya Mannes, But Will It Sell?, 1964


Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.  ~Margaret Mead


Women's chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy.  ~Estelle R. Ramey


I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.  ~Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Our Girls"


I am beautiful as I am.  I am the shape that was gifted.  My breasts are no longer perky and upright like when I was a teenager.  My hips are wider than that of a fashion model's.  For this I am glad, for these are the signs of a life lived.  ~Cindy Olsen, co-owner of The Body Objective


Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.  ~Gloria Steinem


Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.  The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.  ~Grover Cleveland, 1905


If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?  ~Mary Astell


I listen to feminists and all these radical gals - most of them are failures.  They've blown it.  Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom.  These women just need a man in the house.  That's all they need.  Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home.  And they blew it and they're mad at all men.  Feminists hate men.  They're sexist.  They hate men - that's their problem.  ~Jerry Falwell


[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.  ~Pat Robertson


I think, therefore I'm single.  ~Lizz Winstead


I can't be a rose in any man's lapel.  ~Margaret Trudeau


Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.  ~Mary Wollstonecraft


The only jobs for which no man is qualified are human incubators and wet nurse.  Likewise, the only job for which no woman is or can be qualified is sperm donor.  ~Wilma Scott Heide


Whether women are better than men I cannot say - but I can say they are certainly no worse.  ~Golda Meir


Give a woman a job and she grows balls.  ~Jack Gelber


The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.  ~Betty Friedan


It's wonderful to watch a pretty woman with character grow beautiful.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!  ~Maya Angelou, in Chris Orr, "Moms and Whoopi: Pioneers of Black Theater," Plexus, November 1983


American women are fools because they try to be everything to everybody.  ~Viva


Several men I can think of are as capable, as smart, as funny, as compassionate, and as confused - as remarkable you might say - as most women.  ~Jane Howard


Not only is women's work never done, the definition keeps changing.  ~Bill Copeland


No man is as anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.  ~Frank O'Connor


Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.  ~Betty Friedan


Sometimes the best man for the job isn't.  ~Author Unknown


Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object.  The difference is that is not all she wants to be.  ~Betty Rollin


When two people marry they become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person is the husband.  ~Shana Alexander, State-by-State Guide to Women's Legal Rights, 1975


Why is it that men can be bastards and women must wear pearls and smile?  ~Lynn Hecht Schafren


You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather.  Later he played my father and finally he played my husband.  If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother.  That's the way it is in Hollywood.  The men get younger and the women get older.  ~Lillian Gish


Easy is an adjective used to describe a woman who has the sexual morals of a man.  ~Nancy Linn-Desmond


Isn't that the problem?  That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?  ~Erica Jong


Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power.  They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability.  They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.  ~Ralph Nader


Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive.  ~Marya Mannes


Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.  ~Erica Jong


It starts when you sink in his arms and ends with your arms in his sink.  ~Author Unknown


To me, "sexual freedom" means freedom from having to have sex.  ~Lily Tomlin


And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in... underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money.  ~Erica Jong


No one should have to dance backward all of their lives.  ~Jill Ruckelshaus


When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn't she behave like a nice man?  ~Edith Evans


We have to have faith in ourselves.  I have never met a woman who, deep down in her core, really believes she has great legs.  And if she suspects that she might have great legs, then she's convinced that she has a shrill voice and no neck.  ~Cynthia Heimel


The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.  ~Maureen Murphy


Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.  ~Isadora Duncan


It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.  ~Sally Kempton, Esquire, 1970


I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body.  ~Elaine Boosler


Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.  ~Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals


Women are not the weak, frail little flowers that they are advertised.  There has never been anything invented yet, including war, that a man would enter into, that a woman wouldn't, too.  ~Will Rogers


Tomboys are an assertion of reality, of practicality.  Forced femininity is a waste of energy and resources, and therefore of oneself.  Live to live.  ~Morgan Torva


We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.  ~Gloria Steinem


Our only hope for the redemption of woman from the thralldom of dress lies in the belief that her hitherto limited sphere of activities has been so insufficient for her intellectual occupations that she has been forced to expend her thoughts in decorating her person, instead of enlarging her mind.  ~Mercy B. Jackson


There is more difference within the sexes than between them.  ~Ivy Compton-Burnett, Mother and Son


Because women's work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we're the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it's our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we're nymphos and if we don't we're frigid and if we love women it's because we can't get a "real" man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we're selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine" and if we don't we're typical weak females and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man and if we don't we're unnatural and because we still can't get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don't want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion and...for lots of other reasons we are part of the women's liberation movement.  ~Author unknown, quoted in The Torch, 14 September 1987


Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet?  As if they're afraid to plant themselves?  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, 1990


Many beautiful women have been made happy by their own beauty, but no intelligent woman has ever been made happy by her own intelligence.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


During the feminist revolution, the battle lines were again simple.  It was easy to tell the enemy, he was the one with the penis.  This is no longer strictly true.  Some men are okay now.  We're allowed to like them again.  We still have to keep them in line, of course, but we no longer have to shoot them on sight.  ~Cynthia Heimel, Sex Tips for Girls, 1983


I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.  ~Jane Rule


We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way.  If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.  ~Elizabeth Janeway


A woman is like a tea bag.  It's only when she's in hot water that you realize how strong she is.  ~Attributed to both Eleanor Roosevelt and Carl Sandburg


The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson


Men define intelligence, men define usefulness, men tell us what is beautiful, men even tell us what is womanly.  ~Sally Kempton


Sexism is a social disease.  ~Author Unknown


Men are irrelevant.  Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men.  ~Fay Weldon


One does not have to sleep with, or even touch, someone who has paid for your meal.  All those obligations are hereby rendered null and void, and any man who doesn't think so needs a quick jab in the kidney.  ~Cynthia Heimel, Sex Tips for Girls, 1983


Women are all female impersonators to some degree.  ~Susan Brownmiller


All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.  ~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929


You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump.  Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.  ~Elizabeth Bibesco


My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias.  ~James McNeill Whistler




To poke a wood fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world.  ~Charles Dudley Warner


It is with our passions as it is with fire and water; they are good servants, but bad masters.  ~Roger L'Estrange, Aesop's Fables, 1692


Since the house is on fire let us warm ourselves.  ~Italian Proverb


The most tangible of all visible mysteries - fire.  ~Leigh Hunt


One can enjoy a wood fire worthily only when he warms his thoughts by it as well as his hands and feet.  ~Odell Shepherd


The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another.  It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Man is the only creature that dares to light a fire and live with it.  The reason?  Because he alone has learned to put it out.  ~Henry Jackson Vandyke, Jr.


If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem.  Everything else is inconvenience.  ~Robert Fulghum


Fire is the most tolerable third party.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Fire and gunpowder do not sleep together.  ~Proverb


Don't let your dreams go up in smoke - practice fire safety.  ~Author Unknown


He who sits by the fire, thankless for the fire, is just as if he had no fire.  Nothing is possessed save in appreciation, of which thankfulness is the indispensable ingredient.  ~W.J. Cameron


A spark neglected makes a mighty fire.  ~Robert Herrick


If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid seeing yourself in the mirror, because I bet that's what really throws you into a panic.  ~Jack Handey


Your own property is concerned when your neighbor's house is on fire.  ~Horace


Fires all go out eventually.  ~Author Unknown


Fire takes no holiday.  ~Author Unknown


Firelight will not let you read fine stories but it's warm and you won't see the dust on the floor.  ~Author Unknown


If you play with fire, you're gonna get burned.  ~Saying


Fire, water, and government know nothing of mercy.  ~Proverb


Each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.  ~Edgar Allan Poe


Playing with fire is bad for those who burn themselves.  For the rest of us, it is a very great pleasure.  ~Author Unknown


Remember in elementary school you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file from smallest to tallest?  What is the logic in that?  What, do tall people burn slower?  ~Warren Hutcherson


Practice fire safety - watch what you heat.  ~Author Unknown


Among the notable things about fire is that it also requires oxygen to burn - exactly like its enemy, life.  Thereby are life and flames so often compared.  ~Otto Weininger


Don't fling your butt beside the trail and we won't fling your butt in jail.  ~Author Unknown


How is it that one match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box of matches to start a campfire?  ~Christy Whitehead


Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld


As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.  ~William Shakespeare


Fire in the heart sends smoke into the head.  ~Proverb


Love is like a friendship caught on fire.  In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering.  As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.  ~Bruce Lee


Time is the fire in which we burn.  ~Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day," 1937  (Thank you, George.)


The fire you kindle for your enemy often burns yourself more than them.  ~Chinese Proverb


Life is a flame that is always burning itself out, but it catches fire again every time a child is born.  ~George Bernard Shaw


When man invented fire, he didn't say, "Hey, let's cook."  He said, "Great, now we can see naked bottoms in the dark."  ~Steven Moffat, Coupling, "Inferno," original airdate 2 June 2000


There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.  ~Vincent van Gogh


Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.  ~Garrison Keillor


The funny thing about firemen is, night and day, they are always firemen.  ~Gregory Widen, Backdraft

I've had tons of odd jobs, but I think that I would probably be a fireman because you get to see the results of your job.  You get there and there is a house on fire.  You leave and there's not a fire anymore.  ~Luke Perry

When a man becomes a fireman his greatest act of bravery has been accomplished.  What he does after that is all in the line of work.  ~Edward F. Croker

I have no ambition in this world but one, and that is to be a fireman.  The position may, in the eyes of some, appear to be a lowly one; but we who know the work which the fireman has to do believe that his is a noble calling.  Our proudest moment is to save lives.  ~Edward F. Croker

If Prometheus was worthy of the wrath of heaven for kindling the first fire upon earth, how ought all the gods honor the men who make it their professional business to put it out?  ~John Godfrey Saxe

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.  ~Kurt Vonnegut

Seems to me the basic conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen.  To men, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we're doing we can be ready in two minutes.  Women, on the other hand, are like fire.  They're very exciting, but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur.  ~Jerry Seinfeld

My sons think it's a fireman's pole, but I forgot to cut a hole through the ground into the kitchen.  ~Pamela Anderson

When fire is cried and danger is neigh,
"God and the firemen" is the people's cry;
But when 'tis out and all things righted,
God is forgotten and the firemen slighted.
~Author unknown, from The Fireman's Journal, 18 Oct 1879

But sound aloud the praises, and give the victor-crown
To our noble-hearted Firemen, who fear not danger's frown.
~Frederic G.W. Fenn, "Ode to our Firemen," 1878

All men are created equal, then a few become firemen.  ~Author Unknown

Firefighters save hearts and homes.  ~Author Unknown

Firemen: your worst day is our everyday.  ~Michael Perry, volunteer firefighter from Wisconsin, as quoted in Into the Fire, a documentary presented by Fireman's Fund Insurance Company and directed by Bill Couturié

Firefighters are hot stuff!  ~Author Unknown

Hug a firefighter and feel warm all over.  ~Author Unknown

If you think it's tough being a firefighter, try being a firefighter's wife.  ~Author Unknown

What you call a hero, I call just doing my job.  ~Author Unknown

Firefighting - one of the few professions left that still makes house calls.  ~Author Unknown

Volunteer firemen do it for free!  ~Author Unknown

The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Let no man's ghost return to say his training let him down.  ~Firefighters Saying

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.  ~Bible, John 15:13

Firefighting is all about ass - busting ours to save yours.  ~Author Unknown

You might be a firefighter if your kids are afraid to get into water fights with you.  ~Author Unknown

What is a firefighter?
He's the guy next door....
He's a guy like you and me with warts and worries and unfulfilled dreams.
Yet he stands taller than most of us.
He's a fireman....
A fireman is at once the most fortunate and the least fortunate of men.
He's a man who saves lives because he has seen too much death.
He's a gentle man because he has seen the awesome power of violence out of control.
He's responsive to a child's laughter because his arms have held too many small bodies that will never laugh again....
He doesn't preach the brotherhood of man.
He lives it.
~Author Unknown

You might be a fireman if you've ever said, "she's hot tonight" and not been talking about a girl.  ~Author Unknown

You might be a firefighter if you've ever smoked and there wasn't a cigarette in sight.  ~Author Unknown

If you put out the fire, you won't have to jump out the window!  ~Andy Freidricks

Firemen never die, they just burn forever in the hearts of the people whose lives they saved.  ~Susan Diane Murphree

So as you look at the firefighter with his rake, hose or axe,
His beet red face or ice covered mustache,
You should know why he goes through that smoky front door,
And is forced to crawl like a baby down on the floor.
He does it to save both lives and property,
All that is precious to you and to me. 
So take a good look at this modern warrior who serves his call proud and true,
And know that he would die just to save me and you.
~Robert J. Athans

You might be a firefighter if "climbing the corporate ladder" has nothing to do with career advancement.  ~Author Unknown

You might be a firefighter if the microwave goes off and you run out of the house thinking it was your pager.  ~Author Unknown

Backdraft has the right-of-way.  ~Author Unknown

You have to do something in your life that is honorable and not cowardly if you are to live in peace with yourself, and for the firefighter it is fire.  ~Larry Brown

When you have secured an area, don't forget to tell the fire.  ~Author Unknown

You know you're a firefighter when you really think that rusty old hydrant looks good in the garden.  ~Author Unknown

You might be a firefighter if you had to extricate someone by cutting the car doors off on one side and realized there was nothing wrong with the doors on the other side.  ~Author Unknown

The very worst fire plan is no plan.  The next worse is two plans.  ~Author Unknown

Never fight fire from ego.  ~Author Unknown

Have cognition before ignition.  ~Author Unknown

Man is the only creature that dares to light a fire and live with it.  The reason?  Because he alone has learned to put it out.  ~Henry Jackson Vandyke, Jr.

Fire is the best of servants; but what a master!  ~Thomas Carlyle

Whatever the Americans are proud of - whatever they consider to be particularly good, useful, brilliant, or characteristic of themselves or their climate, they designate, half in jest, though scarcely half in earnest, as an "institution."  Thus the memory of George Washington... is an institution; the Falls of Niagara are an institution; the Plymouth Rock, on which the Pilgrim Fathers first set foot, is an institution...; "Sweet potatoes" are an institution, and Pumpkin (or Punkin) pie is an institution; ...squash is an institution; Bunker Hill is an institution; and the firemen of New York are a great institution.  ~Charles Mackay, Life and Liberty in America, 1850

Fires all go out eventually.  ~Author Unknown

Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.  ~William Shakespeare

For safety is not a gadget but a state of mind.  ~Eleanor Everet

Safety doesn't happen by accident.  ~Author Unknown

If crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?  ~George Carlin

"Safety First" is "Safety Always."  ~Charles M. Hayes

Better a thousand times careful than once dead.  ~Proverb

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!  ~Maya Angelou



There are two types of fisherman - those who fish for sport and those who fish for fish.  ~Author Unknown


Fishing is the sport of drowning worms.  ~Author Unknown


[T]his planet is covered with sordid men who demand that he who spends time fishing shall show returns in fish.  ~Leonidas Hubbard, Jr.


A bad day of fishing is better than a good day of work.  ~Author Unknown


May the holes in your net be no larger than the fish in it.  ~Irish Blessing


I fish better with a lit cigar; some people fish better with talent.  ~Nick Lyons, Bright Rivers, 1977


All the romance of trout fishing exists in the mind of the angler and is in no way shared by the fish.  ~Harold F. Blaisdell, The Philosophical Fisherman, 1969


There is certainly something in angling that tends to produce a serenity of the mind.  ~Washington Irving


Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.  ~Ernest Hemingway


The fishing was good; it was the catching that was bad.  ~A.K. Best


The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span the hours spent in fishing.  ~Babylonian Proverb


It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming.  ~John Steinbeck


Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.  Teach him how to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.  ~Author Unknown


Bragging may not bring happiness, but no man having caught a large fish goes home through an alley.  ~Author Unknown


Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.  ~Henry David Thoreau


All fishermen are liars; it's an occupational disease with them like housemaid's knee or editor's ulcers.  ~Beatrice Cook, Till Fish Do Us Part, 1949


An angler is a man who spends rainy days sitting around on the muddy banks of rivers doing nothing because his wife won't let him do it at home.  ~Author Unknown


If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles.  ~Doug Larson


We ask a simple question
And that is all we wish:
Are fishermen all liars?
Or do only liars fish?
~William Sherwood Fox, Silken Lines and Silver Hooks, 1954


Fishing is boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting.  ~Dave Barry


There he stands, draped in more equipment than a telephone lineman, trying to outwit an organism with a brain no bigger than a breadcrumb, and getting licked in the process.  ~Paul O'Neil, 1965


The best way to a fisherman's heart is through his fly.  ~Author Unknown


I love fishing.  You put that line in the water and you don't know what's on the other end.  Your imagination is under there.  ~Robert Altman






Give a man a fish and he has food for a day; teach him how to fish and you can get rid of him for the entire weekend.  ~Zenna Schaffer


There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.  ~Steven Wright


The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.  ~John Buchan


Fishing is a... discipline in the equality of men - for all men are equal before fish.  ~Herbert Hoover


Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali.  He was using a dotted line.  He caught every other fish.  ~Steven Wright


Calling fishing a hobby is like calling brain surgery a job.  ~Paul Schullery


As the evening sky faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint.  ~Jack Handey


...of all the liars among mankind, the fisherman is the most trustworthy.  ~William Sherwood Fox, Silken Lines and Silver Hooks, 1954


...trout that doesn't think two jumps and several runs ahead of the average fisherman is mighty apt to get fried.  ~Beatrice Cook, Till Fish Do Us Part, 1949


Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day.  But teach a man how to fish, and he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years.  ~Charles Haas


I am not against golf, since I cannot but suspect it keeps armies of the unworthy from discovering trout...  ~Paul O'Neil


Even if you've been fishing for three hours and haven't gotten anything except poison ivy and sunburn, you're still better off than the worm.  ~Author Unknown


Three-fourths of the Earth's surface is water, and one-fourth is land.  It is quite clear that the good Lord intended us to spend triple the amount of time fishing as taking care of the lawn.  ~Chuck Clark


Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls...  ~Jim Harrison, Just Before Dark, 1991


There's no taking trout with dry breeches.  ~Miguel de Cervantes


Reading about baseball is a lot more interesting than reading about chess, but you have to wonder:  Don't any of these guys ever go fishing?  ~Dave Shiflett, quoted in Houston Chronicle, 29 April 1990


There is no greater fan of fly fishing than the worm.  ~Patrick F. McManus, Never Sniff a Gift Fish, 1979


People who fish for food, and sport be damned, are called pot-fishermen.  The more expert ones are called crack pot-fishermen.  All other fishermen are called crackpot fishermen.  This is confusing.  ~Ed Zern, 1947


Enjoy thy stream, O harmless fish;
And when an angler for his dish,
Through gluttony's vile sin,
Attempts, the wretch, to pull thee out,
God give thee strength, O gentle trout,
To pull the rascal in!
~John Wolcot


Our tradition is that of the first man who sneaked away to the creek when the tribe did not really need fish.  ~Roderick Haig-Brown, about modern fishing, A River Never Sleeps, 1946


Even eminent chartered accountants are known, in their capacity as fishermen, blissfully to ignore differences between seven and ten inches, half a pound and two pounds, three fish and a dozen fish.  ~William Sherwood Fox, Silken Lines and Silver Hooks, 1954


Fishing is much more than fish.  It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.  ~Herbert Hoover


Good things come to those who bait.  ~Author Unknown


"Carpe Diem" does not mean "fish of the day."  ~Author Unknown


Gone fishin', be back at dark-thirty!  ~Author Unknown


You must lose a fly to catch a trout.  ~George Herbert


If you've got short, stubby fingers and wear reading glasses, any relaxation you would normally derive from fly fishing is completely eliminated when you try to tie on a fly.  ~Jack Ohman, Fear of Fly Fishing, 1988


Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.  ~Author Unknown


Nothing makes a fish bigger than almost being caught.  ~Author Unknown


My biggest worry is that my wife (when I'm dead) will sell my fishing gear for what I said I paid for it.  ~Koos Brandt


Scholars have long known that fishing eventually turns men into philosophers.  Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to buy decent tackle on a philosopher's salary.  ~Patrick F. McManus


Bass fishermen watch Monday night football, drink beer, drive pickup trucks and prefer noisy women with big breasts.  Trout fishermen watch MacNeil-Lehrer, drink white wine, drive foreign cars with passenger-side air bags and hardly think about women at all.  This last characteristic may have something to do with the fact that trout fishermen spend most of the time immersed up to the thighs in ice-cold water.  ~Author Unknown



Men and fish are alike.  They both get into trouble when they open their mouths.  ~Author Unknown


There will be days when the fishing is better than one's most optimistic forecast, others when it is far worse.  Either is a gain over just staying home.  ~Roderick Haig-Brown, Fisherman's Spring, 1951




The whole inspiration of our life as a nation flows out from the waving folds of this banner.  ~Author Unknown


If anyone, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him - it means just what Concord and Lexington meant; what Bunker Hill meant; which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known - the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


There is not a thread in it but scorns self-indulgence, weakness and rapacity.  ~Charles Evans Hughes


You're the emblem of
The land I love.
The home of the free and the brave.
~George M. Cohan


I am whatever you make me, nothing more.  I am your belief in yourself, your dream of what a people may become.... I am the clutch of an idea, and the reasoned purpose of resolution.  I am no more than you believe me to be and I am all that you believe I can be.  I am whatever you make me, nothing more.  ~Franklin Knight Lane


When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there.
~Joseph Rodman Drake, The American Flag


I swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself, the pictured suggestion of that big thing which makes this nation.  My stars and my stripes are your dream and your labors.  They are bright with cheer, brilliant with courage, firm with faith, because you have made them so out of your heart.  For you are the makers of the flag and it is well that you glory in the making.  ~Franklin Knight Lane


A moth-eaten rag on a worm-eaten pole
It does not look likely to stir a man's soul,
'Tis the deeds that were done 'neath the moth-eaten rag,
When the pole was a staff, and the rag was a flag.
~Sir Edward B. Hamley, 1824-1893


I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.  ~Francis Bellamy, The Youth's Companion, 8 September 1892


Cheers for the sailors that fought on the wave for it,
Cheers for the soldiers that always were brave for it,
Tears for the men that went down to the grave for it,
Here comes the flag!
~Arthur Macy, The Flag


It is the flag just as much of the man who was naturalized yesterday as of the men whose people have been here many generations.  ~Henry Cabot Lodge


You're a grand old flag,
You're a high flying flag
And forever in peace may you wave.
~George M. Cohan


That piece of red, white and blue bunting means five thousand years of struggle upwards.  It is the full-grown flower of ages of fighting for liberty.  It is the century plant of human hope in bloom.  ~Alvin Owsley


Off with your hat, as the flag goes by!
And let the heart have its say;
you're man enough for a tear in your eye
that you will not wipe away.
~Henry Cuyler Bunner


We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity, representing our liberty.  ~George Washington, attributed


The red and white and starry blue
Is freedom's shield and hope.
~John Philip Sousa 


Oh! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
~Francis Scott Key, The Star-Spangled Banner


Our flag means all that our fathers meant in the Revolutionary War.  It means all that the Declaration of Independence meant.  It means justice.  It means liberty.  It means happiness.... Every color means liberty.  Every thread means liberty.  Every star and stripe means liberty.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


Freedom's natal day is here.
Fire the guns and shout for freedom,
See the flag above unfurled!
Hail the stars and stripes forever,
Dearest flag in all the world. 
~Florence A. Jones


We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.  ~Justice William J. Brennan, for the Majority US Supreme Court Decision, 3 July 1989


Your flag and my flag,
And how it flies today
In your land and my land
And half a world away!
Rose-red and blood-red
The stripes forever gleam;
Snow-white and soul-white -
The good forefathers' dream;
Sky-blue and true-blue, with stars to gleam aright -
The gloried guidon of the day, a shelter through the night.
~Wilbur D. Nesbit, Your Flag and My Flag


Ev'ry heart beats true
'neath the Red, White and Blue,
~George M. Cohan


Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?  ~Thomas Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus"


A flag appears 'mid thunderous cheers,
The banner of the Western land.
The emblem of the brave and true 
~John Philip Sousa


The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights.  It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life.  It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history.  ~Woodrow Wilson


Thanks for your help, Dave Martucci of vexman.net!




To avoid mistakes and regrets, always consult your wife before engaging in a flirtation.  ~E.W. Howe


If you're a gifted flirt, talking about the price of eggs will do as well as any other subject.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Flirtation:  attention without intention.  ~Max O'Rell, John Bull and His Island


Women flirt to keep their stock high, men to get somewhere.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The greatest miracle of love is the cure of coquetry.  ~François Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims


Why does a man take it for granted that a girl who flirts with him wants him to kiss her - when, nine times out of ten, she only wants him to want to kiss her?  ~Helen Rowland


Women know not the whole of their coquetry.  ~François Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims


Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.  ~Charles Reade


The coquets of both sexes are self-lovers, and that is a love no other whatever can dispossess.  ~John Gay, The Beggar's Opera


Coquetry is the essential characteristic, and the prevalent humor of women; but they do not all practice it, because the coquetry of some is restrained by fear or by reason.  ~François Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims


Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves it.  Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose - easily trimmed off when once plucked.  Flirtation is like the slime on water-plants, making them hard to handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in slimy waters.  ~Ik Marvel


Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into.  ~Henry Beecher, Life Thoughts, 1858

Earth laughs in flowers.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Hamatreya"

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.  ~Emma Goldman

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.  ~Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.  Bricks to all greenhouses!  Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!  ~Edward Abbey

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Afternoon on a Hill"

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.  ~Basho

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.  ~Beverly Nichols

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.  ~Walt Whitman

'Tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes!
~William Wordsworth, "Lines Written in Early Spring," Lyrical Ballads, 1798

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.  ~Tennessee Williams

Flowers are without hope.  Because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms.  ~Ikkyu Sojun

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.  ~Heinrich Heine, The Hartz Journey

Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
~Francis Thompson, "The Poppy," 1891

How can one help shivering with delight when one's hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor!  ~Colette

Look at us, said the violets blooming at her feet, all last winter we slept in the seeming death but at the right time God awakened us, and here we are to comfort you.  ~Edward Payson Rod

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.  ~John Ruskin

Pluck not the wayside flower;
It is the traveler's dower.
~William Allingham

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.  ~Chinese Proverb

Flowers have an expression of countenance as much as men or animals.  Some seem to smile; some have a sad expression; some are pensive and diffident; others again are plain, honest and upright, like the broad-faced sunflower and the hollyhock.  ~Henry Ward Beecher, Star Papers: A Discourse of Flowers

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.  ~Walt Whitman

The flower is the poetry of reproduction.  It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.  ~Jean Giraudoux

Why do people give each other flowers?  To celebrate various important occasions, they're killing living creatures?  Why restrict it to plants?  "Sweetheart, let's make up.  Have this deceased squirrel."  ~The Washington Post

Flowers really do intoxicate me.  ~Vita Sackville-West

Flowers whisper "Beauty!" to the world, even as they fade, wilt, fall.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Flowers are those little colorful beacons of the sun from which we get sunshine when dark, somber skies blanket our thoughts.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Flowers don't worry about how the're going to bloom.  They just open up and turn toward the light and that makes them beautiful.  ~Jim Carrey

The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms.  Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.  ~Auguste Rodin

The flower offered of itself
And eloquently spoke
Of Gods
In languages of rainbows
Perfumes
And secret silence...
~Phillip Pulfrey, from Love, Abstraction and other Speculations, www.originals.net

Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.  ~Gerard de Nerval

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords.  ~John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, 1916

With daffodils mad footnotes for the spring,
And asters purple asterisks for autumn -
~Conrad Aiken, Preludes for Memnon, 1930

The poet's darling.  ~William Wordsworth, "To the Daisy"

Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul.  ~The Koran

If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn.  ~Andrew Mason

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
~William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," 1804

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.  ~Claude Monet

The flowers of late winter and early spring occupy places in our hearts well out of proportion to their size.  ~Gertrude S. Wister

Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?  ~Maurice Maeterlinck

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...  ~Susan Polis Shutz

The flower that follows the sun does so even in cloudy days.  ~Robert Leighton

I like to think a flower opens itself to outgrow its plantedness.  That it yearns to be carried away.  ~Author Unknown

Being perfect artists and ingenuous poets, the Chinese have piously preserved the love and holy cult of flowers; one of the very rare and most ancient traditions which has survived their decadence.  And since flowers had to be distinguished from each other, they have attributed graceful analogies to them, dreamy images, pure and passionate names which perpetuate and harmonize in our minds the sensations of gentle charm and violent intoxication with which they inspire us.  So it is that certain peonies, their favorite flower, are saluted by the Chinese, according to their form or color, by these delicious names, each an entire poem and an entire novel:  The Young Girl Who Offers Her Breasts, or: The Water That Sleeps Beneath the Moon, or: The Sunlight in the Forest, or: The First Desire of the Reclining Virgin, or: My Gown Is No Longer All White Because in Tearing It the Son of Heaven Left a Little Rosy Stain; or, even better, this one: I Possessed My Lover in the Garden.  ~Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden, "The Garden," Chapter 5

A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.  ~The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words.  They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.  ~Lydia M. Child

Even if you think the Big Bang created the stars, don't you wonder who sent the flowers?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I hope some day to meet God, because I want to thank Him for the flowers.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.  ~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964

God loved the flowers and invented soil.  Man loved the flowers and invented vases.  ~Variation of a saying by Jacques Deval (God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.)





I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious.  And why shouldn't it be? - it is the same the angels breathe.  ~Mark Twain, "Roughing It"


You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky.  ~Amelia Earhart


How strange is this combination of proximity and separation.  That ground - seconds away - thousands of miles away.  ~Charles A. Lindbergh


There is an art, or rather a knack to flying.  The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.  ~Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy


There are only two emotions in a plane:  boredom and terror.  ~Orson Welles


Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society.  The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.  ~Gil Stern


Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.  ~James Dickey


O! for a horse with wings!  ~William Shakespeare, Cymbeline


The butterfly is a flying flower...  ~Ponce Denis couchard Lebrun


More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.  ~Wilbur Wright


The modern airplane creates a new geographical dimension.  A navigable ocean of air blankets the whole surface of the globe.  There are no distant places any longer:  the world is small and the world is one.  ~Wendell Willkie


Once you have learned to fly your plane, it is far less fatiguing to fly than it is to drive a car.  You don't have to watch every second for cats, dogs, children, lights, road signs, ladies with baby carriages and citizens who drive out in the middle of the block against the lights.... Nobody who has not been up in the sky on a glorious morning can possibly imagine the way a pilot feels in free heaven.  ~William T. Piper


Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.  ~Alexander Chase, "Perspectives," 1966


Flying without feathers is not easy; my wings have no feathers.  ~Titus Maccius Plautus


Within all of us is a varying amount of space lint and star dust, the residue from our creation.  Most are too busy to notice it, and it is stronger in some than others.  It is strongest in those of us who fly and is responsible for an unconscious, subtle desire to slip into some wings and try for the elusive boundaries of our origin.  ~K.O. Eckland, "Footprints On Clouds"


He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


The bluebird carries the sky on his back.  ~Henry David Thoreau


If God had really intended men to fly, he'd make it easier to get to the airport.  ~George Winters


The engine is the heart of an airplane, but the pilot is its soul.  ~Walter Raleigh


Angels can fly because they carry no burdens.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994


Whenever we safely land in a plane, we promise God a little something.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Pilots are a rare kind of human.  They leave the ordinary surface of the word, to purify their soul in the sky, and they come down to earth, only after receiving the communion of the infinite.  ~Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra


Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.  ~Henry David Thoreau


The desire to reach for the sky runs deep in our human psyche.  ~Cesar Pelli


Why fly?  Simple.  I'm not happy unless there's some room between me and the ground.  ~Richard Bach






This is the first convention of the space age - where a candidate can promise the moon and mean it.  ~Author Unknown


I never liked riding in helicopters because there's a fair probability that the bottom part will get going around as fast as the top part.  ~John Wittenborn


In the space age, man will be able to go around the world in two hours - one hour for flying and one hour to get to the airport.  ~Neil McElroy


When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.  ~Leonardo Da Vinci  (Thanks, Tommy)


The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing.  The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together.  ~Bill Gates


Given angel's wings, where might you fly?
In what sweet heaven might you find your love?
Unwilling to be bound, where might you move,
Lost between the wonder and the why?...
~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com


Bicycling is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds.  The airplane simply carries a man on its back like an obedient Pegasus; it gives him no wings of his own.  ~Louis J. Helle, Jr., Spring in Washington


When you think about flying, it's nuts really.  Here you are at about 40,000 feet, screaming along at 700 miles an hour and you're sitting there drinking Diet Pepsi and eating peanuts.  It just doesn't make any sense.  ~David Letterman


I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.  ~Jean Kerr, "Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall," The Snake Has All the Lines, 1958


I pick the prettiest part of the sky and I melt into the wing and then into the air, till I'm just soul on a sunbeam.  ~Richard Bach


I think progress began to retrogress when Wilbur and Orville started tinkering around in Dayton and at Kitty Hawk, because I believe that two Wrights made a wrong.  ~Ogden Nash, "Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours," New Yorker, 1959 April 4


If black boxes survive air crashes, why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?  ~George Carlin


Those who gave away their wings are sad not to see them fly.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


I think it is a pity to lose the romantic side of flying and simply to accept it as a common means of transport....  ~Amy Johnson


My soul is in the sky.  ~William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream


I always thought that my airplane conveyed a silent sermon.  To the earthbound observer, its silhouette was the shape of the cross on which Jesus was crucified.  ~E.R. Trimble


The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.  ~G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"


Now I know why they tell you to put your head between your knees on crash landings.  You think you're going to kiss your ass good-bye.  ~Terry Hanson


There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further.  ~Werner von Braun


Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway.  ~Mary Kay Ash


Spread your wings and let the fairy in you fly!  ~Author Unknown


If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?  ~E.Y. Harburg


The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.  ~Wilbur Wright


Thanks, Tom, for sharing some of your collection!




Football is, after all, a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions without going to jail for it.  ~Heywood Hale Brown


Academe, n.:  An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.  Academy, n.:  [from academe] A modern school where football is taught.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


Most football players are temperamental.  That's 90 percent temper and 10 percent mental.  ~Doug Plank


Let's face it, you have to have a slightly recessive gene that has a little something to do with the brain to go out on the football field and beat your head against other human beings on a daily basis.  ~Tim Green


You have to play this game like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four.  ~Dan Birdwell


Football combines the two worst things about America:  it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.  ~George F. Will


Pro football is like nuclear warfare.  There are no winners, only survivors.  ~Frank Gifford


Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare.  They are consumed in twelve minutes.  Half-times take twelve minutes.  This is not coincidence.  ~Erma Bombeck


If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.  ~Erma Bombeck


If you're mad at your kid, you can either raise him to be a nose tackle or send him out to play on the freeway.  It's about the same.  ~Bob Golic


At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.  ~George Plimpton


Baseball players are smarter than football players.  How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?  ~Jim Bouton


One of the great disappointments of a football game is that the cheerleaders never seem to get injured.  ~Author Unknown


American football makes rugby look like a Tupperware party.  ~Sue Lawley, 1985


Football is not a contact sport.  It's a collision sport.  Dancing is a good example of a contact sport.  ~Duffy Daugherty


When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball.  He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest.  The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team.  ~George Raveling


The reason women don't play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public.  ~Phyllis Diller


Baseball is what we were.  Football is what we have become.  ~Mary McGrory


Is there a point at which every Sunday during the NFL season ceases to make a man feel like a kid on Christmas morning?  ~Mike Alexander, MADfit.com


Football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time.  ~Arnold Mandell


I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide.  Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment.  Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.  ~Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud, 1988


College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Watching football is like watching pornography.  There's plenty of action, and I can't take my eyes off it, but when it's over, I wonder why the hell I spent an afternoon doing it.  ~Luke Salisbury






There are two kinds of people in the world, Notre Dame lovers and Notre Dame haters.  And, quite frankly, they're both a pain in the ass.  ~Dan Devine, former Notre Dame football coach


The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.  ~Erma Bombeck


Beer and Rugby are more or less synonymous.  ~Chris Laidlaw, 1973


Rugby football is a game I can't claim absolutely to understand in all its niceties, if you know what I mean.  I can follow the broad, general principles, of course.  I mean to say, I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end and that, in order to squalch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellowman which, if done elsewhere, would result in fourteen days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench.  ~P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves, 1930


I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and - this always amazes me - not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a "good hit," which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body.  ~Dave Barry


I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault.  ~Jack Tatum


He was the only man I ever saw who ran his own interference.  ~Steve Owen, about Bronko Nagurski


Trying to maintain order during a legalized gang brawl involving 80 toughs with a little whistle, a hanky and a ton of prayer.  ~Anonymous referee, explaining his job


There are several differences between a football game and a revolution.  For one thing, a football game usually lasts longer and the participants wear uniforms.  Also, there are usually more casualties in a football game.  The object of the game is to move a ball past the other team's goal line.  This counts as six points.  No points are given for lacerations, contusions, or abrasions, but then no points are deducted, either.  Kicking is very important in football.  In fact, some of the more enthusiastic players even kick the ball, occasionally.  ~Alfred Hitchcock


Men are clinging to football on a level we aren't even aware of.  For centuries, we ruled everything, and now, in the last ten minutes, there are all these incursions by women.  It's our Alamo.  ~Tony Kornheiser


Speed is not your fastest, but your slowest man.  No back can run faster than his interference.  ~Jock Sutherland


It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent.  The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.  ~George Santayana


When it comes to football, God is prejudiced - toward big, fast kids.  ~Chuck Mills


Australian Rules football might best be described as a game devised for padded cells, played in the open air.  ~Jim Murray


Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.  ~Merle Kessler


Speed, strength, and the inability to register pain immediately.  ~Reggie Williams, when asked his greatest strengths as a football player


Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen.  Soccer is a gentleman's game played by beasts.  Football is a beastly game played by beasts.  ~Henry Blaha, 1972


What about football?  Is it a sport or a concussion?  ~Jim Murray, Los Angeles Times


The tactical difference between Association Football and Rugby with its varieties seems to be that in the former the ball is the missile, in the latter men are the missiles.  ~Alfred E. Crawley, The Book of the Ball, 1913


I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive.  Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Forgiving is rediscovering the shining path of peace that at first you thought others took away when they betrayed you.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.  ~Mark Twain

Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.  ~Marlene Dietrich

It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.  ~Grace Hopper

The weak can never forgive.  Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.  ~Lewis B. Smedes, "Forgiveness - The Power to Change the Past," Christianity Today, 7 January 1983  (Thanks, Donna)

Forgiveness is a funny thing.  It warms the heart and cools the sting.  ~William Arthur Ward

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.  ~Paul Boese

If you can't forgive and forget, pick one.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

You can make up a quarrel, but it will always show where it was patched.  ~Edgar Watson Howe, Country Town Sayings, 1911

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.  ~William Blake, Jerusalem

Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge.  ~Isaac Friedmann

[A]ll forgiveness is a gift to yourself. ~A Course in Miracles

Forgive all who have offended you, not for them, but for yourself.  ~Harriet Nelson

He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.  ~George Herbert

There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.  ~Sydney Harris

Nobody forgets where he buried the hatchet.  ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, Abe Martin's Broadcast, 1930

Yes, this is what good is:  to forgive evil.  There is no other good.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The man who forgives is far stronger than the man who fights.  ~Nathan Croall

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.  ~Norman Cousins

What we forgive too freely doesn't stay forgiven.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

It's far easier to forgive an enemy after you've got even with him.  ~Olin Miller

Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk.  If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator.  Forgiving seems almost unnatural.  Our sense of fairness tells us people should pay for the wrong they do.  But forgiving is love's power to break nature's rule.  ~Lewis B. Smedes

There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.  ~Josh Billings

Without forgiveness life is governed by... an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation.  ~Roberto Assagioli

One thing you will probably remember well is any time you forgive and forget.  ~Franklin P. Jones

Forgive.  It doesn't erase their crime but why should you do the time.  Let go of resentment.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge, and dares forgive an injury.  ~E.H. Chapin

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.  ~Oscar Wilde

The fact, in short, is that freedom, to be meaningful in an organized society must consist of an amalgam of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints.  ~Samuel Hendel

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.  ~Thomas Paine

History does not teach fatalism.  There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.  ~Charles de Gaulle

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake,... of searching and experimenting,... of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, and even political.  ~Ignazio Silone, The God That Failed, 1950

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The patriot's blood is the seed of Freedom's tree.  ~Thomas Campbell

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte

Here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to 2081.  First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs.  Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify.  And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.  ~Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.  ~Simone de Beauvoir

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.  ~Adlai Stevenson, speech, Detroit, 1952

It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.  ~Author unknown, sometimes attributed to M. Grundler

We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.  ~Robert J. McCracken

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.  ~Robert Frost

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.  ~Thomas Paine

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

We have to call it "freedom": who'd want to die for "a lesser tyranny"?  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.  ~Moshe Dayan

There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.  ~Charles Kingsley

No one is free when others are oppressed.  ~Author Unknown

Nations grown corrupt
Love bondage more than liberty;
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.
~John Milton

Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law....  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Freedom means choosing your burden.  ~Hephzibah Menuhin

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.  ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan into the fire.  ~Eric Hoffer

Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.  ~Author Unknown

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.  ~Jeffrey Borenstein

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

Freedom is not enough.  ~Lyndon B. Johnson

Liberty has never come from the government.  Liberty has always come from the subjects of it.  The history of liberty is a history of resistance.  ~Woodrow Wilson

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.  ~Adlai Stevenson, speech, New York City, 28 August 1952

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.  ~William Faulkner

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.  ~Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, - Necessity and Free Will.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays, "The Opera"

We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.  ~Felix Frankfurter

O Liberty...! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded?
~Thomas Bailey Aldrich

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.  ~Frederick Douglass, speech, Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Washington, D.C., 1883

Let freedom never perish in your hands.  ~Joseph Addison

Who speaks of liberty while the human mind is in chains?  ~Francis Wright, 1828

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.  ~George Washington

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.  ~James Madison, speech, Virginia Convention, 1788

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.  ~Will Rogers

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.  ~Edward R. Murrow

Freedom has a thousand charms to show,
That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
~William Cowper

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings.  ~Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 1929

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.  ~Daniel Webster

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.  ~Albert Camus

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks.  Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools.  And their grandchildren are once more slaves.  ~D.H. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 1922

I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.  ~Author Unknown

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.  ~Louis D. Brandeis

When the People contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything for their Victory but new Masters.  ~George Savile

Without freedom, no one really has a name.  ~Milton Acorda

A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.  ~Baron de Montesquieu

Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888

Liberty means responsibility.  That is why most men dread it.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, "Maxims: Liberty and Equality," 1905

Liberty is maintained by responsible freedom.  ~Roger W Hancock, www.PoetPatriot.com

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.  ~Edmund Burke

We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.  ~Errico Malatesta, l'Agitazione, 18 June 1897

Freedom is never free.  ~Author Unknown

We are free, truly free, when we don't need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.  ~Ricardo Flores Magon, speech, 31 May 1914

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom.  The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.  ~Thomas Macaulay

A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be.  ~Douglas Pagels

Most of us don't need a psychiatric therapist as much as a friend to be silly with.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Friendship isn't a big thing - it's a million little things.  ~Author Unknown

A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world.  ~Leo Buscaglia

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty.  ~Sicilian Proverb

The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend.  ~Aristotle

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.  It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being.  We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.  ~Albert Schweitzer

A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they're not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they're not so bad.  ~Arnold H. Glasgow

The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Notebook, 1927

A good friend is cheaper than therapy.  ~Author Unknown

If a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do.  Think up something appropriate and do it.  ~Edgar Watson Howe

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.  ~Henry David Thoreau

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

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
~William Shakespeare

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.  ~Elisabeth Foley

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.  ~William Blake

A friend is the only person you will let into the house when you are Turning Out Drawers.  ~Pam Brown

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.  ~George Santayana

A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.  ~Donna Roberts

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone.  A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.  ~Samuel Johnson

True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.  ~Dave Tyson Gentry

You can always tell a real friend:  when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.  ~Laurence J. Peter

Friends are those rare people who ask how you are and then wait for the answer.  ~Author Unknown

A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out.  ~Grace Pulpit

One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.  ~D.H. Lawrence

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.  ~C.S. Lewis

Constant use will not wear ragged the fabric of friendship.  ~Dorothy Parker

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.  ~Virginia Woolf

There are big ships and small ships.  But the best ship of all is friendship.  ~Author Unknown

The best kind of friend is the one you could sit on a porch with, never saying a word, and walk away feeling like that was the best conversation you've had.  ~Author Unknown

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.  ~Henry David Thoreau

A true friend is one who thinks you are a good egg even if you are half-cracked.  ~Author Unknown

Friends are kisses blown to us by angels.  ~Author Unknown

It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to the friendship that we are not.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.  ~Marlene Dietrich

She is a friend of mind.  She gather me, man.  The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.  It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.  ~Toni Morrison, Beloved

Cherish the friend who tells you a harsh truth, wanting ten times more to tell you a loving lie.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.  ~Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.  ~Plautus

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.  ~George MacDonald

A real friend is someone who would feel loss if you jumped on a train, or in front of one.  ~Author Unknown

Silences make the real conversations between friends.  Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.  ~Margaret Lee Runbeck, Answer Without Ceasing

Love is like the wild-rose briar;
Friendship is like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?
~Emily Brontë

Our most difficult task as a friend is to offer understanding when we don't understand.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

As a friend, you first give your understanding, then you try to understand.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The friend within the man is that part of him which belongs to you and opens to you a door which never, perhaps, is opened to another.  Such a friend is true, and all he says is true; and he loves you even if he hates you in other mansions of his heart.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert

We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies.  Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.  The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Yes we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter.  I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front.  We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often.  I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check her diary when we arrange to meet.  ~Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, 1992

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.  ~John Leonard

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

True friends stab you in the front.  ~Oscar Wilde

Strangers are just friends waiting to happen.  ~Rod McKuen, Looking for a Friend  (Thank you, Carolyn.)

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.  ~Epicurus

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.  The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.  ~Henri Nouwen

Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need most.  ~American Proverb

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.  ~William Blake

The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate

A true friend reaches for your hand and touches your heart.  ~Attributed to Heather Pryor

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Friendship is a sheltering tree.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We are keenly aware of the faults of our friends, but if they like us enough it doesn't matter.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.  ~Shirley Maclaine

What do we ask of friendship except to be taken for what we pretend to be - and without having to pretend.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Friendship is Love, without his wings.  ~Lord Byron, L'Amitié est l'Amour sans Ailes

But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely.  Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.  ~Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859

A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.  ~William Penn

We are the captains of our own ships sailing the sea of life, but in times of a stormy weather, you will discover true friends when they don't hesitate to be a lighthouse.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.  ~Thomas Jefferson

A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.  ~Lois Wyse

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

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.  ~Katherine Mansfield

A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself.  ~Frances Ward Weller

The strongest marriage is between two who seek the same God, the strongest friendship between two who flee the same devil.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There is magic in long-distance friendships.  They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound.  ~Diana Cortes

If you're alone, I'll be your shadow.  If you want to cry, I'll be your shoulder.  If you want a hug, I'll be your pillow.  If you need to be happy, I'll be your smile.  But anytime you need a friend, I'll just be me.  ~Author Unknown

A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us to be what we should.  ~Author Unknown

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.  ~Barbara Kingsolver

Probably no man ever had a friend that he did not dislike a little.  ~E.W. Howe

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.  ~Edith Wharton

I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

'Tis a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his.  ~Benjamin Franklin

The best rule of friendship is to keep your heart a little softer than your head.  ~Author Unknown

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it.  But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.  ~Alice Duer Miller

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.  ~Anäis Nin

Friends are relatives you make for yourself.  ~Eustache Deschamps

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, for in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.  ~Emil Ludwig

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Journals, 1843

Ah, how good it feels!  The hand of an old friend.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends.  ~Samuel Pepys

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hold a true friend with both your hands.  ~Nigerian Proverb

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.  ~Sarah Orne Jewett

I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.  ~Blaise Pascal

Friendship is Love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Say what you want about aging, it's still the only way to have old friends.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.  ~Francesco Guicciardini

The best way to mend a broken heart is time and girlfriends.  ~Gwyneth Paltrow

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.  ~Mencius

Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.  ~Dag Hammarskjold

What is a friend?  A single soul dwelling in two bodies.  ~Aristotle

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.  ~Thomas A. Edison

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack.  Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.  ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.  ~Plutarch

The essence of true friendship is to make allowance for another's little lapses.  ~David Storey

Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends.  Bury the carcass of friendship:  it is not worth embalming.  ~William Hazlitt

It's no good trying to keep up old friendships.  It's painful for both sides.  The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.  ~Somerset Maugham

Friends are like walls.  Sometimes you lean on them, and sometimes it's good just knowing they are there.  ~Author Unknown

In my friend, I find a second self.  ~Isabel Norton

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.  Before him I may think aloud.  I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The future is called "perhaps," which is the only possible thing to call the future.  And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.  ~Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending, 1957

Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.  ~Ruth Benedict

I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.  ~Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, 1893

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.  ~Charles F. Kettering

I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.  ~Albert Einstein

The past can't see you, but the future is listening.  ~Terri Guillemets

And in today already walks tomorrow.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The future is always beginning now.  ~Mark Strand, Reasons for Moving

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.  ~Eric Hoffer

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.  ~John Sladek

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.  ~Paul Valery

Tomorrow is fresh, with no mistakes in it.  ~L.M. Montgomery

How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy
For the future!  How sure the future is within me;
I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed....
~D.H. Lawrence, "Wedlock"

You can never plan the future by the past.  ~Edmund Burke, "Letter to a Member of the National Assembly"

I have seen the future and it is very much like the present - only longer.  ~Kehlog Albran

I know not what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.  ~Author Unknown

The course of life is unpredictable... no one can write his autobiography in advance.  ~Abraham Joshua Heschel

The future is an opaque mirror.  Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.  ~Jim Bishop



Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.  ~From the movie The Color of Money


If you ain't just a little scared when you enter a casino, you are either very rich or you haven't studied the games enough.  ~VP Pappy


For most men (till by losing rendered sager)
Will back their own opinions by a wager.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Beppo"


Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing from something.  ~Wilson Mizner


The subject of gambling is all encompassing.  It combines man's natural play instinct with his desire to know about his fate and his future.  ~Franz Rosenthal, Gambling in Islam, 1975


The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.  ~Damon Runyon, "More Than Somewhat," in reference to Ecclesiastes 9:11, "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."


In a bet there is a fool and a thief.  ~Proverb


The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.  ~Kin Hubbard


Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply that we don't have as much money.  That was a true but incomplete answer.  In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.  ~Gloria Steinem


The typical gambler might not really understand the probabilistic nuances of the wheel or the dice, but such things seem a bit more tractable than, say, trying to raise a child in this lunatic society of ours.  ~Arthur S. Reber, The New Gambler's Bible


No wife can endure a gambling husband, unless he is a steady winner.  ~Thomas Robert Dewar


The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice is so pleasurable, that I assume it must be evil.  ~Heywood Broun


If you must play, decide upon three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.  ~Chinese Proverb


There is a very easy way to return from a casino with a small fortune:  go there with a large one.  ~Jack Yelton


Baccarat is a game whereby the croupier gathers in money with a flexible sculling oar, then rakes it home.  If I could have borrowed his oar I would have stayed.  ~Mark Twain


In most betting shops you will see three windows marked "Bet Here," but only one window with the legend "Pay Out."  ~Jeffrey Bernard


A gambler is nothing but a man who makes his living out of hope.  ~William Bolitho


I met with an accident on the way to the track; I arrived safely.  ~Joe E. Lewis


In the case of an earthquake hitting Las Vegas, be sure to go straight to the Keno Lounge.  Nothing ever gets hit there.  ~Author Unknown


Man is a gaming animal.  He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.  ~Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, 1823


Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit.  ~R.E. Shay






The house doesn't beat the player.  It just gives him the opportunity to beat himself.  ~Nick Dandalos


Dear Lord, help me to break even.  I need the money.  ~Author Unknown


A race track is a place where windows clean people.  ~Danny Thomas


You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it.  ~Albert Einstein


A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to us than the 99 which we had to work for, and the money won at Faro or in the stock market snuggles into our hearts in the same way.  ~Mark Twain


Casinos and prostitutes have the same thing in common; they are both trying to screw you out of your money and send you home with a smile on you face.  ~VP Pappy


Luck never gives; it only lends.  ~Swedish Proverb


By gaming we lose both our time and treasure - two things most precious to the life of man.  ~Owen Felltham


At the gambling table, there are no fathers and sons.  ~Chinese Proverb


Lottery:  A tax on people who are bad at math.  ~Author Unknown


You know horses are smarter than people.  You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people.  ~Will Rogers


No dog can go as fast as the money you bet on him.  ~Bud Flanagan


Horse racing is animated roulette.  ~Roger Kahn


I bet on a horse at ten-to-one.  It didn't come in until half-past five.  ~Henny Youngman


One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds.  ~Dan Bennett


A racehorse is an animal that can take several thousand people for a ride at the same time.  ~Author Unknown


The better the gambler, the worse the man.  ~Publius Syrus


A number of moralists condemn lotteries and refuse to see anything noble in the passion of the ordinary gambler.  They judge gambling as some atheists judge religion, by its excesses.  ~Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, 1832


There is but one good throw upon the dice, which is, to throw them away.  ~Author Unknown


Games of chance are traps to catch school boy novies and gaping country squires, who begin with a guinea and end with a mortgage.  ~Author Unknown


Betting is the manure to which the enormous crop of horse-races and racehorse breeding in this and other countries is to a large extent due.  ~Richard Blackmore, The Jockey Club and its Founders, 1891


Horse sense is a good judgment which keeps horses from betting on people.  ~W.C. Fields


The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.  ~Ambrose Bierce




You don't have to be a beer drinker to play darts, but it helps.  ~Author Unknown


It is impossible to win gracefully at chess.  No man has yet said "Mate!" in a voice which failed to sound to his opponent bitter, boastful and malicious.  ~A.A. Milne, Not That It Matters, 1919


One of the advantages bowling has over golf is that you seldom lose a bowling ball.  ~Don Carter


Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right.  ~Clive James


Life's too short for chess.  ~Henry James Byron, Our Boys, 1874


It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.  ~Henry Louis Mencken


Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.  ~Charles Lamb


With spots quadrangular of diamond form,
Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife,
And spades, the emblems of untimely graves.
~William Cowper


The bowling alley is the poor man's country club.  ~Sanford Hansell


'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays;
Hither and thither, and mates, and slays.
~Edward Fitzgerald


The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.  ~Stephen Sondheim


Egotism, n:  Doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.  ~Author Unknown


Do I rue a life wasted doing crosswords?  Yes, but I do know the three-letter-word for regret.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Our whole life is solving puzzles.  ~Erno Rubik


Whoever dreamed up Scrabble had an exaggerated idea of how many seven-letter words have five i's.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.  ~Joseph de Maistre


Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.  ~Indian Proverb


An apocryphal story - the word "apocryphal" here means "obviously untrue" - tells of two people, long ago, who were very bored, and that instead of complaining about it they sat up all night and invented the game of chess so that everyone else in the world, on evenings when there is nothing to do, can also be bored by the perplexing and tedious game they invented.  ~Lemony Snicket


The perfect family board game is one that can be played each time with fewer pieces.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


At my house, when a missing pawn shows up in the Scrabble tiles, it counts as an extra blank.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I haven't had sex in eight months.  To be honest, I now prefer to go bowling.  ~Kimberly Jones


Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Thank you to Michael P. Garofalo of The Spirit of Gardening for sharing some of these quotations!

My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view.  ~H. Fred Dale (Thanks, Anne)

Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration.  ~Lou Erickson

What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.  ~Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden, 1871

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.  ~Mirabel Osler

Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it.  ~Author Unknown

The best place to seek God is in a garden.  You can dig for him there.  ~George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932

Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if they are spoken to.  But a kind word every now and then is really quite enough.  Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them.  ~Victoria Glendinning

In gardens, beauty is a by-product.  The main business is sex and death.  ~Sam Llewelyn

The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.  ~Hanna Rion

In my garden there is a large place for sentiment.  My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams.  The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful.  ~Abram L. Urban

It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.  ~James Douglas, Down Shoe Lane

Weather means more when you have a garden.  There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.  ~Marcelene Cox

God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.  ~Author Unknown

I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.  It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from and Old Manse

Don't wear perfume in the garden - unless you want to be pollinated by bees.  ~Anne Raver

When one of my plants dies, I die a little inside, too.  ~Linda Solegato

Plant carrots in January and you'll never have to eat carrots.  ~Author Unknown

Take thy plastic spade,
It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants,
They are thy colours.
~William Mason, The English Garden, 1782

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Gardens are a form of autobiography.  ~Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine, August/September 1993

Gardening is about enjoying the smell of things growing in the soil, getting dirty without feeling guilty, and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity.  ~Lindley Karstens, noproblemgarden.com

I know that if odour were visible, as colour is,
I'd see the summer garden in rainbow clouds.
~Robert Bridges, "Testament of Beauty"

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.  ~Orson Scott Card

How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: -"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.
~Rudyard Kipling, "The Glory of the Garden"

You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.  ~Author Unknown

I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them.  I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master.  I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit.  ~Reginald Farrer, In a Yorkshire Garden, 1909

Plants cry their gratitude for the sun in green joy.  ~Terri Guillemets

The garden is the poor man's apothecary.  ~German Proverb

Garden writing is often very tame, a real waste when you think how opinionated, inquisitive, irreverent and lascivious gardeners themselves tend to be.  Nobody talks much about the muscular limbs, dark, swollen buds, strip-tease trees and unholy beauty that have made us all slaves of the Goddess Flora.  ~Ketzel Levine's talkingplants.com

On every stem, on every leaf,... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.  ~Mrs. C.W. Earle, Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden, 1897 (Thanks, Jessica)

No two gardens are the same.  No two days are the same in one garden.  ~Hugh Johnson

Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes.  ~Author Unknown

From an aunt, long ago:  "Death has come for me many times but finds me always in my lovely garden and leaves me there, I think, as an excuse to return."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs.  How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening.  It makes it so lifelike.  ~Evelyn Underhill, Letters

Coffee.  Garden.  Coffee.  Does a good morning need anything else?  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day.  ~F. Frankfort Moore, A Garden of Peace

Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden.... It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks

Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise.  ~Michael P. Garafalo

Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there.  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it.  ~Frank McKinney Hubbard

It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.  ~Walt Whitman

In the garden I tend to drop my thoughts here and there.  To the flowers I whisper the secrets I keep and the hopes I breathe.  I know they are there to eavesdrop for the angels.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another.  ~Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, 1977

Gardens... should be like lovely, well-shaped girls:  all curves, secret corners, unexpected deviations, seductive surprises and then still more curves.  ~H.E. Bates, A Love of Flowers

My garden is my favorite teacher.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden.  ~Abraham Cowley, The Garden, 1666

One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides.  ~W.E. Johns, The Passing Show

Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.  ~Douglas William Jerrold, about Australia, A Land of Plenty

I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.  ~John Erskine

Green fingers are the extension of a verdant heart.  ~Russell Page

It is utterly forbidden to be half-hearted about gardening.  You have got to love your garden whether you like it or not.  ~W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, Garden Rubbish, 1936

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.  ~Charles Lamb, 1830

When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it.  If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.  ~Author Unknown

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation.  It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.  ~Karel Čapek, The Gardener's Year, translated by M. and R. Weatherall, 1931

Most people who possess anything like an acre, or half of it, contribute weekly to the support of a gentleman known as Jobbing Gardener.  You are warned of the danger that he may prove to be Garden Pest no 1.  ~C.E. Lucas-Phillips, The New Small Garden

Plants give us oxygen for the lungs and for the soul.  ~Linda Solegato

I sit in my garden, gazing upon a beauty that cannot gaze upon itself.  And I find sufficient purpose for my day.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity.  You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it.  ~S.J. Perelman, Acres and Pains, 1951

If there was a big gardening convention, and you got up and gave a speech in favor of fast-motion gardening, I bet you would get booed right off the stage.  They're just not ready.  ~Jack Handey, Deeper Thoughts: All New, All Crispy

I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border.  I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error.  ~Sara Stein, My Weeds, 1988

It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience.  It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn't a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong?  Maybe nothing.  ~Eleanor Perényi, Green Thoughts, 1981

Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

As a gardener, I'm among those who believe that much of the evidence of God's existence has been planted.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.
~Dorothy Frances Gurney, "Garden Thoughts"

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Just because you've only got houseplants doesn't mean you don't have the gardening spirit - I look upon myself as an indoor gardener.  ~Sara Moss-Wolfe

If you've never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Gardening is a kind of disease.  It infects you, you cannot escape it.  When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.  ~Lewis Gannit

When you have done your best for a flower, and it fails, you have some reason to be aggrieved.  ~Frank Swinnerton

Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.  ~May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968

There is no gardening without humility.  Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.  ~Alfred Austin

Fingers now scented with sage and rosemary, a kneeling gardener is lost in savory memories.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

The best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow.  ~Author Unknown

I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months.  All is at last in balance and all is serene.  The gardener is usually dead, of course.  ~Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman, 1981



There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age - I missed it coming and going.  ~J.B. Priestly


It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.  ~Igor Stravinsky


People who don't cherish their elderly have forgotten whence they came and whither they go.  ~Ramsey Clark


As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.
~Homer, Iliad


Generation Gap:  A chasm, amorphously situated in time and space, that separates those who have grown up absurd from those who will, with luck, grow up absurd.  ~Bernard Rosenberg, Dictionary for the Disenchanged, 1972


They say genes skip generations.  Maybe that's why grandparents find their grandchildren so likeable.  ~Joan McIntosh


We're the middle children of history.... no purpose or place.  We have no Great War, no Great Depression.  Our great war is a spiritual war.  Our great depression is our lives.  ~From the movie Fight Club, about Generation X


The older generation thought nothing of getting up at five every morning - and the younger generation doesn't think much of it either.  ~John J. Welsh


That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.  ~Adlai Stevenson


First we are children to our parents, then parents to our children, then parents to our parents, then children to our children.  ~Milton Greenblatt


A father lives after death in his son.  ~Sanskrit


When women feel they have learned to forgive their mothers - and men, their fathers - all it usually means is that they've decided to allow themselves the same kind of behavior.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.  ~Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades


The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.  ~Clarence Darrow


Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn't have anything to do with it.  ~Haim Ginott


Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents' pots and pans, the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape.  Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes.  A featherweight portable museum.  ~Susan Sontag


It's hard for me to get used to these changing times.  I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.  ~George Burns


Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks.  Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools.  And their grandchildren are once more slaves.  ~D.H. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 1922


In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.  ~Jane Haddam


Some men so dislike the dust kicked up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


There is nothing wrong with today's teenager that twenty years won't cure.  ~Author Unknown




Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte, Discours de Lyon, 1771


A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see - and hits it.  ~Author Unknown


Everyone is a genius at least once a year.  The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.  ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.  ~E.B. White


I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.  ~John F. Kennedy, in an address to Nobel Prize winners


Every true genius is bound to be naive.  ~J.C.F. von Schiller


Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.  ~Phillips Brooks


I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect, either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.  ~Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, 1911


I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know.  Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.  ~Buckminster Fuller


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


Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.  ~James Russell Lowell, Literary Essays


The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius.  ~Rebecca Pepper Sinkler


If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.  ~Robert S. Lynd


In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance," Essays, 1841


Common sense is instinct.  Enough of it is genius.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Genius is a plodding intellect, incapable of dreaming up the obstacles that stop the rest of us.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There is no great genius without some touch of madness.  ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca, "On Tranquillity of the Mind," Moral Essays


This is the nature of genius, to be able to grasp the knowable even when no one else recognizes that it is present.  ~Deepak Chopra


When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.  ~Jonathan Swift


Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.  It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.  ~E.F. Schumacher


Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk


Genius ain't anything more than elegant common sense.  ~Josh Billings


Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.  ~George-Louis de Buffon


People ask how I think up my thoughts.  Mostly I think them up while reading Paul Simon's lyrics.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.  ~James McNeill Whistler


A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


You give but little when you give of your possessions.  It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.  ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

What is bought is cheaper than a gift.  ~Portuguese Proverb

A wise lover values not so much the gift of the lover as the love of the giver.  ~Thomas  Kempis

The only gift is a portion of thyself.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.  ~Seneca

We do not quite forgive a giver.  The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Gifts," Essays, Second Series, 1844

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.  ~George MacDonald

The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.  ~Pierre Corneille, Le Menteur

Christmas is the season when you buy this year's gifts with next year's money.  ~Author Unknown

A hug is a great gift - one size fits all, and it's easy to exchange.  ~Author Unknown

If you give what can be taken, you are not really giving.  Take what you are given, not what you want to be given.  Give what cannot be taken.  ~Idries Shah

'Tis blessed to bestow, and yet,
Could we bestow the gifts we get,
And keep the ones we give away,
How happy were our Christmas day!
~Carolyn Wells

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.  ~Max Beerbohm

Pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
~William Wordsworth, 1806

What we are is God's gift to us.  What we become is our gift to God.  ~Eleanor Powell

The Lord loveth a cheerful giver.  He also accepteth from a grouch.  ~Catherine Hall

The Christmas season has come to mean the period when the public plays Santa Claus to the merchants.  ~John Andrew Holmes

May Peace be your gift at Christmas and your blessing all year through!  ~Author Unknown

God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

God waits to win back his own flowers as gifts from man's hands.  ~Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 1916

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.  ~Author Unknown

The paradox of gifts:  I know what I have given you.  I do not know what you have received.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.  ~Elwyn Brooks White

Nothing's as mean as giving a little child something useful for Christmas.  ~Kin Hubbard

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today.  Have you used one to say "thank you?"  ~William A. Ward

It isn't the size of the gift that matters, but the size of the heart that gives it.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.  ~William A. Ward

Each day comes bearing its own gifts.  Untie the ribbons.  ~Ruth Ann Schabacker

Change always comes bearing gifts.  ~Price Pritchett

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.  ~Jean Anouilh

Yesterday is history.  Tomorrow is a mystery.  And today?  Today is a gift.  That's why we call it the present.  ~Babatunde Olatunji, also attributed to Alice Morse Earle

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

Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.  ~Les Brown

The important thing is to strive towards a goal which is not immediately visible.  That goal is not the concern of the mind, but of the spirit.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.  ~Sidney Howard

If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.  ~Lawrence J. Peter

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.  ~Samuel Johnson, in Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1770

Some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.  ~Doug Larson

Goals are dreams with deadlines.  ~Diana Scharf Hunt

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.  ~T.S. Eliot

The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.  ~Charles DeLint

Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion.  You must set yourself on fire.  ~Arnold H. Glasow

A deadline is negative inspiration.  Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.  ~Rita Mae Brown

I love deadlines.  I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.  ~Douglas Adams

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.  ~Thomas Henry Huxley, An Address to the Students of the Faculty of Medicine in University College, London, May 18, 1870, On the Occasion of the Distribution of Prizes for the Session  (Thanks, Paul)

If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up.  ~J.M. Power

Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.  ~C.D. Jackson

Life's problems wouldn't be called "hurdles" if there wasn't a way to get over them.  ~Author Unknown

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.  ~Author Unknown

God gives us dreams a size too big so that we can grow in them.  ~Author Unknown

Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing.  ~Adolph Monod

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.  ~Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Don't say you don't have enough time.  You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresea, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.  ~Life's Little Instruction Book, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Life is full of obstacle illusions.  ~Grant Frazier

It is never too late to be who you might have been.  ~George Eliot

Success is 10% inspiration, 90% last-minute changes.  ~From a billboard advertisement

Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.  ~Woody Allen

To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.  ~Eva Young

I don't care how much power, brilliance or energy you have, if you don't harness it and focus it on a specific target, and hold it there you're never going to accomplish as much as your ability warrants.  ~Zig Ziglar

The best angle from which to approach any problem is the try-angle.  ~Author Unknown

How am I going to live today in order to create the tomorrow I'm committed to?  ~Anthony Robbins

Sometimes the path you're on is not as important as the direction you're heading.  ~Kevin Smith

The impossible is often the untried.  ~Jim Goodwin

The vision must be followed by the venture.  It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs.  ~Vance Havner

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is best from the top.  ~Arnold Bennett

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done.  ~Henry Ford

Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes.  ~Author Unknown

We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When I was a Boy Scout, we played a game when new Scouts joined the troop.  We lined up chairs in a pattern, creating an obstacle course through which the new Scouts, blindfolded, were supposed to maneuver.  The Scoutmaster gave them a few moments to study the pattern before our adventure began.  But as soon as the victims were blindfolded, the rest of us quietly removed the chairs.  I think life is like this game.  Perhaps we spend our lives avoiding obstacles we have created for ourselves and in reality exist only in our minds.  We're afraid to apply for that job, take violin lessons, learn a foreign language, call an old friend, write our Congressman - whatever it is that we would really like to do but don't because of personal obstacles.  Don't avoid any chairs until you run smack into one.  And if you do, at least you'll have a place to sit down.  ~Pierce Vincent Eckhart

Try not.  Do or do not.  There is no try.  ~Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back

Garbage clutters the house that has no dream.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Don't waste time learning the "tricks of the trade."  Instead, learn the trade.  ~Attributed to both James Charlton and H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

One of the secrets of life is to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks.  ~Jack Penn

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.  ~Beverly Sills

You can find inspiration from others but determination is solely your responsibility.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

If it came true, it wasn't much of a dream.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Of course I'm ambitious.  What's wrong with that?  Otherwise you sleep all day.  ~Ringo Starr

Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hell!  There ain't no rules around here!  We're trying to accomplish somep'n.  ~Thomas Alva Edison

A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.  ~Andre Gide

Nothing interferes with my concentration.  You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up.  Well, maybe once.  ~Isaac Asimov

The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers.  But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.  ~Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, 1996

The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult.  ~Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand, letter to Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, 7 July 1763

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.  ~Bruce Feirstein, Tomorrow Never Dies (screenplay)

If you don't have time to do it right you must have time to do it over.  ~Author Unknown

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.  Now put the foundations under them.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.  ~George Bernard Shaw

There is one quality more important than "know-how" and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it.  This is "know-what" by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.  ~Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1954

I'm pretty sure it's a simple matter of climbing over that seemingly high (but actually rather unimpressive) obstacle.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.  ~David Lloyd George

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? - the cuckoo clock.  ~Graham Greene & Orson Wells, The Third Man, movie

The shortest distance between two points assumes you know where you're going.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Know your limits, but never stop trying to exceed them.  ~Author Unknown

Part of the issue of achievement is to be able to set realistic goals, but that's one of the hardest things to do because you don't always know exactly where you're going, and you shouldn't.  ~George Lucas

The greatest dreams are always unrealistic.  ~Will Smith

Out of the strain of the doing,
Into the peace of the done.
~Julia Woodruff, Gone

The only thing that has to be finished by next Tuesday is next Monday.  ~Jennifer Yane

All men dream:  but not equally.  Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity:  but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.  ~T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926

Map out your future, but do it in pencil.  ~Jon Bon Jovi, quoted in Reader's Digest, "Quotable Quotes," September 2002

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Drift-Wood

None of our men are "experts."  We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job.  A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is.  Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible.  The moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible.  ~Henry Ford, Sr.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.  ~Peter Drucker

We are too busy mopping the floor to turn off the faucet.  ~Author Unknown

In the measurement world, we set a goal and strive to achieve it.  In the universe of possibility, we set the context and let life unfold.  ~B. Zander, The Art of Possibility

When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures.  ~Charles C. Noble

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.  ~Elbert Hubbard

We're still not where we're going, but we're not where we were.  ~Natash Jasefowitz

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.  ~John Dewey

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.  ~Pearl S. Buck

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living.  Satisfaction is death.  ~George Bernard Shaw

If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.  ~Attributed to Zig Ziglar

Vision without action is a daydream.  Action with without vision is a nightmare.  ~Japanese Proverb

When the horse is dead, get off.  ~Author Unknown

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.  There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.  Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.  Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job.  Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it.  It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anyone could have.  ~Author Unknown

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One may miss the mark by aiming too high as too low.  ~Thomas Fuller

When people say to me:  "How do you do so many things?"  I often answer them, without meaning to be cruel:  "How do you do so little?"  It seems to me that people have vast potential.  Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks.  Yet most people don't.  They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.  ~Philip Adams

Establishing goals is all right if you don't let them deprive you of interesting detours.  ~Doug Larson

Any fool can count the seeds in an apple.  Only God can count all the apples in one seed.  ~Robert H. Schuller

Every evening I turn my worries over to God.  He's going to be up all night anyway.  ~Mary C. Crowley

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.  ~St. Augustine

Young man, young man, your arm's too short to box with God.  ~James Weldon Johnson

God understands our prayers even when we can't find the words to say them.  ~Author Unknown

What we are is God's gift to us.  What we become is our gift to God.  ~Eleanor Powell

A man with God is always in the majority.  ~John Knox

Certain thoughts are prayers.  There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.  ~Victor Hugo

You can tell the size of your God by looking at the size of your worry list.  The longer your list, the smaller your God.  ~Author Unknown

Maybe the atheist cannot find God for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman.  ~Author Unknown

If God had wanted to be a big secret, He would not have created babbling brooks and whispering pines.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.  ~Jules Renard

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.  ~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

The soul can split the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.  ~Edna St. Vincent Millay

God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things done.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.  ~Teresa of Avila

God's last name is not "Dammit."  ~Author Unknown

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?  ~Sylvia Plath, "Mystic"

As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" - probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.  ~Woody Allen

Clearly, God is a Democrat.  ~Patrick Caddell

God:  The most popular scapegoat for our sins.  ~Mark Twain

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.  ~Vincent van Gogh, Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh, 1937

No matter how much I prove and prod,
I cannot quite believe in God;
But oh, I hope to God that He
Unswervingly believes in me.
~E.Y. Harburg, attributed

People see God every day, they just don't recognize him.  ~Pearl Bailey

How tired God must be of guilt and loneliness, for that is all we ever bring to Him.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

God's will is not an itinerary, but an attitude.  ~Andrew Dhuse

Let God's promises shine on your problems.  ~Corrie Ten Boom

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?  ~Woody Allen, "Selections from the Allen Notebooks," Without Feathers, 1975

I just hope God does not get bored of dreaming me.  ~Author Unknown

By night, an atheist half believes in God.  ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."  At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.  ~George Santayana

You found God?  If nobody claims him in thirty days, he's yours!  ~Author Unknown

When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily.  It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence

God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle.  I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.  ~Mother Teresa

In many areas of understanding, none so much as in our understanding of God, we bump up against a simplicity so profound that we must assign complexities to it to comprehend it at all.  It is mindful of how we paste decals to a sliding glass door to keep from bumping our nose against it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.  ~Quentin Crisp

Prayer is when you talk to God; meditation is when you listen to God.  ~Diana Robinson

Weave in faith and God will find the thread.  ~Author Unknown

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

If you don't know what's meant by God, watch a forsythia branch or a lettuce leaf sprout.  ~Martin H. Fischer

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.  ~E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, 1973

It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.  ~Joseph Joubert

Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.  ~Garth Brooks

God is a sort of burglar.  As a young man you knock him down; as an old man you try to conciliate him, because he may knock you down.  ~H. Beerbohm-Tree

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.  ~Anatole France, Le jardin d'Epicure

How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

God enters by a private door into each individual.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand.  If you understand you have failed.  ~Saint Augustine

God is not the name of God, but an opinion about Him.  ~Pope Xystus I, The Ring

God's promises are like the stars; the darker the night the brighter they shine.  ~David Nicholas

In nature we see where God has been.  In our fellow man, we see where He is still at work.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

"What do you think of God," the teacher asked.  After a pause, the young pupil replied, "He's not a think, he's a feel."  ~Paul Frost

I feel most ministers who claim they've heard God's voice are eating too much pizza before they go to bed at night, and it's really an intestinal disorder, not a revelation.  ~Rev. Jerry Falwell

God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.  ~Jean Paul Richter

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
~Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1734

Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.  ~Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History

Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

Your talent is God's gift to you.  What you do with it is your gift back to God.  ~Leo Buscaglia; also, What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.  ~Hans Urs von Balthasar

God is the perfect poet.  ~Robert Browning

Remember this.  When people choose to withdraw far from a fire, the fire continues to give warmth, but they grow cold.  When people choose to withdraw far from light, the light continues to be bright in itself but they are in darkness.  This is also the case when people withdraw from God.  ~Augustine

Why attack God?  He may be as miserable as we are.  ~Erik Satie

Are you wrinkled with burden?  Come to God for a faith lift.  ~Author Unknown

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."  ~C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1943

We need not join the mad rush to purchase an earthly fallout shelter.  God is our eternal fallout shelter.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.  Really.  ~Lenny Bruce, "Religions Inc.," in The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. John Cohen, 1967

Were there no God, we would be in this glorious world with grateful hearts and no one to thank.  ~Christina Rossetti

Life is God's novel.  Let him write it.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

You are not obliged to put on evening clothes to meet God.  ~Austin O'Malley

When you knock, ask to see God - none of the servants.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Your mind works very simply:  you are either trying to find out what are God's laws in order to follow them; or you are trying to outsmart Him.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe in the God idea, not God himself.  ~Miguel de Unamuno

Most people wish to serve God - but only in an advisory capacity.  ~Author Unknown

I've been hiding from God, and I'm appalled to find how easy it is.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The self-appointed spokesmen for God incline to shout; He, Himself, speaks only in whispers.  ~Martin H. Fischer

A lot of people are willing to give God credit, but so few ever give Him cash.  ~Robert E. Harris, Laugh with the Circuit Rider

It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that when we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation - of loneliness, of poverty and misery, the end of all things, or their extreme - then rises in our mind the thought of God.  ~Vincent van Gogh, Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh, 1937

To put one's trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.  ~Samuel Butler, Note-Books

So long as God reveals Himself, or doesn't, He is behaving like God.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.  ~Blaise Pascal

Don't look for God where He is needed most; if you didn't bring Him there, He isn't there.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

God waits to win back his own flowers as gifts from man's hands.  ~Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 1916

I say to mankind, Be not curious about God.  For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.  ~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.  ~Malcolm Muggeridge

We always keep God waiting while we admit more importunate suitors.  ~Malcolm de Chazal

Been taken for granted?  Imagine how God feels.  ~Author Unknown

Don't look for God in the sky; look within your own body.  ~Osho

'T is heaven alone that is given away,
'T is only God may be had for the asking;...
~James Russell Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848

We climb mountains because they are there, and worship God because He is not.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

If Creation were a crime, would not God be the prime suspect?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

How important the concept of God is, and how instead of valuing what has been given us, we with light hearts spurn it because of absurdities that have been attached to it.  ~Leo Tolstoy, Last Diaries, 1960

No pillow so soft as God's promise.  ~Author Unknown

The young do not need God, and the old cannot find Him.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

For light I go directly to the Source of light, not to any of the reflections.  ~Peace Pilgrim

Some people talk about finding God - as if He could get lost.  ~Author Unknown

I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk.  ~John Marcellus Huston

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.  The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.... Shall we think of the day as a chance to come nearer to our Host, and to find out something of Him who has fed us so long?  ~Rebecca Harding Davis

I talk to God but the sky is empty.  ~Sylvia Plath

I do not believe in God, for that implies an effort of the will - I see God everywhere!  ~Jean Favre

Is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

I believe in God; I just don't trust anyone who works for him.  ~Author Unknown

I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.  ~Voltaire

There is a tendency to see divine intervention in things that happen in the normal course of miracles.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

All that I have seen teaches me to trust God for all I have not seen.  ~Author Unknown

"I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all," Teddy said.  "It was on a Sunday, I remember.  My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God.  I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.  ~J.D. Salinger, "Teddy," 1954

He who kneels before God can stand before anyone.  ~Author Unknown

Peace on the outside comes from knowing God on the inside.  ~Author Unknown

God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home.  ~Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest, 1886

God is with you always.  Simply turn your face to Him.  ~Kirpal Singh

Hunting God is a great adventure.  ~Marie DeFloris

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.  ~Christopher Morley

God is a verb, not a noun proper or improper.  ~R. Buckminster Fuller, No More Secondhand God, 1963

Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort but I do not think they will find God.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.  ~Timaeus of Locris

Some people always sigh in thanking God.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

God, that dumping ground of our dreams.  ~Jean Rostand, Carnets d'un Biologiste, 1962

If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?  ~Art Hoppe

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.  ~Julian Huxley

God - the John Doe of philosophy and religion.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Notebook, 1927

When we lose God, it is not God who is lost.  ~Author Unknown

Life is a tapestry:  We are the warp; angels, the weft; God, the weaver.  Only the Weaver sees the whole design.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Those who never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all.  ~Catherine Marshall, Christy, 1967

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.  ~Voltaire

I had a thousand questions to ask God; but when I met him they all fled and didn't seem to matter.  ~Christopher Morley, Inward Ho!, 1923

Don't question God, for He may reply:  "If you're so anxious for answers, come up here."  ~Author Unknown

I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.  ~Mary Gardiner Brainard

Availability is better than ability for God.  ~Author Unknown

Seeing so much poverty everywhere makes me think that God is not rich.  He gives the appearance of it, but I suspect some financial difficulties.  ~Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862

God is a child who amuses himself, going from laughing to crying for no reason, each day reinventing the world to the chagrin of hair-splitters, pedants, and preachers, who try to teach God his job as Creator.  ~Elie Faure, L'Esprit des formes, 1927

Man is born broken.  He lives by mending.  The grace of God is glue.  ~Eugene O'Neill, The Great God Brown, 1926

Peace is not the absence of affliction, but the presence of God.  ~Author Unknown

If you are not as close to God as you used to be, who moved?  ~Author Unknown

I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour.  ~William Ralph Inge

When we put our cares in His hands, He puts His peace in our hearts.  ~Author Unknown

Before me, even as behind, God is, and all is well.  ~John Greenleaf Whittier

What is it that we all believe in that we cannot see or hear or feel or taste or smell - this invisible thing that heals all sorrows, reveals all lies and renews all hope?  What is it that has always been and always will be, from whose bosom we all came and to which we will all return?  Most call it Time.  A few realize that it is God.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Exercise daily.  Walk with the Lord!  ~Author Unknown

Be God or let God.  ~Author Unknown

I could not say I believe.  I know!  I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.  ~Carl Jung

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.  ~Alfred Jarry, Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll Pataphysicien, 1911

Every morning I spend fifteen minutes filling my mind full of God; and so there's no room left for worry thoughts.  ~Howard Chandler Christy

I believe in the sun even if it isn't shining.  I believe in love even when I am alone.  I believe in God even when He is silent.  ~Author Unknown

Darkness cannot put out the Light.  It can only make God brighter.  ~Author Unknown

No God, no peace.  Know God, know peace.  ~Author Unknown

You ask:  what is the meaning or purpose of life?  I can only answer with another question:  do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?  ~Freeman Dyson, quoted in The Meaning of Life, compiled by Hugh S. Moorhead

It is better to rise from life as from a banquet - neither thirsty nor drunken.  ~Aristotle

I soon found out you can't change the world.  The best you can do is to learn to live with it.  ~Henry Miller

My good friends, while I do most earnestly recommend you to take care of your health and safety, as things most precious to us, I would not have that care degenerate into an effeminate and over-curious attention, which is always disgraceful to a man's self, and often troublesome to others.  ~Edmund Burke

No matter what happens... somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.  ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"

From a worldly point of view there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.  ~Samuel Butler, Note-Books, 1912

Enough is as good as a feast.  ~English Proverb

We may outrun
By violent swiftness
And lose by over-running.
~William Shakespeare

The most pleasant and useful persons are those who leave some of the problems of the universe for God to worry about.  ~Don Marquis

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab

He who makes a paradise of his bread makes a hell of his hunger.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Even nectar is poison if taken to excess.  ~Hindu Proverb

To character and success, two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together... humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self.  ~William Wordsworth

Be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance.  ~Epicurus

They are sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.  ~William Shakespeare

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.  ~Confucius, Analects

You're always in either first or fifth, but you know there's a lot of great gears in between.  ~Tony to Angela on Who's The Boss

All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.  ~George Harrison

Everything in moderation, including moderation.  ~Author Unknown

Our moral theorists seem never content with the normal.  Why must it always be a contest between fornication, obesity and laziness, and celibacy, fasting and hard labor?  ~Martin H. Fischer

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time.  At any given moment the floor may open up.  Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.  ~Edward Gorey

We find our energies are actually cramped when we are overanxious to succeed.  ~Michel de Montaigne



Eighteen holes of match or medal play will teach you more about your foe than will 18 years of dealing with him across a desk.  ~Grantland Rice


Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child.  Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.  ~John Updike


It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place this world is when one is playing golf.  ~Robert Lynd


Golf is so popular simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad.  ~A.A. Milne


Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.  ~P.G. Wodehouse, A Mixed Threesome, 1922


I have a tip that can take five strokes off anyone's golf game:  it's called an eraser.  ~Arnold Palmer


Golf is a game that is played on a five-inch course - the distance between your ears.  ~Bobby Jones


I'm about five inches from being an outstanding golfer.  That's the distance my left ear is from my right.  ~Ben Crenshaw


Golf is like a love affair.  If you don't take it seriously, it's no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.  ~Arthur Daley


Golf is a fascinating game.  It has taken me nearly forty years to discover that I can't play it.  ~Ted Ray, Golf - My Slice of Life, 1972


The number of shots taken by an opponent who is out of sight is equal to the square root of the sum of the number of curses heard plus the number of swishes.  ~Michael Green, The Art of Coarse Golf, 1975


If there is any larceny in a man, golf will bring it out.  ~Paul Gallico


Golf is like an 18-year-old girl with big boobs.  You know it's wrong but you can't keep away from her.  ~Val Doonican


Golf is a lot of walking, broken up by disappointment and bad arithmetic.  ~Author Unknown


It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification.  ~Bruce McCall


Forget your opponents; always play against par.  ~Sam Snead


If profanity had an influence on the flight of the ball, the game of golf would be played far better than it is.  ~Horace G. Hutchinson


They say golf is like life, but don't believe them.  Golf is more complicated than that.  ~Gardner Dickinson


I guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf.  I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.  ~Will Rogers


If a lot of people gripped a knife and fork the way they do a golf club, they'd starve to death.  ~Sam Snead


Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.  ~William Wordsworth


What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.  ~Arnold Palmer


The reason the pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can't see him laughing.  ~Phyllis Diller





Fifty years ago, 100 white men chasing one black man across a field was called the Ku Klux Klan.  Today it's called the PGA Tour.  ~Author uncertain, attributed to Alex Hay





A game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.  ~Author Unknown, plagiarized from the Samuel Johnson quotation "It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the priveleges of age, and retain the play-things of childhood," which was not written about golf  (Thanks, Frank Lynch)


Golf combines two favorite American pastimes:  taking long walks and hitting things with a stick.  ~P.J. O'Rourke


The sport of choice for the urban poor is basketball.  The sport of choice for maintenance level employees is bowling.  The sport of choice for front-line workers is football.  The sport of choice for supervisors is baseball.  The sport of choice for middle management is tennis.  The sport of choice for corporate officers is golf.  Conclusion: The higher you are in the corporate structure, the smaller your balls become.  ~Author Unknown


If you drink, don't drive.  Don't even putt.  ~Dean Martin


Golf gives you an insight into human nature, your own as well as your opponent's.  ~Grantland Rice


[T]o play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk.  ~Attributed to "the Allens," as quoted by H.S. Scrivener in Lawn Tennis at Home and Abroad, 1903, Arthur Wallis Myers, ed., commonly attributed to Mark Twain as "Golf is a good walk spoiled." (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.  ~G.K. Chesterton


They throw their clubs backwards, and that's wrong.  You should always throw a club ahead of you so that you don't have to walk any extra distance to get it.  ~Tommy Bolt, about the tempers of modern players


If you break 100, watch your golf.  If you break 80, watch your business.  ~Joey Adams


Man blames fate for other accidents but feels personally responsible for a hole in one.  ~Martha Beckman


When I die, bury me on the golf course so my husband will visit.  ~Author Unknown


I'm not saying my golf game went bad, but if I grew tomatoes, they'd come up sliced.  ~Attributed to both Miller Barber and Lee Trevino


Duffers who consistently shank their balls are urged to buy and study Shanks - No Thanks by R.K. Hoffman, or in extreme cases, M.S. Howard's excellent Tennis for Beginners.  ~Henry Beard, Golfing, 1985


Golf is life.  If you can't take golf, you can't take life.  ~Author Unknown


In baseball you hit your home run over the right-field fence, the left-field fence, the center-field fence.  Nobody cares.  In golf everything has got to be right over second base.  ~Ken Harrelson


If I can hit a curveball, why can't I hit a ball that is standing still on a course?  ~Larry Nelson


Golf balls are attracted to water as unerringly as the eye of a middle-aged man to a female bosom.  ~Michael Green, The Art of Coarse Golf, 1967


If your opponent is playing several shots in vain attempts to extricate himself from a bunker, do not stand near him and audibly count his strokes.  It would be justifiable homicide if he wound up his pitiable exhibition by applying his niblick to your head.  ~Harry Vardon


A passion, an obsession, a romance, a nice acquaintanceship with trees, sand, and water.  ~Bob Ryan


Drugs are very much a part of professional sports today, but when you think about it, golf is the only sport where the players aren't penalized for being on grass.  ~Bob Hope


I'd play every day if I could.  It's cheaper than a shrink and there are no telephones on my golf cart.  ~Brent Musburger






Columbus went around the world in 1492.  That isn't a lot of strokes when you consider the course.  ~Lee Trevino


Real golfers, no matter what the provocation, never strike a caddie with the driver.  The sand wedge is far more effective.  ~Huxtable Pippey


I've spent most of my life golfing - the rest I've just wasted.  ~Author Unknown


They call it golf because all of the other four-letter words were taken.  ~Raymond Floyd


My handicap?  Woods and irons.  ~Chris Codiroli


The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.  ~John Updike


Even God has to practice his putting.  ~Golf Saying


Actually, the only time I ever took out a one-iron was to kill a tarantula.  And it took a seven to do that.  ~Jim Murray


The ardent golfer would play Mount Everest if somebody put a flagstick on top.  ~Pete Dye


If you're caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron.  Not even God can hit a 1-iron.  ~Lee Trevino


Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.  ~Jim Bishop


I'm hitting the woods just great, but I'm having a terrible time getting out of them.  ~Harry Toscano


I know I am getting better at golf because I'm hitting fewer spectators.  ~Gerald Ford


"Play it as it lies" is one of the fundamental dictates of golf.  The other is "Wear it if it clashes."  ~Henry Beard, Golfing, 1985


I just hope I don't have to explain all the times I've used His name in vain when I get up there.  ~Bob Hope, about his golfing


I can airmail the golf ball, but sometimes I don't put the right address on it.  ~Jim Dent


It is more satisfying to be a bad player at golf.  The worse you play, the better you remember the occasional good shot.  ~Nubar Gulbenkian, 1972


Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses.  ~Adlai Stevenson


I would like to deny all allegations by Bob Hope that during my last game of golf, I hit an eagle, a birdie, an elk and a moose.  ~Gerald Ford


The first time I played the Masters, I was so nervous I drank a bottle of rum before I teed off.  I shot the happiest 83 of my life.  ~Chi Chi Rodriguez


A golf course is nothing but a poolroom moved outdoors.  ~Barry Fitzgerald, Going My Way


I'll shoot my age if I have to live to be 105.  ~Bob Hope


After all these years, it's still embarrassing for me to play on the American golf tour.  Like the time I asked my caddie for a sand wedge and he came back ten minutes later with a ham on rye.  ~Chi Chi Rodriguez, on his Puerto Rican accent


My swing is so bad I look like a caveman killing his lunch.  ~Lee Trevino


Playing the game I have learned the meaning of humility.  It has given me an understanding of futility of the human effort.  ~Abba Eban


It took me seventeen years to get 3,000 hits.  I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.  ~Hank Aaron, 1971


Swinging at daisies is like playing electric guitar with a tennis racket:  if it were that easy, we could all be Jerry Garcia.  The ball changes everything.  ~Michael Bamberger


One of the most fascinating things about golf is how it reflects the cycle of life.  No matter what you shoot - the next day you have to go back to the first tee and begin all over again and make yourself into something.  ~Peter Jacobsen


You are meant to play the ball as it lies, a fact that may help to touch on your own objective approach to life.  ~Grantland Rice


A golf ball is like a clock.  Always hit it at 6 o'clock and make it go toward 12 o'clock.  But make sure you're in the same time zone.  ~Chi Chi Rodriguez


Golf isn't like other sports where you can take a player out if he's having a bad day.  You have to play the whole game.  ~Phil Blackmar


The trouble that most of us find with the modern matched sets of clubs is that they don't really seem to know any more about the game than the old ones did.  ~Robert Browning, A History of Golf


Golf is the cruelest game, because eventually it will drag you out in front of the whole school, take your lunch money and slap you around.  ~Rick Reilly, "Master Strokes," Sports Illustrated


Golf is the cruelest of sports.  Like life, it's unfair.  It's a harlot.  A trollop.  It leads you on.  It never lives up to its promises.... It's a boulevard of broken dreams.  It plays with men.  And runs off with the butcher.  ~Jim Murray


Golf is essentially an exercise in masochism conducted out-of-doors.  ~Paul O'Neil


Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill scoured by a whiff of arrogance.  ~Alistair Cooke


No game designed to be played with the aid of personal servants by right-handed men who can't even bring along their dogs can be entirely good for the soul.  ~Bruce McCall, "The Case Against Golf," Esquire


These greens are so fast I have to hold my putter over the ball and hit it with the shadow.  ~Sam Snead


Through years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.  ~Jack Nicklaus, on why he tees his ball high.


Golf is not a game, it's bondage.  It was obviously devised by a man torn with guilt, eager to atone for his sins.  ~Jim Murray


Golf is an awkward set of bodily contortions designed to produce a graceful result.  ~Tommy Armour


Who watches golf on TV?  Who calls eight friends over and gets a keg of beer?  Landscapers, I guess.  They sit around the TV, yelling, "Will you look at that golf path?  Pure pea gravel."  ~Jeff Cesario


But you don't have to go up in the stands and play your foul balls.  I do.  ~Sam Snead, to Ted Williams, arguing which was more difficult, to hit a moving baseball or a stationary golf ball


A hole in one is amazing when you think of the different universes this white mass of molecules has to pass through on its way to the hole.  ~Mac O'Grady


Trevino is in a league by himself.  We don't even count him.  We figure when you come in second, you're a winner.  ~Chi Chi Rodriguez


Golf is a game in which you yell "fore," shoot six, and write down five.  ~Paul Harvey


In golf, you keep your head down and follow through.  In the vice presidency, you keep your head up and follow through.  It's a big difference.  ~Dan Quayle


You can't call it a sport.  You don't run, jump, you don't shoot, you don't pass.  All you have to do is buy some clothes that don't match.  ~Steve Sax


The best wood in most amateurs' bags is the pencil.  ~Author Unknown


One under a tree, one under a bush, one under the water.  ~Lee Trevino, describing how he was one under during a tournament


The average golfer doesn't play golf.  He attacks it.  ~Jack Burke


Hockey is a sport for white men.  Basketball is a sport for black men.  Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps.  ~Tiger Woods


The least thing upset him on the links.  He missed short putts because of the uproar of butterflies in the adjoining meadows.  ~P.G. Wodehouse


It's so bad I could putt off a tabletop and still leave the ball halfway down the leg.  ~J.C. Snead, on his putting


Any game where a man 60 can beat a man 30 ain't no game.  ~Burt Shotten


There are two things you can do with your head down - play golf and pray.  ~Lee Trevino


Golf is not just an exercise; it's an adventure, a romance... a Shakespeare play in which disaster and comedy are intertwined.  ~Harold Segall


The worst club in my bag is my brain.  ~Chris Perry


Golf is a game where white men can dress up as black pimps and get away with it.  ~Robin Williams, 1986


Golf is hockey at the halt.  ~Arthur Marshall, 1985


There is one thing in this world that is dumber than playing golf.  That is watching someone else playing golf.  What do you actually get to see?  Thirty-seven guys in polyester slacks squinting at the sun.  Doesn't that set your blood racing?  ~Peter Andrews






The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf.  It's almost a law.  ~H.G. Wells, Bealby, 1915


[Golf] is like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture.  ~Winston Churchill


The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.  ~Ernest Hemingway


One of the advantages bowling has over golf is that you seldom lose a bowling ball.  ~Don Carter


I'm a golfaholic, no question about that.  Counseling wouldn't help me.  They'd have to put me in prison, and then I'd talk the warden into building a hole or two and teach him how to play.  ~Lee Trevino


A "gimme" can best be defined as an agreement between two golfers, neither of whom can putt very well.  ~Author Unknown


Give me the fresh air, a beautiful partner, and a nice round of golf, and you can keep the fresh air and the round of golf.  ~Jack Benny


Golf is a game in which the ball lies poorly and the players well.  ~Art Rosenbaum


Art said he wanted to get more distance.  I told him to hit it and run backward.  ~Ken Venturi, on Art Rosenbaum


One thing about golf is you don't know why you play bad and why you play good.  ~George Archer


Have you ever noticed what golf spells backwards?  ~Al Boliska


If I'm on the course and lightning starts, I get inside fast.  If God wants to play through, let him.  ~Bob Hope


Golf is the most fun you can have without taking your clothes off.  ~Chi Chi Rodriguez


"After all, golf is only a game," said Millicent.  Women say these things without thinking.  It does not mean that there is a kink in their character.  They simply don't realise what they are saying.  ~P.G. Wodehouse, Order by Golf, 1922


When I putt, my emotions collide like tectonic plates.  It's left my memory circuits full of scars that won't heal.  ~Mac O'Grady


The only time my prayers are never answered is on the golf course.  ~Billy Graham


That son of a bitch was able to hole a putt over 60 feet of peanut brittle.  ~Lloyd Mangrum, about Bobby Locke


Golf is not, on the whole, a game for realists.  By its exactitudes of measurements it invites the attention of perfectionists.  ~Heywood Hale Broun


Isn't it fun to go out on the course and lie in the sun?  ~Bob Hope


His driving is unbelievable.  I don't go that far on my holidays.  ~Ian Baker-Finch, on John Daly


John certainly gives it a good hit, doesn't he?  My Sunday best is a Wednesday afternoon compared to him.  ~Nick Faldo, on John Daly


I never pray to God to make a putt.  I pray to God to help me react good if I miss a putt.  ~Chi Chi Rodriguez


Golf seems to me an arduous way to go for a walk.  I prefer to take the dogs out.  ~Princess Anne of Great Britain


One minute you're bleeding.  The next minute you're hemorrhaging.  The next minute you're painting the Mona Lisa.  ~Mac O'Grady, describing a typical round of golf


If you wish to hide your character, do not play golf.  ~Percey Boomer


Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing.  ~Ben Hogan


Yeah, after each of my downhill putts.  ~Homero Blancas, asked if he had any uphill putts


When you hear someone shout "You da man," if he ain't shouting at Arnold Palmer, then it ain't da man.  ~Ron Green, Charlotte Observer


Golf can best be defined as an endless series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle.  ~Author Unknown


What's nice about our tour is you can't remember your bad shots.  ~Bob Bruce, about the senior tour


Golf is golf.  You hit the ball, you go find it.  Then you hit it again.  ~Lon Hinkle


To some golfers, the greatest handicap is the ability to add correctly.  ~Author Unknown


If you think it's hard to meet new people, try picking up the wrong golf ball.  ~Jack Lemmon


I play in the low 80s.  If it's any hotter than that, I won't play.  ~Joe E. Lewis


The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.  ~Will Rogers


I don't like watching golf on TV.  I can't stand whispering.  ~David Brenner


One almost expects one of the players to peer into the monitor and politely request viewers to refrain from munching so loudly on cheese and crackers while the golfers are trying to reach the greens.  ~Pete Alfano


Golf without mistakes is like watching haircuts.  A dinner without wine.  ~Jim Murray


Men who would face torture without a word become blasphemous at the short fourteenth.  It is clear that the game of golf may well be included in that category of intolerable provocations which may legally excuse or mitigate behaviour not otherwise excusable.  ~A.P. Herbert, Misleading Cases, 1935


If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and the families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina.  ~H.L. Mencken


All I've got against it is that it takes you so far from the clubhouse.  ~Eric Linklater, Poet's Pub, 1929


Baseball players quit playing and they take up golf.  Basketball players quit, take up golf.  Football players quit, take up golf.  What are we supposed to take up when we quit?  ~George Archer


A golf course outside a big town serves an excellent purpose in that it segregates, as though a concentration camp, all the idle and idiot well-to-do.  ~Osbert Sitwell


If you want to take long walks, take long walks.  If you want to hit things with sticks, hit things with sticks.  But there's no excuse for combining the two and putting the results on TV.  Golf is not so much a sport as an insult to lawns.  ~National Lampoon, 1979


It's good sportsmanship not to pick up lost balls while they are still rolling.  ~Mark Twain


Don't play too much golf.  Two rounds a day are plenty.  ~Harry Vardon


Golf is an ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adapted to the purpose.  ~Woodrow Wilson


A golfer's diet:  live on greens as much as possible.  ~Author Unknown


Gone golfin'... be back dark thirty.  ~Author Unknown


Born to golf.  Forced to work.  ~Author Unknown


My body is here, but my mind has already teed off.  ~Author Unknown


Find a man with both feet firmly on the ground and you've found a man about to make a difficult putt.  ~Fletcher Knebel


Golf and sex are the only things you can enjoy without being good at them.  ~Jimmy DeMaret


May thy ball lie in green pastures... and not in still waters.  ~Author Unknown


If I hit it right, it's a slice.  If I hit it left, it's a hook.  If I hit it straight, it's a miracle.  ~Author Unknown


If you call on God to improve the results of a shot while it is still in motion, you are using "an outside agency" and subject to appropriate penalties under the rules of golf.  ~Henry Longhurst


The difference between golf and government is that in golf you can't improve your lie.  ~George Deukmejian


Don't be dismayed at goodbyes.  A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.  And meeting again, after moments or lifetime, is certain for those who are friends.  ~Richard Bach

We only part to meet again.  ~John Gay

Man's feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell.  ~Jean Paul Richter

Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need to know of hell.  ~Emily Dickinson, "Parting"

Why does it take a minute to say hello and forever to say goodbye?  ~Author Unknown

Gone - flitted away,
Taken the stars from the night and the sun
From the day!
Gone, and a cloud in my heart.
~Alfred Tennyson

Why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together?  I guess that wouldn't work.  Someone would leave.  Someone always leaves.  Then we would have to say good-bye.  I hate good-byes.  I know what I need.  I need more hellos.  ~Charles M. Schulz

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.  ~Henry David Thoreau

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.  ~Carol Sobieski and Thomas Meehan, Annie

Goodbyes are not forever.
Goodbyes are not the end.
They simply mean I'll miss you
Until we meet again!
~Author Unknown

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.  ~Ivy Baker Priest

Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair.  ~William Cowper

Excuse me, then! you know my heart;
But dearest friends, alas! must part.
~John Gay

To die and part is a less evil; but to part and live, there, there is the torment.  ~George Lansdowne

May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be ever at your back.  May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall softly on your fields.  And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand.  ~Irish Blessing

Happy trails to you, until we meet again.
Some trails are happy ones,
Others are blue.
It's the way you ride the trail that counts,
Here's a happy one for you.
~Dale Evans

No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth.  ~Robert Southey

Can miles truly separate you from friends.... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?  ~Richard Bach

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.  ~Garrison Keillor

What shall I do with all the days and hours
That must be counted ere I see thy face?
How shall I charm the interval that lowers
Between this time and that sweet time of grace?
~Frances Anne Kemble

Not to understand a treasure's worth till time has stole away the slighted good, is cause of half the poverty we feel, and makes the world the wilderness it is.  ~William Cowper

She went her unremembering way,
She went and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone,
And partings yet to be.
~Francis Thompson

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.  ~George Eliot

Love is missing someone whenever you're apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you're close in heart.  ~Kay Knudsen

The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected.  ~Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

You and I will meet again
When we're least expecting it
One day in some far off place
I will recognize your face
I won't say goodbye my friend
For you and I will meet again
~Tom Petty

Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.  ~William Shakespeare

In the hope to meet
Shortly again, and make our absence sweet.
~Ben Jonson

Some people come into our lives and quickly go.  Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same.  ~Flavia Weedn, Forever, © Flavia.com

So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return.
~William Shenstone

But fate ordains that dearest friends must part.  ~Edward Young

Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; and every little absence is an age.  ~John Dryden

Where is the good in goodbye?  ~Meredith Willson, The Music Man  (Thanks, Thomas)

Distance of time and place generally cure what they seem to aggravate; and taking leave of our friends resembles taking leave of the world, of which it has been said, that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible.  ~Henry Fielding

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.  ~Anna Brownell Jameson

Promise me you'll never forget me because if I thought you would I'd never leave.  ~A.A. Milne

As contraries are known by contraries, so is the delight of presence best known by the torments of absence.  ~Alcibiades

May you always have work for your hands to do.
May your pockets hold always a coin or two.
May the sun shine bright on your windowpane.
May the rainbow be certain to follow each rain.
May the hand of a friend always be near you.
And may God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.
~Irish Blessing

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.  ~Elizabeth Bowen

May the sun shine, all day long,
everything go right, and nothing wrong.
May those you love bring love back to you,
and may all the wishes you wish come true!
~Irish Blessing

May you always have walls for the winds,
a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire,
laughter to cheer you, those you love near you,
and all your heart might desire.
~Irish Blessing

Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire.  ~Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, translated from French

Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.  ~Tryon Edwards

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

Farewell, my sister, fare thee well.
The elements be kind to thee, and make
Thy spirits all of comfort: fare thee well.
~William Shakespeare

A man never knows how to say goodbye; a woman never knows when to say it.  ~Helen Rowland

The return makes one love the farewell.  ~Alfred De Musset

You're searching...
For things that don't exist; I mean beginnings.
Ends and beginnings - there are no such things.
There are only middles.
~Robert Frost, Mountain Interval, "In the Home Stretch"

Fare thee well! and if for ever,
Still for ever, fare thee well.
~Lord Byron

May you have warm words on a cool evening, a full moon on a dark night, and a smooth road all the way to your door.  ~Irish Toast

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.  ~Attributed to Claudia Ghandi

Ye flowers that drop, forsaken by the spring,
Ye birds that, left by summer, cease to sing,
Ye trees that fade, when Autumn heats remove,
Say, is not absence death to those who love?
~Alexander Pope

The best things said come last.  People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.  ~Alan Alda

May flowers always line your path and sunshine light your day.
May songbirds serenade you every step along the way.
May a rainbow run beside you in a sky that's always blue.
And may happiness fill your heart each day your whole life through.
~Irish Blessing

That bitter word, which closed all earthly friendships and finished every feast of love farewell!  ~Robert Pollok

One kind kiss before we part,
Drop a tear, and bid adieu;
Though we sever, my fond heart
Till we meet shall pant for you.
~Robert Dodsley

The joy of meeting pays the pangs of absence; else who could bear it?  ~Nicholas Rowe

Adieu! I have too grieved a heart to take a tedious leave.  ~William Shakespeare

A sunbeam to warm you,
A moonbeam to charm you,
A sheltering angel, so nothing can harm you.
~Irish Blessing

Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see,
My heart untravelled, fondly turns to thee;
Still to my brother turns, with ceaseless pain,
And drags at each remove a lengthening chain.
~Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller

If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me?  ~Allen Collins and Ronnie Van Zant, "Free Bird," One More From the Road, 1973, performed by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.  ~Lazurus Long

May brooks and trees and singing hills
Join in the chorus too,
And every gentle wind that blows
Send happiness to you.
~Irish Blessing

I wanted a perfect ending.  Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.  Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.  ~Gilda Radner

Sweet is the memory of distant friends!  Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.  ~Washington Irving

Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been -
A sound which makes us linger; - yet - farewell!
~Lord Byron

Goodbye, goodbye, I hate the word.  Solitude has long since turned brown and withered, sitting bitter in my mouth and heavy in my veins.  ~R.M. Grenon

Missing someone gets easier every day because even though it's one day further from the last time you saw each other, it's one day closer to the next time you will.  ~Author Unknown

Farewell!
For in that word - that fatal word - howe'er
We promise - hope - believe - there breathes despair.
~Lord Byron

Let's not unman each other - part at once;
All farewells should be sudden, when forever,
Else they make an eternity of moments,
And clog the last sad sands of life with tears.
~Lord Byron

A goodbye isn't painful unless you're never going to say hello again.  ~Author Unknown

A chord, stronger or weaker, is snapped asunder in every parting, and time's busy fingers are not practiced in re-splicing broken ties.  Meet again you may; will it be in the same way?  With the same sympathies?  With the same sentiments?  Will the souls, hurrying on in diverse paths, unite once more, as if the interval had been a dream?  Rarely, rarely!  ~Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton

Never part without loving words to think of during your absence.  It may be that you will not meet again in this life.  ~Jean Paul Richter

Don't cry because it's over.  Smile because it happened.  ~Theodor Seuss Geisel, attributed



If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.  ~Alice Roosevelt Longworth


What you don't see with your eyes, don't witness with your mouth.  ~Jewish Proverb


What is told in the ear of a man is often heard 100 miles away.  ~Chinese Proverb


No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.  ~Bertrand Arthur William Russell, On Education, 1926


If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.  ~Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam


If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it.  But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.  ~Alice Duer Miller


When you are in trouble, people who call to sympathize are really looking for the particulars.  ~Edgar Watson Howe, Country Town Sayings, 1911


The easiest way to keep a secret is without help.  ~Author Unknown


The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.  ~Wendell Phillips, attributed


A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.  ~Ouida


Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you.  ~Spanish Proverb


Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to.  ~Author Unknown


Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules.  ~Douglas Adams


Show me someone who never gossips, and I'll show you someone who isn't interested in people.  ~Barbara Walters


Gossip needn't be false to be evil - there's a lot of truth that shouldn't be passed around.  ~Frank A. Clark


It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people's business.  ~Dolley Madison


I look at it this way.  I'm not an eavesdropper; I have an attention surplus disorder.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.  ~Errol Flynn


To a friend, who asked him how to find out a girl's faults, he gave the sage advice to praise her to her girl friends.  ~Edwin Lillie Miller, 1938, Explorations in Literature, about Benjamin Franklin (Thanks, Sam)


Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell.  ~Shana Alexander


There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.  ~F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms


Who brings a tale takes two away.  ~Irish Proverb


A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.  ~John Tudor


Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.  ~Liz Smith


I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of everybody.  ~Benjamin Franklin


There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
~Edward Wallis Hoch


Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth:  Their measurements are being taken and compared.  ~Erica Jong


If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.  ~Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835


The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.  ~Napoleon I, Maxims


The biggest liar in the world is They Say.  ~Douglas Malloch


Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.  ~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, July 1735


There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.  ~Winston Churchill


The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap.  And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.  ~Lewis Mumford, in Anne Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth:  Conversations with Ecologists, 1972

It might be more worthwhile if we stopped wringing our hands and started ringing our congressmen.  ~Author Unknown

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.  ~Winston Churchill

If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops.  ~Kelvin Throop

We are imperfect.  We cannot expect perfect government.  ~William Howard Taft

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.  ~James Russell Lowell

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, "Maxims: Education," 1905

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests.  An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.  ~Woodrow Wilson

In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?  ~St. Augustine

Democracy:  The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it.  ~Benjamin Lichtenberg

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.  ~George Bernard Shaw

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true.  ~Polish Proverb

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.  ~Karl Marx

Governments should not possess instruments of coercion and violence denied to their citizens.  ~Edgar A. Suter

Our government... teaches the whole people by its example.  If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.  ~Louis Brandeis

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.  ~Barry Goldwater

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.  No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.  Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.  ~Winston Churchill

Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don't think.  ~Author Unknown

The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.  ~Robert L. Heilbroner

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner.  Liberty is a well-armed lamb.  ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin  (Thanks, Art)

Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights.  Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.  ~Attributed to Larry Flynt

Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it.  Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.  ~Richard Lamm

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?  ~Will Rogers

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft.  Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.  ~Will Rogers

If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the Constitution.  (It conveys precious little of the flavor of today's statecraft.)  Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory containing listings for all the organizations with titles beginning with the word National.  ~George Will

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.  ~Will Rogers

Congress is so strange.  A man gets up to speak and says nothing.  Nobody listens - and then everybody disagrees.  ~Boris Marshalov

Our political institutions work remarkably well.  They are designed to clang against each other.  The noise is democracy at work.  ~Michael Novak

I'm tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn't work.  Of course it doesn't work.  We are supposed to work it.  ~Alexander Woollcott

The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.  ~Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

People come to Washington believing it's the center of power.  I know I did.  It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that's not connected to the engine.  ~Richard Goodwin

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.  ~Sydney J. Harris

A civil servant is sometimes like a broken cannon - it won't work and you can't fire it.  ~George S. Patton

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.  ~Denis Diderot

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.  ~Herbert Hoover, attributed

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.  ~Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

Talk is cheap - except when Congress does it.  ~Cullen Hightower

The most important political office is that of the private citizen.  ~Louis Brandeis

People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people.  Of course, that is not true.  Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote - a very different thing.  ~Walter H. Judd

How can one conceive of a one-party system in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese?  ~Charles de Gaulle, about France

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.  ~John Perry Barlow

A survey says that American workers work the first three hours every day just to pay their taxes.  So that's why we can't get anything done in the morning:  We're government workers.  ~Jay Leno

When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it - whether it be a factory or a government.  ~Alexander Chase, Perspectives, 1966

In a state-run society the government promises you security.  But it's a false promise predicated on the idea that the opposite of security is risk.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The opposite of security is insecurity, and the only way to overcome insecurity is to take risks.  The gentle government that promises to hold your hand as you cross the street refuses to let go on the other side.  ~Theodore Forstmann

Treaties are like roses and young girls - they last while they last.  ~Charles de Gaulle

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush.  It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.  ~Robert M. Hutchins, Great Books, 1954

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.  ~John Gardner

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.  ~Robert Orben

Everybody wants to eat at the government's table, but nobody wants to do the dishes.  ~Werner Finck

When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.  ~George Pataki

Morphine and state relief are the same.  You go dopey, feel better and are worse off.  ~Martin H. Fischer

If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?  ~Author Unknown

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.  ~Jorge Luis Borges

The mistakes made by Congress wouldn't be so bad if the next Congress didn't keep trying to correct them.  ~Cullen Hightower

The plague of government is senile delinquency.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Our government has become too responsive to trivial or ephemeral concerns, often at the expense of more important concerns or an erosion of our liberty, and it has made policy priorities more dependent on where TV journalists happen to point their cameras.... As a nation we have lost our sense of tragedy, a recognition that bad things happen to good people.  A nation that expects the government to prevent churches from burning, to control the price of bread or gasoline, to secure every job, and to find some villain for every dramatic accident, risks an even larger loss of life and liberty.  ~William A. Niskanen, "For a Less Responsive Government," Cato Policy Report, 1996

No nation is fit to set in judgment upon any other nation.  ~Woodrow Wilson

It's every American's duty to support his government, but not necessarily in the style to which it has become accustomed.  ~Quoted by Thomas Clifford

Information is the currency of democracy.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Democracy is like a raft:  It won't sink, but you will always have your feet wet.  ~Russell B. Long

It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can stand by itself.  ~Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.  ~H.L. Mencken

The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect.  ~Sam Ewing

Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.  ~Author Unknown

A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy.  ~Benjamin Disraeli, 1845

Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.  ~William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

Bureaus are extrusions from the body politic - they are pus.  ~Martin H. Fischer

In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of the state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.  ~Baron de Montesquieu

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.  ~William E. Borah

The happiest thing that can be said about democracy... is that it is one of the few systems that has been willing to risk a long period of confusion and mixed purposes for the sake of giving man a chance to grow up in mind and responsibility.  ~H.A. Overstreet

Democracy cannot flourish half rich and half poor, any more than it can flourish half free and half slave.  ~Felix G. Rohatyn, New York Times, 3 June 1987

You know why there are so many whitefish in the Yellowstone River?  Because the Fish and Game people have never done anything to help them.  ~Russell Chatham, Silent Seasons, 1978

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.  ~Reinhold Niebuhr

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.  ~James Bryce

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.  ~Wendell Phillips, Orations, Speeches, Lectures and Letters

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.  ~Jonathan Swift, The Drapier's Letter

Democracy is an experiment, and the right of the majority to rule is no more inherent than the right of the minority to rule; and unless the majority represents sane, righteous, unselfish public sentiment, it has no inherent right.  ~William Allen White  (Thanks, Bob)

Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else.  ~Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism

Young lovers and young nations face the same problem:  after orgasm, what?  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Government is an unnecessary evil.  Human beings, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior, can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness.  ~Fred Woodworth, The Match!, No. 79

If human beings are fundamentally good, no government is necessary; if they are fundamentally bad, any government, being composed of human beings, would be bad also.  ~Fred Woodworth, The Match!, No. 79

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern.  Every class is unfit to govern.  ~Lord Acton, letter to Mary Gladstone, 24 April 1881

If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.  ~Arthur Goldberg

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1847

To rule is easy, to govern difficult.  ~Johann W. von Goethe

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

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Following the Equator, 1897

Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life.  ~Elmer Davis

Here is my first principle of foreign policy:  good government at home.  ~William Ewart Gladstone

Because of our Congressional committee system, our government is closer to a gerontocracy than a democracy.  ~Charles Frankel

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character.  The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.  ~Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Fire, water, and government know nothing of mercy.  ~Proverb

I never would believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.  ~Richard Rumbold, 1685

Every government is a parliament of whores.  The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.  ~National Review

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.  ~H.L. Mencken

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success.  ~Robert Orben

Just about a month from now I'm set adrift, with a diploma for a sail and lots of nerve for oars.  ~Richard Halliburton

There is a good reason they call these ceremonies "commencement exercises."  Graduation is not the end; it's the beginning.  ~Orrin Hatch

Your families are extremely proud of you.  You can't imagine the sense of relief they are experiencing.  This would be a most opportune time to ask for money.  ~Gary Bolding

The tassel's worth the hassle!  ~Author Unknown

The fireworks begin today.  Each diploma is a lighted match.  Each one of you is a fuse.  ~Edward Koch

All that stands between the graduate and the top of the ladder is the ladder.  ~Author Unknown

Graduation is only a concept.  In real life every day you graduate.  Graduation is a process that goes on  until the last day of your life.  If you can grasp that, you'll make a difference.  ~Arie Pencovici

At commencement you wear your square-shaped mortarboards.  My hope is that from time to time you will let your minds be bold, and wear sombreros.  ~Paul Freund

When you leave here, don't forget why you came.  ~Adlai Stevenson, to college graduates

Graduation day is tough for adults.  They go to the ceremony as parents.  They come home as contemporaries.  After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed.  ~Erma Bombeck

You are educated.  Your certification is in your degree.  You may think of it as the ticket to the good life.  Let me ask you to think of an alternative.  Think of it as your ticket to change the world.  ~Tom Brokaw

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.  ~Aristotle

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.  ~Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin

Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.  ~Garry Trudeau

[I]t is clear the future holds great opportunities.  It also holds pitfalls.  The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.  ~Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates," Side Effects, 1980

People will frighten you about a graduation.... They use words you don't hear often:  "And we wish you Godspeed."  It is a warning, Godspeed.  It means you are no longer welcome here at these prices.  ~Bill Cosby

The future lies before you
Like a field of driven snow,
Be careful how you tread it,
For every step will show.
~Author Unknown

Your schooling may be over, but remember that your education still continues.  ~Author Unknown

Don't live down to expectations.  Go out there and do something remarkable.  ~Wendy Wasserstein

I hope your dreams take you to the corners of your smiles, to the highest of your hopes, to the windows of your opportunities, and to the most special places your heart has ever known.  ~Author Unknown

Hitch your wagon to a star.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.  ~Confucius

Life is my college.  May I graduate well, and earn some honors!  ~Louisa May Alcott

It is indeed ironic that we spend our school days yearning to graduate and our remaining days waxing nostalgic about our school days.  ~Isabel Waxman

In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins:  cash and experience.  Take the experience first; the cash will come later.  ~Harold Geneen

Put your future in good hands - your own.  ~Author Unknown

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.  ~Henry S. Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street, 1940, commonly misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Do not follow where the path may lead.  Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after.  ~Newton D. Baker

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
You're on your own.
And you know what you know.
You are the guy who'll decide where to go.
~Dr. Seuss

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.  ~B.F. Skinner

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.  ~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," 1890

Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.  ~Les Brown

Spread joy.  Chase your wildest dreams.  ~Patch Adams

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did.  So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore.  Dream.  Discover.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.  ~Albert Einstein

If at first you don't succeed, do it like your mother told you.  ~Author Unknown

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities:  the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.  ~A. Lawrence Lowell

If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.  ~Robert Goheen, Time, 23 June 1961

Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

The truth is, I was afraid the day I walked into Stanford.  And I was afraid the day I walked out.  ~Carly Fiorina

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.  ~H. Jackson Brown, Jr., Life's Little Instruction Book

If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.  ~Vince Lombardi

I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.  ~Fred Allen

You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands.  Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.  ~John Updike

We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails.  ~Author Unknown

Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.  ~Art Linkletter

Excellence is not a skill.  It is an attitude.  ~Ralph Marston

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.  ~e.e. cummings, 1955

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.  ~Judy Garland

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.  ~e.e. cummings

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.  ~Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

There is just one life for each of us:  our own.  ~Euripides

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.  ~Dr. Seuss

The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money.  ~Author Unknown

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.  ~W.H. Auden

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.  ~Russell Green

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.  ~Henry Ford

Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn't always have to be their top priority.  ~William Arthur Ward

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.  ~Henry Ford

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.  ~Edmund Hillary

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.  We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small does not serve the world.  There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.  We are all meant to shine, as children do.  We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.  It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.  ~Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles," 1992 (commonly misattributed to Nelson Mandela, 1994 inauguration speech)

The important thing is not to stop questioning.  ~Albert Einstein

The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate.  ~Doug Larson

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.  ~Ralph W. Sockman

The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.  ~Bishop Mandell Creighton

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!  ~Andy McIntyre

To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.  ~A.A. Milne

The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own arm.  ~Fred Dehner

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

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved.  The real milestones are less prepossessing.  They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave.  Our lives are measured by these.  ~Susan B. Anthony

Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.  ~Roger Babson

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.  ~Milton Berle

Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion.  You must set yourself on fire.  ~Arnold H. Glasow

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.  ~Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625

Education is the best provision for old age.  ~Aristotle

Don't waste time learning the "tricks of the trade."  Instead, learn the trade.  ~Attributed to both James Charlton and H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.  ~Beverly Sills

Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.  ~David Lloyd George

What we are is God's gift to us.  What we become is our gift to God.  ~Eleanor Powell

Whenever it is possible, a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money.  ~William Lyon Phelps

My father always told me, "Find a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life."  ~Jim Fox

During my second year of nursing school our professor gave us a quiz.  I breezed through the questions until I read the last one:  "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?"  Surely this was a joke.  I had seen the cleaning woman several times, but how would I know her name?  I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank.  Before the class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our grade.  "Absolutely," the professor said.  "In your careers, you will meet many people.  All are significant.  They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello."  I've never forgotten that lesson.  I also learned her name was Dorothy.  ~Joann C. Jones

You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.  ~John Wooden

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.  ~Nelson Henderson

My spelling is Wobbly.  It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.  ~A.A. Milne

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression.  ~Bronson Alcott

Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.  ~George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.  ~Richard C. Trench

[A] man must be a dd fool, who can't spell a word more than one way.  ~Author unknown, 1855, anecdote from Jamestown Journal (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.  ~Henry Louis Mencken, The American Language

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.  ~Rémy de Gourmont
	

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.  ~Mark Twain

When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.  ~Raymond Chandler

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson:  you find the present tense, but the past perfect!  ~Owens Lee Pomeroy

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.  ~Robert Graves

There are grammatical errors even in his silence.  ~Stanislaw J. Lec

Man 1:  Where are you from?
Man 2:  From a place where we do not end sentences with prepositions.
Man 1:  Okay, where are you from, jackass?
~Author Unknown

Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law.  After all, the law is just so much grammar.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.  ~Attributed to Winston Churchill, rejecting the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, c.1948, may instead have been said by an anonymous official, see notes at www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.  ~William Safire



The reason grandchildren and grandparents get along so well is that they have a common enemy.  ~Sam Levenson


Grandmas are moms with lots of frosting.  ~Author Unknown


What a bargain grandchildren are!  I give them my loose change, and they give me a million dollars' worth of pleasure.  ~Gene Perret


Grandmothers are just antique little girls.  ~Author Unknown


Grandfathers are just antique little boys.  ~Author Unknown


Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.  ~Welsh Proverb


A child needs a grandparent, anybody's grandparent, to grow a little more securely into an unfamiliar world.  ~Charles and Ann Morse


A grandmother is a babysitter who watches the kids instead of the television.  ~Author Unknown


What children need most are the essentials that grandparents provide in abundance.  They give unconditional love, kindness, patience, humor, comfort, lessons in life.  And, most importantly, cookies.  ~Rudolph Giuliani


A house needs a grandma in it.  ~Louisa May Alcott


Our grandchildren accept us for ourselves, without rebuke or effort to change us, as no one in our entire lives has ever done, not our parents, siblings, spouses, friends - and hardly ever our own grown children.  ~Ruth Goode


When a child is born, so are grandmothers.  ~Judith Levy


Never have children, only grandchildren.  ~Gore Vidal


I always give my grandkids a couple of quarters when they go home.  It's a bargain.  ~Gene Perret


There's no place like home except Grandma's.  ~Author Unknown


If God had intended us to follow recipes,
He wouldn't have given us grandmothers.
~Linda Henley


Becoming a grandmother is wonderful.  One moment you're just a mother.  The next you are all-wise and prehistoric.  ~Pam Brown


We should all have one person who knows how to bless us despite the evidence, Grandmother was that person to me.  ~Phyllis Theroux


It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.  ~Igor Stravinsky


Being grandparents sufficiently removes us from the responsibilities so that we can be friends.  ~Allan Frome


Grandchildren don't stay young forever, which is good because Pop-pops have only so many horsey rides in them.  ~Gene Perret


When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window.  ~Ogden Nash


Grandma always made you feel she had been waiting to see just you all day and now the day was complete.  ~Marcy DeMaree


A married daughter with children puts you in danger of being catalogued as a first edition.  ~Author Unknown


Grandmas never run out of hugs or cookies.  ~Author Unknown


Grandmas hold our tiny hands for just a little while, but our hearts forever.  ~Author Unknown


Grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation.  ~Lois Wyse


Uncles and aunts, and cousins, are all very well, and fathers and mothers are not to be despised; but a grandmother, at holiday time, is worth them all.  ~Fanny Fern


It is as grandmothers that our mothers come into the fullness of their grace.  ~Christopher Morley


A grandfather is someone with silver in his hair and gold in his heart.  ~Author Unknown






If I had known how wonderful it would be to have grandchildren, I'd have had them first.  ~Lois Wyse


Grandfathers are for loving and fixing things.  ~Author Unknown


They say genes skip generations.  Maybe that's why grandparents find their grandchildren so likeable.  ~Joan McIntosh


Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.  ~Margaret Mead


To become a grandparent is to enjoy one of the few pleasures in life for which the consequences have already been paid.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


My grandkids believe I'm the oldest thing in the world.  And after two or three hours with them, I believe it, too.  ~Gene Perret


My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty.  She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is.  ~Ellen DeGeneres


I loved their home. Everything smelled older, worn but safe; the food aroma had baked itself into the furniture.  ~Susan Strasberg


My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses.  Drinks right out of the bottle.  ~Henry Youngman


If becoming a grandmother was only a matter of choice, I should advise every one of you straight away to become one.  There is no fun for old people like it!  ~Hannah Whithall Smith


It's such a grand thing to be a mother of a mother - that's why the world calls her grandmother.  ~Author Unknown


Do you know why grandchildren are always so full of energy?  They suck it out of their grandparents.  ~Gene Perret


Grandchildren are God's way of compensating us for growing old.  ~Mary H. Waldrip


You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.  ~Proverb


An hour with your grandchildren can make you feel young again.  Anything longer than that, and you start to age quickly.  ~Gene Perret


If nothing is going well, call your grandmother.  ~Italian Proverb


Elephants and grandchildren never forget.  ~Andy Rooney


A grandma's name is little less in love than is the doting title of a mother.  ~William Shakespeare


I don't intentionally spoil my grandkids.  It's just that correcting them often takes more energy than I have left.  ~Gene Perret


The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby's grandparents.  You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.  ~Dave Barry


Few things are more delightful than grandchildren fighting over your lap.  ~Doug Larson


To a small child, the perfect granddad is unafraid of big dogs and fierce storms but absolutely terrified of the word "boo."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Posterity is the patriotic name for grandchildren.  ~Art Linkletter


A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do.  ~Lois Wyse


I wish I had the energy that my grandchildren have - if only for self-defense.  ~Gene Perret


The simplest toy, one which even the youngest child can operate, is called a grandparent.  
~Sam Levenson, You Don't Have to Be in "Who's Who" to Know What's What


Grandmother-grandchild relationships are simple.  Grandmas are short on criticism and long on love.  ~Author Unknown


The best place to be when you're sad is Grandpa's lap.  ~Author Unknown


I have a warm feeling after playing with my grandchildren.  It's the liniment working.  ~Author Unknown


Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do.  Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.  ~Alex Haley


Grandmother - a wonderful mother with lots of practice.  ~Author Unknown


On the seventh day God rested.  His grandchildren must have been out of town.  ~Gene Perret


A grandparent is old on the outside but young on the inside.  ~Author Unknown


One of the most powerful handclasps is that of a new grandbaby around the finger of a grandfather.  ~Joy Hargrove


Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.  ~Lewis Mumford


Grandparents are there to help the child get into mischief they haven't thought of yet.  ~Gene Perret


It's amazing how grandparents seem so young once you become one.  ~Author Unknown


By the time the youngest children have learned to keep the house tidy, the oldest grandchildren are on hand to tear it to pieces.  ~Christopher Morley


Her grandmother, as she gets older, is not fading but rather becoming more concentrated.  ~Paulette Bates Alden


If your baby is "beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time," you're the grandma.  ~Teresa Bloomingdale


Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.  ~William Osler


A garden of Love grows in a Grandmother's heart.  ~Author Unknown


A grandmother is a little bit parent, a little bit teacher, and a little bit best friend.  ~Author Unknown


Most grandmas have a touch of the scallywag.  ~Helen Thomson


Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.  ~G. Norman Collie


The history of our grandparents is remembered not with rose petals but in the laughter and tears of their children and their children's children.  It is into us that the lives of grandparents have gone.  It is in us that their history becomes a future.  ~Charles and Ann Morse


Grandparents are similar to a piece of string - handy to have around and easily wrapped around the fingers of their grandchildren.  ~Author Unknown


What is it about grandparents that is so lovely?  I'd like to say that grandparents are God's gifts to children.  And if they can but see, hear and feel what these people have to give, they can mature at a fast rate.  ~Bill Cosby


You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.  ~Irish Saying


A grandmother is a mother who has a second chance.  ~Author Unknown


Being pretty on the inside means you don't hit your brother and you eat all your peas - that's what my grandma taught me.  ~Lord Chesterfield


Our land is everything to us.... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land.  We remember our grandfathers paid for it - with their life.  ~John Wooden Legs, "Back on the War Ponies," 1960, quoted in We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History, edited by Nathaniel May and Clint Willis (Thanks, Jamie)


Two things I dislike about my granddaughter - when she won't take her afternoon nap, and when she won't let me take mine.  ~Gene Perret


No cowboy was ever faster on the draw than a grandparent pulling a baby picture out of a wallet.  ~Author Unknown


I would love to go back and travel the road not taken, if I knew at the end of it I'd find the same set of grandkids.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather - not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.  ~Will Shriner


I like to do nice things for my grandchildren - like buy them those toys I've always wanted to play with.  ~Gene Perret


A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.  ~Erma Bombeck


My grandchild has taught me what true love means.  It means watching Scooby-Doo cartoons while the basketball game is on another channel.  ~Gene Perret


My granddaughter came to spend a few weeks with me, and I decided to teach her to sew.  After I had gone through a lengthy explanation of how to thread the machine, she stepped back, put her hands on her hips, and said in disbelief, "You mean you can do all that, but you can't play my Game Boy?"  ~Author Unknown


Soon I will be an old, white-haired lady, into whose lap someone places a baby, saying, "Smile, Grandma!" - I, who myself so recently was photographed on my grandmother's lap.  ~Liv Ullmann


Grandchildren:  the only people who can get more out of you than the IRS.  ~Gene Perret


Just about the time a woman thinks her work is done, she becomes a grandmother.  ~Edward H. Dreschnack


My grandson was visiting one day when he asked, "Gramma, do you know how you and God are alike?"  I mentally polished my halo while I asked, "No, how are we alike?"  "You're both old," he replied.  ~Author Unknown


"You're more trouble than the children are" is the greatest compliment a grandparent can receive.  ~Gene Perret


Have children while your parents are still young enough to take care of them.  ~Rita Rudner


Saying thank you is more than good manners.  It is good spirituality.  ~Alfred Painter

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today.  Have you used one to say "thank you?"  ~William A. Ward

The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts.  No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.  ~H.U. Westermayer

Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.  ~G.B. Stern

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.  ~Meister Eckhart

There is no such thing as gratitude unexpressed.  If it is unexpressed, it is plain, old-fashioned ingratitude.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Gratitude is the memory of the heart.  ~Jean Baptiste Massieu, translated from French

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.  Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?  ~G.K. Chesterton

The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.  ~John E. Southard

Gratitude is an art of painting an adversity into a lovely picture.  ~Kak Sri

If you have lived, take thankfully the past.  ~John Dryden

As each day comes to us refreshed and anew, so does my gratitude renew itself daily.  The breaking of the sun over the horizon is my grateful heart dawning upon a blessed world.  ~Terri Guillemets

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.  ~G.K. Chesterton

You say grace before meals.  All right.  But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.  ~G.K. Chesterton

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a fellow isn't thankful for what he's got, he isn't likely to be thankful for what he's going to get.  ~Frank A. Clark

The unthankful heart... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Grace isn't a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal.  It's a way to live.  ~Attributed to Jacqueline Winspear

Praise the bridge that carried you over.  ~George Colman

If you count all your assets, you always show a profit.  ~Robert Quillen

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.  ~Epictetus

What a miserable thing life is:  you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough.  ~Bertolt Brecht, Jungle of Cities, 1924

Gratitude is the best attitude.  ~Author Unknown

Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.  ~W.T. Purkiser

We thank Thee, O Father of all, for... all the soul-help that sad souls understand.  ~Will Carleton

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.  ~Thornton Wilder

Two kinds of gratitude:  The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give.  ~Edwin Arlington Robinson

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.  ~William Faulkner

If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness.  It will change your life mightily.  ~Gerald Good

Gratitude is the least of the virtues, but ingratitude is the worst of vices.  ~Thomas Fuller

Gratitude is an opener of locked-up blessings.  ~Marianne Williamson

There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude.  It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance.  ~Joseph Addison

Gratitude is the music of the heart, when its chords are swept by the breeze of kindness.  ~Author Unknown

I feel a very unusual sensation - if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people.  ~R.H. Blyth

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.  ~Henry Clay

The world has enough beautiful mountains and meadows, spectacular skies and serene lakes.  It has enough lush forests, flowered fields and sandy beaches.  It has plenty of stars and the promise of a new sunrise and sunset every day.  What the world needs more of is people to appreciate and enjoy it.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.  ~Estonian Proverb

All that we behold is full of blessings.  ~William Wordsworth

Thou hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, - a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise.
~George Herbert

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.  ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections On The Human Condition

Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?  ~George Canning

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.  ~John Fitzgerald Kennedy

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.  ~Cynthia Ozick

Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.  ~Horace

The grateful person, being still the most severe exacter of himself, not only confesses, but proclaims, his debts.  ~Robert South

Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.  ~Aldous Huxley

When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.  ~Chinese Proverb

Thanks are justly due for boons unbought.  ~Ovid

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.  ~H.L. Mencken

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.  ~William Arthur Ward

Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don't unravel.  ~Author Unknown



Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.  ~From a headstone in Ireland


When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.  ~Kahlil Gibran


It's so curious:  one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief.  But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.  ~Colette


Sorrow you can hold, however desolating, if nobody speaks to you.  If they speak, you break down.  ~Bede Jarrett


While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates.  You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.  ~Samuel Johnson


Grieving is a necessary passage and a difficult transition to finally letting go of sorrow - it is not a permanent rest stop.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com


Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.  ~William Shakespeare


Man, when he does not grieve, hardly exists.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Even hundredfold grief is divisible by love.  ~Terri Guillemets


Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect.  The wisest know nothing.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.  ~E.M. Cioran


Grief is a species of idleness.  ~Samuel Johnson


Grief is itself a medicine.  ~William Cowper, Charity


In my Lucia's absence
Life hangs upon me, and becomes a burden;
I am ten times undone, while hope, and fear,
And grief, and rage and love rise up at once,
And with variety of pain distract me.
~Joseph Addison


We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.  ~Kenji Miyazawa


Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.  ~From the television show The Wonder Years


If you're going through hell, keep going.  ~Winston Churchill


We acquire the strength we have overcome.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Time is a physician that heals every grief.  ~Diphilus


No one ever really dies as long as they took the time to leave us with fond memories.  ~Chris Sorensen


The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer


There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.  ~Lou Reed, "Magic and Loss"


Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.  ~Dan Rather


You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.  ~Jan Glidewell


Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.  ~Author Unknown


There are things that we don't want to happen but have to accept, things we don't want to know but have to learn, and people we can't live without but have to let go.  ~Author Unknown


If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.  ~Moliere


Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.  ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations


In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.  ~Robert Ingersoll


Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.  ~Jacques Prévert


The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.  ~Henry Maudsley


Every evening I turn my worries over to God.  He's going to be up all night anyway.  ~Mary C. Crowley


She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.  ~George Eliot


While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil.  ~John Taylor


As long as I can I will look at this world for both of us.  As long as I can I will laugh with the birds, I will sing with the flowers, I will pray to the stars, for both of us.  ~Sascha, as posted on motivateus.com




The groundhog is like most other prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears.  ~Bill Vaughn


To shorten winter, borrow some money due in spring.  ~W.J. Vogel


Alas! must it ever be so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?
~Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton


Every mile is two in winter.  ~George Herbert


The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.  ~Patrick Young


To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.  ~George Santayana


Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.  ~Kin Hubbard


Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.  ~Maori Proverb


Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours."  ~Robert Byrne


I was just thinking, if it is really religion with these nudist colonies, they sure must turn atheists in the wintertime.  ~Will Rogers


Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"  ~Robin Williams


Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.  ~Doug Larson


Where does the white go when the snow melts?  ~Hugh Kieffer


Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book


There's one good thing about snow, it makes your lawn look as nice as your neighbor's.  ~Clyde Moore




If it were not for guests all houses would be graves.  ~Kahlil Gibran


If you are a host to your guest, be a host to his dog also.  ~Russian Proverb


I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest:  one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine.  ~Alfred North Whitehead


Staying with people consists in your not having your own way, and their not having theirs.  ~Maarten Maartens


Visits always give pleasure - if not the arrival, the departure.  ~Portuguese Proverb


The ornaments of your house will be the guests who frequent it.  ~Author Unknown


Santa Claus has the right idea:  Visit people once a year.  ~Victor Borge


Visitor's footfalls are like medicine; they heal the sick.  ~African Proverb


We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends.  ~Samuel Pepys


We labor to make a house a home, then every time we're expecting visitors, we rush to turn it back into a house.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Very sorry can't come.  Lie follows by post.  ~Charles Beresford, telegram reply to a dinner invitation


Fish and visitors smell in three days.  ~Benjamin Franklin


A dinner invitation, once accepted, is a sacred obligation.  If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend.  ~Ward McAllister


Hospitality, n.  The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were.  ~Author Unknown




The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.  ~Samuel Johnson


Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.  ~Mark Twain


A habit is something you can do without thinking - which is why most of us have so many of them.  ~Frank A. Clark


Ill habits gather by unseen degrees -
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
~John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 1681


Motivation is what gets you started.  Habit is what keeps you going.  ~Jim Ryun


Bad habits are easier to abandon today than tomorrow.  ~Yiddish Proverb


The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.  ~Somerset Maugham


Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.  ~St. Augustine


The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.  ~Feodor Dostoevski


Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882


Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables.  ~Spanish Proverb


The hard must become habit.  The habit must become easy.  The easy must become beautiful.  ~Doug Henning


Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.  ~Marcel Proust


The easier it is to do, the harder it is to change.  ~Eng's Principle


The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.  ~Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913


Habits are safer than rules; you don't have to watch them.  And you don't have to keep them, either.  They keep you.  ~Frank Crane


Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.  It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.  ~William James, The Principles of Psychology


In any family, measles are less contagious than bad habits.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.  ~Confucius, Analects


Habit with him was all the test of truth;
It must be right:  I've done it from my youth.
~George Crabbe, The Borough


Habit is a cable; we weave a thread each day, and at last we cannot break it.  ~Horace Mann


Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar for 1894


Small habits well pursued betimes
May reach the dignity of crimes.
~Hannah More


To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.  ~Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life


Habit is a man's sole comfort.  We dislike doing without even unpleasant things to which we have become accustomed.  ~Goethe


The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it.  ~Leo Aikman


Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all.  ~Georges Gurdjieff




The hair is the richest ornament of women.  ~Martin Luther


Hair brings one's self-image into focus; it is vanity's proving ground.  Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudices.  ~Shana Alexander


Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like.  ~Author Unknown


It seems no more than right that men should seize time by the forelock, for the rude old fellow, sooner or later, pulls all their hair out.  ~George Dennison Prentice, Prenticeana, 1860


What's the matter with you guys?  The sight of blonde hair knocks you three rungs down on the evolutionary ladder.  ~From the television show Civil Wars


The great ages of prose are the ages in which men shave.  The great ages of poetry are those in which they allow their beards to grow.  ~Robert Lynd


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


I'm not offended by all the dumb-blonde jokes because I know that I'm not dumb.  I also know I'm not blonde.  ~Dolly Parton


It was a blonde.  A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.  ~Raymond Chandler


Hair style is the final tip-off whether or not a woman really knows herself.  ~Hubert de Givenchy, Vogue, July 1985


Babies haven't any hair:
Old men's heads are just as bare;
From the cradle to the grave
Lies a haircut and a shave.
~Samuel Goodman Hoffenstein


Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair.  ~Sam Ewing


Women.... Who made 'em?  God must have been a... genius.  Their hair.  They say that the hair is everything, you know?  Have you ever buried your nose in a mountain of curls, and just wanted to go to sleep forever?  ~Bo Goldman, "The Start of an Education," made popular by the movie Scent of a Woman


When red headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.  ~Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court


Those curious locks so aptly twin'd,
Whose every hair a soul doth bind.
~Thomas Carew


If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in a library?  ~Lily Tomlin


Long, beautiful, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen... I adore hair!  ~James Rado and Gerome Ragni, Hair


Violet will be a good color for hair at just about the same time that brunette becomes a good color for flowers.  ~Fran Lebowitz


Beauty draws us with a single hair.  ~Alexander Pope


Gentlemen prefer blondes... but gentlemen marry brunettes.  ~Anita Loos






Hair is vitally personal to children.  They weep vigorously when it is cut for the first time; no matter how it grows, bushy, straight or curly, they feel they are being shorn of a part of their personality.  ~Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography, 1964


Attired to please herself: no gems of any kind
She wore, nor aught of borrowed gloss in Nature's stead;
And, then her long, loose hair flung round her head
Fell carelessly behind.
~Publius Terentius Afer


[T]his is California.  Blondes are like the state flower or something.  ~From the television show Beverly Hills 90210


There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


Only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
~W.B. Yeats


It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.  ~Cicero


To Crystal, hair was the most important thing on earth.  She would never get married because you couldn't wear curlers in bed.  ~Edna O'Brien


There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.  ~Martial


Gray hair is a blessing - ask any bald man.  ~Author Unknown


You can't part the skin of a sausage,
Or a dad from his fond son and heir.
And you can't part the hair on a bald-headed man,
For there'll be no parting there.  ~Billy Bennett


Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...  ~Susan Polis Shutz


A celebrity is any well-known TV or movie star who looks like he spends more than two hours working on his hair.  ~Steve Martin


A fine head of hair adds beauty to a good face, and terror to an ugly one.  ~Lycurgus


By common consent gray hairs are a crown of glory; the only object of respect that can never excite envy.  ~George Bancroft


There is one thing about baldness:  it's neat.  ~Don Herold


How can I control my life when I can't control my hair?  ~Author Unknown


It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show.  ~D.H. Lawrence


I don't care if they call me "baldie" or "chrome dome."  God took an eraser and brushed my head clean.  I'd rather be bald on top than bald inside.  ~Joe Garagiola, 1975


A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.  ~Oliver Herford


Experience is a comb which nature gives us when we are bald.  ~Proverb




I'll bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween.  ~Author Unknown


As spirits roam the neighborhoods at night,
Let loose upon the Earth till it be light...
~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com


Eat, drink and be scary.  ~Author Unknown


Pixie, kobold, elf, and sprite,
All are on their rounds tonight;
In the wan moon's silver ray,
Thrives their helter-skelter play.
~Joel Benton


A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.  ~Erma Bombeck


Witch and ghost make merry on this last of dear Octobers days.  ~Author Unknown


Halloween wraps fear in innocence,
As though it were a slightly sour sweet.
Let terror, then, be turned into a treat...
~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com


Nothing on Earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.  ~Steve Almond


Halloween is huge in my house and we really get into the "spirits" of things.  ~Dee Snider


At first cock-crow the ghosts must go
Back to their quiet graves below.
~Theodosia Garrison


'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.
~William Shakespeare


Hold on, man.  We don't go anywhere with "scary," "spooky," "haunted," or "forbidden" in the title.  ~From Scooby-Doo


When witches go riding,
and black cats are seen,
the moon laughs and whispers,
tis near Halloween.
~Author Unknown


I don't know that there are real ghosts and goblins, but there are always more trick-or-treaters than neighborhood kids.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Bring forth the raisins and the nuts-
Tonight All-Hallows' Spectre struts
Along the moonlit way.
~John Kendrick Bangs


From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
~Scottish Saying


This Halloween the most popular mask is the Arnold Schwarzenegger mask.  And the best part?  With a mouth full of candy you will sound just like him.  ~Conan O'Brien


'Tis the night - the night
Of the grave's delight,
And the warlocks are at their play;
Ye think that without
The wild winds shout,
But no, it is they - it is they.
~Arthur Cleveland Coxe


One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
~Emily Dickinson


Those seemingly interminable dark walks between houses, long before street-lit safety became an issue, were more adrenalizing than the mountains of candy filling the sack.  Sadly Halloween, with our good-natured attempts to protect the little ones, from the increasingly dangerous traffic and increasingly sick adults, has become an utter bore.  ~Lauren Springer


Where there is no imagination there is no horror.  ~Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr.


Just like a ghost, you've been a-hauntin' my dreams,
So I'll propose on Halloween.
Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you.
~Classics IV


There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.  ~George Carlin


Shadows of a thousand years rise again unseen,
Voices whisper in the trees, "Tonight is Halloween!"
~Dexter Kozen


There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.  ~Joseph Conrad






Ghosts, like ladies, never speak till spoke to.  ~Richard Harris Barham


If a man harbors any sort of fear, it makes him landlord to a ghost.  ~Lloyd Douglas


Men say that in this midnight hour,
The disembodièd have power
To wander as it liketh them,
By wizard oak and fairy stream.
~William Motherwell


Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with.  C.B. is such a loser.  He wasn't even the star of his own Halloween special.  ~Chris Rock


A gypsy fire is on the hearth,
Sign of the carnival of mirth;
Through the dun fields and from the glade
Flash merry folk in masquerade,
For this is Hallowe'en!
~Author Unknown


Once in a young lifetime one should be allowed to have as much sweetness as one can possibly want and hold.  ~Judith Olney


Auld Daddy Darkness creeps frae his hole,
Black as a blackamoor, blin' as a mole....
~James Ferguson


Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names.
~John Milton


Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.  ~River Phoenix


Stir the fire till it lowe
How like a queen comes forth the lonely Moon
From the slow opening curtains of the clouds
Walking in beauty to her midnight throne!
~George Croly


True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about but few have seen.  ~Author Unknown


Backward, turn backward,
O Time, in your flight
make me a child again
just for to-night!
~Elizabeth Akers Allen


They that are born on Halloween shall see more than other folk.  ~Saying of unknown origin


Being in a band you can wear whatever you want - it's like an excuse for Halloween everyday.  ~Gwen Stefani


You wouldn't believe
On All Hallow Eve
What lots of fun we can make,
With apples to bob,
And nuts on the hob,
And a ring-and-thimble cake.
~Carolyn Wells


On Halloween, witches come true;
Wild ghosts escape from dreams.
Each monster dances in the park....
~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com


A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises.  Ghosts were created when the first man awoke in the night.  ~J.M. Barrie


May Jack-o-lanterns burning bright
Of soft and golden hue
Pierce through the futures veil and show
What fate now holds for you.
~Author Unknown


On Hallowe'en the thing you must do
Is pretend that nothing can frighten you
And if somethin' scares you and you want to run
Just let on like it's Hallowe'en fun.
~Author Unknown


Clothes make a statement.  Costumes tell a story.  ~Mason Cooley


Proof of our society's decline is that Halloween has become a broad daylight event for many.  ~Robert Kirby


Hark! Hark to the wind! 'Tis the night, they say,
When all souls come back from the far away-
The dead, forgotten this many a day!
~Virna Sheard


I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.  ~Henry David Thoreau


When black cats prowl and pumpkins gleam,
May luck be yours on Halloween.
~Author Unknown


There is nothing that gives more assurance than a mask.  ~Colette


Hobgoblins know the proper way to dance:
Arms akimbo, loopy legs askew,
Leaping into darkness with delight,
Lusting for the ecstasy of fright,
Open to the charm of horrors new....
~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com



Nothing beats a haunted moonlit night on All Hallows Eve.... And on this fatal night, at this witching time, the starless sky laments black and unmoving.  The somber hues of an ominous, dark forest are suddenly illuminated under the emerging face of the full moon.  ~Kim Elizabeth


Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.  ~Fernando Pessoa


Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate!  ~Attributed to Sandra J. Dykes


After eating chocolate you feel godlike, as though you can conquer enemies, lead armies, entice lovers.  ~Emily Luchetti




Kindle the taper like the steadfast star
Ablaze on evening's forehead o'er the earth,
And add each night a lustre till afar
An eightfold splendor shine above thy hearth.
~Emma Lazarus, "The Feast of Lights"


Colorful candles burning bright, each lit on eight very special nights.  ~Author Unknown


May the lights of Hanukkah usher in a better world for all humankind.  ~Author Unknown


Eight days the light continued on its own:
A miracle, they say, but not more so
Than ordinary lives of flesh and bone,
Consuming wicks burned ashen long ago....
~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com


Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart
~Hannah Senesh


To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass


Most Texans think Hanukkah is some sort of duck call.  ~Richard Lewis


The miracle, of course, was not that the oil for the sacred light -
in a little cruse - lasted as long as they say;
but that the courage of the Maccabees lasted to this day:
let that nourish my flickering spirit.
~Charles Reznikoff, "Meditations on the Fall and Winter Holidays"


Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.  ~Buddha


We have focused on the miracle-thing and I think we often overlook the message of Hanukkah.  To me, the core of the holiday is the cleaning of the temple.... The accomplishment was in restoring the temple to the purpose for which it was built.  Now think of the temple as a symbol.  Perhaps it represents my life.  The world has tried to use me for its own (perhaps good, but none-the-less extrinsic) purposes.  But now I can rededicate myself to my own original purpose.  ~Ralph Levy, "Hanukkah - Another View"


On Hanukkah, the first dark night,
Light yourself a candle bright.
I'll you, if you will me invite
To dance within that gentle light.
~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com


Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness - to seek the light.
Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness - to seek the light.
Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.
~Allen Ginsberg, "Psalm III"


Christmas brings enormous electric bills.  Candles are used for Hanukkah.  Not only are we spared enormous electric bills, but we get to feel good about not contributing to the energy crisis.  ~KOACH Humor, "Holiday Distinctions Finally Explained" (KOACH College Outreach is a project of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism)


May love and light fill your home and heart at Hanukkah.  ~Author Unknown


In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukkah" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank.  People passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukkah!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!"  ~Dave Barry


...A fuel-less flame is nothing but a wraith,
However wrought, if unsustained by passion.
~Nicholas Gordon, "How Long Can We Remember an Event," poemsforfree.com


Now, near the Winter Solstice, it is good to light candles.  All the nice meanings of bringing light to the world can be beautiful.  But perhaps we are concentrating on lighting the world because we don't know how to light up our own lives.  ~Ralph Levy, "Hanukkah - Another View"


I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders.  ~Jewish Proverb


By all means, then, let us have psalms
and days of dedication anew to the old causes.
~Charles Reznikoff, "Meditations on the Fall and Winter Holidays"


Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.  ~Chinese Proverb


Still ours the dance, the feast, the glorious Psalm,
The mystic lights of emblem, and the Word.
~Emma Lazarus, "The Feast of Lights"


Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?  ~Rose F. Kennedy


Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight, 1931, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert


The darkness of the whole world cannot swallow the glowing of a candle.  ~Robert Altinger


The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness.  You have to catch it yourself.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.  ~Jacques Prévert

If you want to be happy, be.  ~Leo Tolstoy

Happiness is never stopping to think if you are.  ~Palmer Sondreal

Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy.  ~Robert Anthony

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.  ~Mark Twain

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.  ~Edith Wharton

Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place.  But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.  ~E.L. Konigsburg

Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.  ~Cynthia Nelms

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

Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.  ~Norm Papernick

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys.  If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.  ~Fyodor Dostoevsky

What a wonderful life I've had!  I only wish I'd realized it sooner.  ~Colette

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.  ~James Openheim

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.  ~John Barrymore

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think.  Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.  ~A.A. Milne

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness.  Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost.  ~H. Jackson Brown

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness.  Poverty and wealth have both failed.  ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard

Happiness and sadness run parallel to each other.  When one takes a rest, the other one tends to take up the slack.  ~Hazelmarie Elliott (“Mattie”)

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier.  The way it actually works is the reverse.  You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.  ~Margaret Young

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.  ~St. Augustine

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are two things to aim at in life:  first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it.  Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts, 1931

This is my "depressed stance."  When you're depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand.  The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you'll start to feel better.  If you're going to get any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this.  ~Charles M. Schulz

Pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
~William Wordsworth, 1806

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Happiness is a form of courage.  ~Holbrook Jackson

We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.  ~Jean de La Bruyere

Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.  ~Christian Nestell Bovee

We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.  ~Frederick Keonig

Every now and then,
when the world sits just right,
a gentle breath of heaven
fills my soul with delight...
~Hazelmarie ‘Mattie’ Elliott, A Breath of Heaven

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.  ~Berke Breathed

The secret to happiness is to put the burden of proof on unhappiness.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Happiness?  That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.  ~Albert Schweitzer

Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.  ~Eleanor Roosevelt

Happiness is a direction, not a place.  ~Sydney J. Harris

Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.  ~Janet Lane

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery while on a detour.  ~Author Unknown

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion.  ~Dalai Lama

Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower.  ~Author Unknown

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.  ~Lady Blessington

The best vitamin to be a happy person is B1.  ~Author Unknown

A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.  ~Bernard de Fontenelle

Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?  ~Yevgeny Zamyatin

A happy thought is like a seed that sows positivity for all to reap.  ~Miriam Muhammad

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.  ~Immanuel Kant

Man must search for what is right, and let happiness come on its own.  ~Johann Pestalozzi

He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

If you search the world for happiness, you may find it in the end, for the world is round and will lead you back to your door.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.  ~Sigmund Freud

There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.  ~Salvador Dali

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony. ~V.S. Pritchett

We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.  ~Walter Savage Landor

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Real elation is when you feel you could touch a star without standing on tiptoe.  ~Doug Larson

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.  ~Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.  ~Bertrand Russell

The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.  ~Doug Larson

Cheerfulness is what greases the axles of the world.  Don't go through life creaking.  ~H.W. Byles

What I'm looking for is a blessing that's not in disguise.  ~Kitty O'Neill Collins

My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy.  ~William Shakespeare

Isn't it cool when the days that are supposed to feel good, actually do?  ~Jim Carrey

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.  ~John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1873

There is no way to happiness - happiness is the way.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now, and there will never be a time when it is not now.  ~Gerald Jampolsky

We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

I have only two kinds of days:  happy and hysterically happy.  ~Allen J. Lefferdink

The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.  ~Joseph Roux

The search for happiness is unlike any other search, for we search last in the likeliest places.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

As people ssock faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves.  ~Andrew Delbanco

Happiness is the feeling you're feeling when you want to keep feeling it.  ~Author Unknown

Joy is a flower that blooms when you do.  ~Author Unknown

So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.  ~Booth Tarkington

Jumping for joy is good exercise.  ~Author Unknown

Happiness is distraction from the human tragedy.  ~J.M. Reinoso

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.  ~Mother Teresa

Seeking happiness, I passed many travelers headed in the opposite direction, seeking happiness.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

She thinks that happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway.  ~Rob Thomas, "3 A.M."

Happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.  ~Gretta Brooker Palmer

Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.  ~Channing Pollock, Mr. Moneypenny

The happy have whole days,
and those they choose.
The unhappy have but hours,
and those they lose.
~Colley Cibber

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.  ~Charles L. Morgan

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.  ~Iris Murdoch

Happiness is... usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.  ~Thomas Szasz

When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.  ~Niccolo Machiavelli

You cannot always have happiness, but you can always give happiness.  ~Author Unknown

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.  ~Ernest Dimnet

One joy scatters a hundred griefs.  ~Chinese Proverb

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Candida, 1898

One should be either sad or joyful.  Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.  ~Eugene O'Neill

A man's as miserable as he thinks he is.  ~Seneca

One filled with joy preaches without preaching.  ~Mother Teresa

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.  ~Joseph Joubert

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.  ~Thornton Wilder

Be happy.  It's one way of being wise.  ~Colette

Whatever you put aside to seek happiness, remember where you put it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way of the best happiness.  ~Frederich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.  ~William Saroyan

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.  ~Anton Chekhov

Happiness is an inside job. ~William Arthur Ward

Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.  ~Douglas Jerrold

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.  ~Don Herold

If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.  ~Taisen Deshimaru

It is strange what a contempt men have for the joys that are offered them freely.  ~Georges Duhamel

If the day and night be such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more immortal - that is your success.  All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.  ~J.D. Salinger

There is no expert on what happiness is but many on what it might have been.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Eden is that old-fashioned house we dwell in every day
Without suspecting our abode until we drive away.
~Emily Dickinson

Happiness is a function of accepting what is.  ~Werner Erhard

Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.  ~Maxim Gorky

Let a joy keep you.  Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.  ~Carl Sandburg

Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.  ~John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 1863

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.  ~Joseph Addison

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought.  Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.  ~Samuel Johnson

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.  ~Freya Stark, The Journey's Echo

Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.  ~Paulo Coelho

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and unhappiness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?  ~Leslie Caron

On the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.  ~William R. Inge

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.  ~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

Joy is not in things; it is in us.  ~Richard Wagner

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed.  Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.  ~Denis Waitley

Happiness is like the penny candy of our youth:  we got a lot more for our money back when we had no money.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.  ~Don Marquis

If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French by Richard Howard

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive.  Call him a breathing corpse.  ~Sophocles

Many things can make you miserable for weeks; few can bring you a whole day of happiness.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.  ~Hosea Ballou

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

Some pursue happiness, others create it.  ~Author Unknown

Happiness consists more in conveniences of pleasure that occur everyday than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.  ~Benjamin Franklin

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.  ~Epictetus

Gather the crumbs of happiness and they will make you a loaf of contentment.  ~Author Unknown

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Happiness is the natural flower of duty.  ~Phillips Brooks

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?  ~Albert Camus

Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.  ~Thomas Jefferson

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements in life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.  ~Charles Kingsley

You need to learn to be happy by nature, because you'll seldom have the chance to be happy by circumstance.  ~Lavetta Sue Wegman

It is a comely fashion to be glad; Joy is the grace we say to God.  ~Jean Ingelow

If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert.  He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.  He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself.  He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day.  ~W. Beran Wolfe

You will 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.  ~Albert Camus

Looking back on a happy life, one realizes that one was not happy all the time.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of a man in strong health, as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom, there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor, or erring habits of life.  ~John Ruskin

Happiness is the resultant of the relative strengths of positive and negative feelings rather than an absolute amount of one or the other.  ~Norman Bradburn

Cheerfulness is the very flower of health.  ~Proverb

If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her own nose all the time.  ~Josh Billings

Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn't stop to enjoy it.  ~William Feather

Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.  ~Johnny Carson

It is not happiness until you capture it and store it out of the reach of time.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse.  I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.  ~J.D. Salinger

Before we set our hearts too much on anything, let us examine how happy are those who already possess it.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.  ~Marcel Proust

For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.  ~Author Unknown

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.  ~Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response.  ~Mildred Barthel

[U]sefulness is happiness, and... all other things are but incidental.  ~Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, 1829

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.  ~Robert Frost

The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash.  ~Author Unknown

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.  ~Margaret Lee Runbeck

Many people are extremely happy, but are absolutely worthless to society.  ~Charles Gow

To be happy, you must fancy that everything you have is a gift, and you the chosen, though you worked your tail off for every bit of it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming - a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

Most of us believe in trying to make other people happy only if they can be happy in ways which we approve.  ~Robert S. Lynd

I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot:  they amount to fourteen.  ~Abd-El-Raham

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase:  if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.  ~C.P. Snow

Happiness:  an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

If you must be in a hurry, then let it be according to the old adage, and hasten slowly.  ~Saint Vincent de Paul

God made time, but man made haste.  ~Irish Proverb

He is invariably in a hurry.  Being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.  ~Elizabeth Bibesco

Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.  ~Lord Chesterfield

It has been left to our generation to discover that you can move heaven and earth to save five minutes and then not have the faintest idea what to do with them when you have saved them.  ~C.E.M. Joad

Though I am always in haste, I am never in a hurry.  ~John Wesley

The devil takes a hand in what is done in haste.  ~Turkish Proverb

 
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.  ~Lao Tzu

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

I regret less the road not taken than my all-fired hurry along the road I took.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Remember the great adversity of art or anything else is a hurried life.  ~Robert James Waller

If you complain about the world moving too fast, slow down.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

I'm in a hurry to get things done
Oh I rush and rush until life's no fun
All I've really gotta do is live and die
But I'm in a hurry and don't know why....
~Roger Murrah and Randy VanWarmer

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.  ~Matthew Arnold

I don't like where I'm going and I don't like where I've been.  Why am I in a hurry?  ~Bertolt Brecht

Rivers know this:  there is no hurry.  We shall get there someday.  ~A.A. Milne

Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit.  Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.  ~St Francis de Sales

 
He bites his tongue who speaks in haste.  ~Turkish Proverb

Waiting is one of life's hardships.  ~Lemony Snicket

I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down.  You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.  ~Max Eastman



I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.  ~Booker T. Washington


Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.  ~Henry Emerson Fosdick


A Rattlesnake, if Cornered will become so angry it will bite itself.  That is exactly what the harboring of hate and resentment against others is - a biting of oneself.  We think we are harming others in holding these spites and hates, but the deeper harm is to ourselves.  ~E. Stanley Jones


Hate must make a man productive.  Otherwise one might as well love.  ~Karl Kraus


All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.  ~James Thurber


Hatred is one long wait.  ~René Maran


A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias - because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love - we must be stingy with it.  ~Charles Baudelaire, "Advice to Young Writers," 1867


Hate cages all the good things about you.  ~Terri Guillemets


The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.  ~Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968


I have decided to stick with love.  Hate is too great a burden to bear.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.


Love is blind; hate is deaf.  ~Author Unknown


We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


hatred bounces  ~e.e. cummings


There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn't like."  ~Gordon Allport


If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.  What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.  ~Hermann Hesse


If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.  ~Charley Reese


You lose a lot of time, hating people.  ~Marian Anderson


Love may be blind, but this I'll state - it's eagle-eyed compared to hate.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Hatreds are the cinders of affection.  ~Walter Raleigh


How wonderful it must be to speak the language of the angels, with no words for hate and a million words for love!  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994


It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.  Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter


Hate is misguided love.  ~Author Unknown


From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.  ~Socrates


Take care that no one hates you justly.  ~Publilius Syrus


End discrimination.  Hate everybody.  ~Elle Eden


I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.  ~James Baldwin


The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.  ~G.K. Chesterton

There's lots of people in this world who spend so much time watching their health that they haven't the time to enjoy it.  ~Josh Billings

The greatest wealth is health.  ~Virgil

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.  ~Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, 1903

Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.  ~Doug Larson

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.  ~World Health Organization, 1948

The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience.  Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around.... Throughout history, "tender loving care" has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.  ~Larry Dossey

Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.  ~Author Unknown

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.  ~Redd Foxx

As a people, we have become obsessed with Health.  There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this.  We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying.  We have lost all confidence in the human body.  ~Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979

In order to change we must be sick and tired of being sick and tired.  ~Author Unknown

A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ.  ~John Steinbeck

The best six doctors anywhere
And no one can deny it
Are sunshine, water, rest, and air
Exercise and diet.
These six will gladly you attend
If only you are willing
Your mind they'll ease
Your will they'll mend
And charge you not a shilling.
~Nursery rhyme quoted by Wayne Fields, What the River Knows, 1990

He who takes medicine and neglects to diet wastes the skill of his doctors.  ~Chinese Proverb

If I'd known I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself.  ~Leon Eldred

Be careful about reading health books.  You may die of a misprint.  ~Mark Twain

Red meat is not bad for you.  Now blue-green meat, that's bad for you!  ~Tommy Smothers

They claim red meat is bad for you.  But I never saw a sick-looking tiger.  ~Chi Chi Rodriguez

Physical ills are the taxes laid upon this wretched life; some are taxed higher, and some lower, but all pay something.  ~Lord Chesterfield

If the pain wanders, do not waste your time with doctors.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The... patient should be made to understand that he or she must take charge of his own life.  Don't take your body to the doctor as if he were a repair shop.  ~Quentin Regestein

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.  ~Author Unknown

Joy and Temperance and Repose
Slam the door on the doctor's nose.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If I had my way I'd make health catching instead of disease.  ~Robert Ingersoll

Sickness comes on horseback but departs on foot.  ~Dutch Proverb, sometimes attributed to William C. Hazlitt

Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.  ~George Jean Nathan

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.  ~Cicero

If you have health, you probably will be happy, and if you have health and happiness, you have all the wealth you need, even if it is not all you want.  ~Elbert Hubbard

People who are always taking care of their health are like misers who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.  ~Laurence Sterne

To feel keenly the poetry of a morning's roses, one has to have just escaped from the claws of this vulture which we call sickness.  ~Henri Frederic Amiel

The longer I live the less confidence I have in drugs and the greater is my confidence in the regulation and administration of diet and regimen.  ~John Redman Coxe, 1800

A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book.  ~Irish Proverb

Fresh air impoverishes the doctor.  ~Danish Proverb

There are two things in life that a sage must preserve at every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth.  Some evils admit of consolations, but there are no comforters for dyspepsia and the toothache.  ~Henry Lytton Bulwer

Water, air, and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia.  ~Napoleon I

The I in illness is isolation, and the crucial letters in wellness are we.  ~Author unknown, as quoted in Mimi Guarneri, The Heart Speaks: A Cardiologist Reveals the Secret Language of Healing

In minds crammed with thoughts, organs clogged with toxins, and bodies stiffened with neglect, there is just no space for anything else.  ~Alison Rose Levy, "An Ancient Cure for Modern Life," Yoga Journal, Jan/Feb 2002

Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once.  ~Thomas Browne

When it comes to eating right and exercising, there is no "I'll start tomorrow."  Tomorrow is disease.  ~Terri Guillemets

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.  ~George Dennison Prentice, Prenticeana, 1860

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.  ~Marcel Proust

My own prescription for health is less paperwork and more running barefoot through the grass.  ~Terri Guillemets

We drink one another's health and spoil our own.  ~Jerome K. Jerome

In a disordered mind, as in a disordered body, soundness of health is impossible.  ~Cicero

I think you might dispense with half your doctors if you would only consult Dr. Sun more.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit.  When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open.  ~B.K.S. Iyengar

Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.  ~Charles Simmons

Mens sana in corpore sano.  (Your prayer must be for a sound mind in a sound body.)  ~Juvenal

The hospitals and graveyards are filled with those who refused to acknowledge the virtues of physical morality.  ~Dr Ron Spallone, denverchiropractor.com

The appearance of a disease is swift as an arrow; its disappearance slow, like a thread.  ~Chinese Proverb

Nature does require
Her time of preservation, which perforce
I her frail son amongst my brethren mortal
Must give my attendance to.
~William Shakespeare

Health is like munny, we never have a true idea of its value until we lose it.  ~Josh Billings

Adam and Eve ate the first vitamins, including the package.  ~E.R. Squibb

Our body is a machine for living.  It is organized for that, it is its nature.  Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.  ~Leo Tolstoy

Gold that buys health can never be ill spent.  ~Thomas Dekker, Westward Ho, 1604

Disease is somatic; the suffering from it, psychic.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Health of body and mind is a great blessing, if we can bear it.  ~John Henry Cardinal Newman

Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, rivel them up like old apples, make them as so many Anatomies.  ~Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Sometimes I get the feeling the aspirin companies are sponsoring my headaches.  ~Terri Guillemets

A healthy body is the guest-chamber of the soul; a sick, its prison.  ~Francis Bacon

An imaginary ailment is worse than a disease.  ~Yiddish Proverb

Health is a large word.  It embraces not the body only, but the mind and spirit as well;... and not today's pain or pleasure alone, but the whole being and outlook of a man.  ~James H. West

Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady.  ~François Duc de la Rochefoucauld

From the bitterness of disease man learns the sweetness of health.  ~Catalan Proverb

If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.  ~Meryl Streep

Just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're healthy.  ~Author Unknown

Every man's disease is his personal property.  ~Alonzo Clark

Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene
Supports the mind supports the body too.
~John Armstrong

I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life's sensational pleasures.  ~Robert Benchley, "Hiccoughing Makes Us Fat," No Poems: or around the world backwards and sideways, 1932

Physick, for the most part, is nothing else but the Substitute of Exercise or Temperance.  ~Joseph Addison

A bad cold wouldn't be so annoying if it weren't for the advice of our friends.  ~Kin Hubbard

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.  ~Aldous Huxley

The most important thing in illness is never to lose heart.  ~Nikolai Lenin

The part can never be well unless the whole is well.  ~Plato

The scientific truth may be put quite briefly; eat moderately, having an ordinary mixed diet, and don't worry.  ~Robert Hutchison, 1932

I am at the moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose, green in the gills, damp in the eyes, twitchy in the joints and fractious in temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold.  ~Charles Dickens

If by gaining knowledge we destroy our health, we labour for a thing that will be useless in our hands.  ~John Locke

To avoid sickness eat less; to prolong life worry less.  ~Chu Hui Weng

When the head aches, all the body is the worse.  ~English Proverb

Healthy people are invalids who don't know it.  ~Jules Romains, Dr. Knock, 1923

After these two, Dr. Diet and Dr. Quiet, Dr. Merriman is requisite to preserve health.  ~James Howell

When a man is ill his very goodness is sickly.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of disease.  ~Edward Jenner

There is something in sickness that breaks down the pride of manhood.  ~Charles Dickens

Bacteria keeps us from heaven and puts us there.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Health and cheerfulness naturally beget each other.  ~Joseph Addison

It is a lot harder to keep people well than it is to just get them over a sickness.  ~DeForest Clinton Jarvis

Life is not merely to be alive, but to be well.  ~Marcus Valerius Martial

The mind has great influence over the body, and maladies often have their origin there.  ~Moliere

Confidence and hope do more good than physic.  ~Galen

Live in rooms full of light
Avoid heavy food
Be moderate in the drinking of wine
Take massage, baths, exercise, and gymnastics
Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water
Change surroundings and take long journeys
Strictly avoid frightening ideas
Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements
Listen to music.
~A. Cornelius Celsus

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.  Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.  ~Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 1977

Half the modern drugs could well be thrown out the window, except that the birds might eat them.  ~Martin H. Fischer

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself!  ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia

Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful.  ~Denis Diderot

Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone; it must husband its resources to live.  But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you wish to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Over the Teacups, 1891

First need in the reform of hospital management?  That's easy!  The death of all dietitians, and the resurrection of a French chef.  ~Martin H. Fischer

In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities hypochondria has always seems to me to be the only rational position to take on life.  ~John Diamond

He who has health has hope; and he who has hope has everything.  ~Arabic Proverb

A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Happiness lies, first of all, in health.  ~George William Curtis, Lotus-Eating

If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer.  ~Clement Freud, The Observer, 27 December 1964

If you start to think about your physical or moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Proverbs in Prose

If you do everything you should do, and do not do anything you should not do, you will, according to the best available statistics, live exactly eighteen hours longer than you would otherwise.  ~Logain Clendening

Health is a relationship between you and your body.  ~Terri Guillemets

It's no longer a question of staying healthy.  It's a question of finding a sickness you like.  ~Jackie Mason

Health is merely the slowest way someone can die.  ~Author Unknown

May you live as long as you are fit to live, but no longer! or, may you rather die before you cease to be fit to live than after!  ~Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1749

Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.  ~Sydney J. Harris

My fat scares me - it's a ticking time bomb.  ~Carrie Latet

I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat.  There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.  ~John Mortimer

So many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then have to spend their wealth to regain their health.  ~A.J. Reb Materi, Our Family

Nothing is more fatal to Health, than an over Care of it.  ~Benjamin Franklin

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not.  ~Mark Twain

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.  I miss you like hell.  ~Edna St. Vincent Millay

[A] final comfort that is small, but not cold:  The heart is the only broken instrument that works.  ~T.E. Kalem

Sometimes I wish I were a little kid again, skinned knees are easier to fix than broken hearts.  ~Author Unknown

God is closest to those with broken hearts.  ~Jewish Saying

God can heal a broken heart, but He has to have all the pieces.  ~Author Unknown

What is the opposite of two?  A lonely me, a lonely you.  ~Richard Wilbur

Giving up doesn't always mean you are weak; sometimes it means that you are strong enough to let go.  ~Author Unknown

Sadness flies away on the wings of time.  ~Jean de La Fontaine

I don't know why they call it heartbreak.  It feels like every other part of my body is broken too.  ~Missy Altijd

Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again.  ~Rosa Parks

I thought when love for you died, I should die.
It's dead.  Alone, most strangely, I live on.
~Rupert Brooke

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.  ~Jean Giraudoux

Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.  ~Lamartine

When love is lost, do not bow your head in sadness; instead keep your head up high and gaze into heaven for that is where your broken heart has been sent to heal.  ~Author Unknown

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Relationships are like glass.  Sometimes it's better to leave them broken than try to hurt yourself putting it back together.  ~Author Unknown

I hate the day, because it lendeth light
To see all things, but not my love to see.
~Edmund Spenser

With what a deep devotedness of woe
I wept thy absence - o'er and o'er again
Thinking of thee, still thee, till thought grew pain,
And memory, like a drop that, night and day,
Falls cold and ceaseless, wore my heart away!
~Thomas Moore

Love is like a puzzle.  When you're in love, all the pieces fit but when your heart gets broken, it takes a while to get everything back together.  ~Author Unknown

If we must part forever,
Give me but one kind word to think upon,
And please myself with, while my heart's breaking.
~Thomas Otway

Bad as I like ye, it's worse without ye.  ~Irish Proverb

Count the garden by the flowers, never by the leaves that fall.  Count your life with smiles and not the tears that roll.  ~Author Unknown

Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free;
Love me no more, but love my love of thee.
~Algernon Charles Swinburne

Don't worry about losing.  If it is right, it happens - The Main thing is not to hurry.  Nothing good gets away.  ~John Steinbeck, 10 November 1958

My love-lies-bleeding.  ~Thomas Campbell

Walking, working, barely breathing
My thoughts, far away
Heart aching, mind racing
Sleep does not come easily, nor last long....
~Peter Winstanley

Ask me why I keep on loving you when it's clear that you don't feel the same way for me... the problem is that as much as I can't force you to love me, I can't force myself to stop loving you.  ~Author Unknown

I am tired, Beloved,
of chafing my heart against
the want of you;
of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
~Amy Lowell, "The Letter"

Maybe part of loving is learning to let go.  ~From the television show The Wonder Years

It's not love's going hurts my days
But that it went in little ways.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay

Have you ever been in love?  Horrible isn't it?  It makes you so vulnerable.  It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.  You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life.... You give them a piece of you.  They didn't ask for it.  They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.  Love takes hostages.  It gets inside you.  It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart.  It hurts.  Not just in the imagination.  Not just in the mind.  It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.  I hate love.  ~Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

...Lost in your heart, lost in your eyes
Lost every day, no map to follow
Entire days, weeks, a blur
Flickers of light, in the darkness,
Only to be enveloped in shadows once more...
~Peter Winstanley

I never knew until that moment how bad it could hurt to lose something you never really had.  ~From the television show The Wonder Years

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.  ~Charlie Brown

Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.  ~J.K. Rowling

I prithee send me back my heart,
Since I cannot have thine;
For if from yours you will not part,
Why, then, shouldst thou have mine?
~John Suckling

Yes, I will go.  I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Maid of Athens"

Let no one who loves be unhappy... even love unreturned has its rainbow.  ~James Matthew Barrie

As soon as forever is through, I'll be over you.  ~Toto

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.  ~Mother Teresa

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.  ~Anne Frank

Act as if what you do makes a difference.  It does.  ~William James

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.  ~Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

The purpose of life is not to be happy - but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.  ~Leo Rosten

Live simply that others might simply live.  ~Elizabeth Ann Seton

We can do no great things, only small things with great love.  ~Mother Teresa

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.  It's not.  ~Dr. Seuss

It seems to me that any full grown, mature adult would have a desire to be responsible, to help where he can in a world that needs so very much, that threatens us so very much.  ~Norman Lear

Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful.  ~Author Unknown

I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.  ~Mother Teresa (Agnes Gonxha Bojarhiu)

I am only one, but I am one.  I cannot do everything, but I can do something.  And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.  ~Edward Everett Hale

The willingness to share does not make one charitable; it makes one free.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little - do what you can.  ~Sydney Smith

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

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.  ~Mother Teresa

Never worry about numbers.  Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you.  ~Mother Teresa

Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him.  ~Albert Schweitzer

He who gives when he is asked has waited too long.  ~Sunshine Magazine

This is the true joy in life - being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something.  ~Author Unknown

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.  ~Nelson Henderson

While earning your daily bread, be sure you share a slice with those less fortunate.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

The difference between a helping hand and an outstretched palm is a twist of the wrist.  ~Laurence Leamer, King of the Night

No man stands so straight as when he stoops to help a boy.  ~Knights of Pythagoras  (Thanks, Jim)

Charity sees the need, not the cause.  ~German Proverb

In about the same degree as you are helpful, you will be happy.  ~Karl Reiland

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
~William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, much later adapted to "So shines a good deed in a weary world" by David Seltzer for the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

If we could all hear one another's prayers, God might be relieved of some of his burdens.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant

Dare to reach out your hand into the darkness, to pull another hand into the light.  ~Norman B. Rice

I expect to pass through life but once.  If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.  ~William Penn

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee, and do not try to make the universe a blind alley.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.  ~Winston Churchill

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.  ~Mohammed Ali

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked  was:  "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?"  But... the good Samaritan reversed the question:  "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

I wondered why somebody didn't do something.  Then I realized, I am somebody.  ~Author Unknown

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives.  Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself.  For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.  ~Daniel Berrigan

The Lord loveth a cheerful giver.  He also accepteth from a grouch.  ~Catherine Hall

Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves.  This shows we are made to live by charity.  ~C.S.Lewis

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.  ~Albert Pike (Thanks, Carl)

Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile.  ~Wilfred Grenfell

It's easy to make a buck.  It's a lot tougher to make a difference.  ~Tom Brokaw

Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us every day.  ~Sally Koch

God has not called us to see through each other, but to see each other through.  ~Author Unknown

Seek to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you.  ~James Freeman Clarke

Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.  ~Jan de Hartog, The Lamb's War

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!  ~George Eliot

He has the right to criticize who has the heart to help.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I am going to give from every corner of my soul.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it.  ~Author Unknown

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.  ~Horace Mann

When you dig another out of their troubles, you find a place to bury your own.  ~Author Unknown

Help one another; there's no time like the present and no present like the time.  ~James Durst

Even if it's a little thing, do something for those who have need of a man's help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.  For, remember, you don't live in a world all your own.  Your brothers are here too.  ~Albert Schweitzer

The only gift is a portion of thyself.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you open your heart to giving, angels fly to your door.  ~Author Unknown

Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others...
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
~Walt Whitman

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others.  Unsuccessful people are always asking "What's in it for me?"  ~Brian Tracy

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.  ~John Wooden, They Call Me Coach

Trees outstrip most people in the extent and depth of their work for the public good.  ~Sara Ebenreck, American Forests

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.  Happiness never decreases by being shared.  ~Buddha

Things of the spirit differ from things material in that the more you give the more you have.  ~Christopher Morley

Being a man or a woman is a matter of birth.  Being a man or a woman who makes a difference is a matter of choice.  ~Byron Garrett

It's not that successful people are givers; it is that givers are successful people.  ~Patti Thor

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.  ~Henry David Thoreau

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.  ~Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970

Past the seeker as he prayed came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten.  And seeing them... he cried, "Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?"  God said, "I did do something.  I made you."  ~Author Unknown

Find a need and fill it.  ~Ruth Stafford Peale

If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure.  ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert

Sometimes a man imagines that he will lose himself if he gives himself, and keep himself if he hides himself.  But the contrary takes place with terrible exactitude.  ~Ernest Hello

You give but little when you give of your possessions.  It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.  ~Kahlil Gibran

No joy can equal the joy of serving others.  ~Sai Baba

Love never reasons but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles lest it has done too little.  ~Hannah More

It's good to be blessed.  It's better to be a blessing.  ~Author Unknown

If you have much, give of your wealth; if you have little, give of your heart.  ~Arabian Proverb

Act always from a sense of common humanity, and let God judge if it be charity.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Bread for myself is a material question.  Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.  ~Nicholas Berdyaev

A bone to the dog is not charity.  Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.  ~Jack London

If I thought I was going to die tomorrow, I should nevertheless plant a tree today.  ~Stephan Girard

I've seen and met angels wearing the disguise of ordinary people living ordinary lives.  ~Tracy Chapman

The vicious count their years; virtuous, their acts.  ~Samuel Johnson

Look around the habitable world: how few
Know their own good, or knowing it, pursue.
~Juvenal, Satires

The deed is everything, the glory naught.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The great use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.  ~William James

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catchers mitt on both hands.  You need to be able to throw something back.  ~Maya Angelou

The race advances only by the extra achievements of the individual.  You are the individual.  ~Charles Towne

Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do.  ~Kahlil Gibran

If all human lives depended upon their usefulness - as might be judged by certain standards - there would be a sudden and terrific mortality in the world.  ~Gene Tunney

Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.  ~Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The destroyer of weeds, thistles and thorns is a benefactor, whether he soweth grain or not.  ~Robert Ingersoll, inscription to Volume I, Collected Works

There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love.  ~Mother Teresa

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.  ~Thomas Carlyle

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope... and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.  ~Robert F. Kennedy

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.  ~Kurt Vonnegut

There are two ways of spreading light - to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.  ~Edith Wharton, Vesalius in Zante

A handful of pine-seed will cover mountains with the green majesty of a forest.  I too will set my face to the wind and throw my handful of seed on high.  ~Fiona MacLeod

If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.  ~Lucy Larcom

[U]sefulness is happiness, and... all other things are but incidental.  ~Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, 1829

You may not have saved a lot of money in your life, but if you have saved a lot of heartaches for other folks, you are a pretty rich man.  ~Seth Parker

What a person believes is not as important as how a person believes.  ~Timothy Virkkala

If you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

My life is my message.  ~Mahatma Ghandi

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.  ~Mahatma Ghandi

Don't be afraid of outgiving God.  It is impossible to do that.  ~Charles R. Swindoll

Go the extra mile.  It's never crowded.  ~Author Unknown

Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man's growth without destroying his roots.  ~Frank A. Clark

The most fundamental winning formula is to bet on human decency and be patient.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is never so busy that there is no time to serve.  ~Author Unknown

We cannot change anything until we accept it.  Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.  ~C.G. Jung

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.  ~Cicero

Plant flowers in others' gardens and your life becomes a bouquet!  ~Author Unknown

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.  ~Confucius

Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.  ~Lowell

You can't lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself.  ~Gene Mauch

The best way to find yourself, is to lose yourself in the service of others.  ~Mohandas Gandhi

If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step towards a real humanity.  ~Nelson DeMille

My piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat.  ~Leo Tolstoy

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.  ~Betty Reese

A large heart can be filled with very little.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

There is no use whatever trying to help people who do not help themselves.  You cannot push anyone up a ladder unless he is willing to climb himself.  ~Andrew Carnegie

Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.  ~Mother Teresa

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.  I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.  When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town.  I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.  Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family.  My family and I could have made an impact on our town.  Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.  ~Author Unknown

A good example has twice the value of good advice.  ~Author Unknown

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.  ~Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Improvement begins with I.  ~Arnold Glasow

Everybody can be great.  Because anybody can serve.  You don't have to have a college degree to serve.  You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.... You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace.  A soul generated by love.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you want to touch the past, touch a rock.  If you want to touch the present, touch a flower.  If you want to touch the future, touch a life.  ~Author Unknown

The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.  ~Helen Keller

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.  ~Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop

Instead of counting your days, make your days count.  ~Author Unknown

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.  ~Mother Teresa

Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others.  ~Saint Augustine

Each of us can only do the best we can for as many as we can and that will never be good enough for those of us who care!  ~Rea Cord



A million thanks to Steve for sharing some of his fantastic collection with me!


History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley


If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.  ~Pearl Buck


History is philosophy teaching by examples.  ~Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War


People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.  ~James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son


The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din
Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.
~John Greenleaf Whittier


Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.  ~African Proverb


The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.  ~John Still, The Jungle Tide


All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.  ~Voltaire, Jeannot et Colin


Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything.  You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree.  ~Michael Crichton, Timeline


We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.  ~Dick Gregory


History is herstory, too.  ~Author Unknown


A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.  ~Thomas Babington Macaulay


History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.  ~Winston Churchill


History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.  ~Thomas Carlyle


History is a novel for which the people is the author.  ~Alfred de Vigny, Réflexions sur la Vérité dans l'Art


History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity.  ~Dexter Perkins





History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind.  Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.  ~Joseph Heller, Good as Gold





Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all:  the conscientious historian will correct these defects.  ~Herodotus, The History of Herodotus


History:  gossip well told.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary


History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard.  It is a poem with events as verses.  ~Charles Angoff


If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits.  That is history to me!  ~George Macaulay Trevelyan


The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter.  ~Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon, The Story of Mankind


Historians are gossips who tease the dead.  ~Voltaire, Scribbling Books


History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.  ~Voltaire


We are the prisoners of history.  Or are we?  ~Robert Penn Warren, Segregation


History never looks like history when you are living through it.  ~John W. Gardner


Legend:  A lie that has attained the dignity of age.  ~H.L. Mencken


God cannot alter the past, though historians can.  ~Samuel Butler, "Prose Observations"


History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.  ~Konrad Adenauer


Oh, God.  The Sixties are coming back.  Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells.  And - speaking strictly for this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik - if the Sixties head my way, they won't get past the porch steps.  They will be history.  Which, for chrissakes, is what they're supposed to be.  ~P.J. O'Rourke


The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.  ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.  ~Plato, Ion


History is a vast early warning system.  ~Norman Cousins


Historian:  an unsuccessful novelist.  ~H.L. Mencken


Historian:  A broad-gauge gossip.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


History is a great dust heap.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Obiter Dicta


Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.  ~Will and Ariel Durant, Our Oriental Heritage


A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children and other innocents.  ~Richard Reeves


History is past politics, and politics present history.  ~John Robert Seeley, The Growth of British Policy


Bound as our lives are to the tyranny of time, it is through what we know of history that we are delivered from our bonds and escape - into time.  ~A.L. Rowse, The Use of History


The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?  ~Katharine Anthony


Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.  ~W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand


Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.  ~Author Unknown


History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force.  ~Frederick Maurice Powicke, History, Freedom & Religion


Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young.  Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.  ~W.H. Auden, A Certain World


More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.  ~John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor


If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.  ~Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary


Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos.  ~Thomas A. Bailey


Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship


People think too historically.  They are always living half in a cemetery.  ~Aristide Briand


Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Life of Frederick the Great


Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Table - Talk


[History is] the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.  ~Robert S. Lynd


History begins in novel and ends in essay.  ~Thomas Babington Macaulay


[W]hen a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.  ~Shailer Mathews, The Spiritual Interpretation of History


It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.  ~Thomas Carlyle


[T]he Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Characteristics


History:  An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.  ~Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary


What is the fire in our belly but the eternal flame of a thousand ancestors.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.  ~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass


History is merely gossip.  ~Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan


Some write a narrative of wars and feats,
Of heroes little known, and call the rant
A history.
~William Cowper, The Task, The Garden


The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.  ~Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty


Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.  ~Leo Tolstoy


The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present.  ~David Thelen


If you go back through 2000 years, I guess luck, Marx, and God have made history, the three of them together.  ~Theodore White


Princes should have more to fear from historians than have ugly women from great painters.  ~Antonio Pérez, Aforismos


Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places.  The task is frankly superhuman.  ~George Santayana, The Life of Reason


Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.  ~Conor Cruise O'Brien






The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them:  this is one summary of history.  ~Will and Ariel Durant, Lessons of History


History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes.  ~Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man


The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables


Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.  ~Richard Ellman


History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.  ~Walter Rauschenbusch


History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs; priviledging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof.  ~Thomas Fuller


I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man.  ~Romain Gary


Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.  ~Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History


Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history.  The same is true of man.  ~Jean Genet


When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.  ~Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard


Men have need of history because, without it, the past threatens to overwhelm them.  ~Guy Fregault, La guerre de la conquête


Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?  ~John Leonard


History is never above the melee.  It is not allowed to be neutral, but forced to enlist in every army.  ~Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History


History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.  ~Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors


History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought - two boys pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Fate


All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, and we linger fondly in these, forgetting the vast tracks between one and another that were trodden by the weary generations of men.  ~John Alfred Spender, The Comments of Bagshot


A boy who hears a lesson in history ended by the beauty of peace, and how Napoleon brought ruin upon the world and that he should be forever cursed, will not long have much confidence in his teacher.  He wants to hear more about the fighting and less about the peace negotiations.  ~William Lee Howard, Peace, Dolls and Pugnacity


[H]istory is a melodrama on the theme of parasitism, characterized by scenes that are exciting or dull, as the case may be, and many a sudden stagetrick.  ~Max Nordau, The Interpretation of History


History is but the record of the public and official acts of human beings.  It is our object, therefore, to humanize our history and deal with people past and present; people who ate and possibly drank; people who were born, flourished and died; not grave tragedians, posing perpetually for their photographs.  ~Bill Nye, History of the United States


History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet:  the statue falls from the pedestal.  Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?  ~Washington Irving, The Sketch Book: Westminster Abbey


For what is history, but... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.  ~Washington Irving, History of New York


Take from the altars of the past the fire - not the ashes.  ~Jean Jaures


The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated


Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians.  ~Franklin P. Jones


Woe unto the defeated,
whom history treads
into the dust.
~Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon


The obscurest epoch is today.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains


A mere compilation of facts presents only the skeleton of History; we do but little for her if we cannot invest her with life, clothe her in the habiliments of her day, and enable her to call forth the sympathies of succeeding generations.  ~Hannah Farnham Lee, The Huguenots in France and America


It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work.  He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.  ~Rebecca West


For me there is no greater subject than history.  How a man can study it and not be forced to become a philosopher, I cannot tell.  ~George E. Wilson


Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.  ~Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers


What would constitute useful history?  That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them.  ~Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary


It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.  ~Bill Vaughan


Whose game was empires and whose stakes were thrones,
Whose table earth, whose dice were human bones.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "The Age of Bronze"


Histories used often to be stories:  the fashion now is to leave out the story.  Our histories are stall-fed:  the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


History is man's best guess as to what the past would look like if everything had happened in chronological order.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come.  The past makes us ask what we have done with us.  It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.  ~Robert Penn Warren


Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary.  ~Lynn White, Jr.


The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.  ~A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture


History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.  ~George Santayana


I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world.  History is more or less bunk.  It is a tradition.  We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.  ~Henry Ford


A lot of guys have had a lot of fun joking about Henry Ford because he admitted one time that he didn't know history.  He don't know it, but history will know him.  He has made more history than his critics ever read.  ~Will Rogers


The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.  ~Jessamyn West


History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.  ~Alexis de Tocqeville, 1856


Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.  ~Walter Raleigh, History of the World


History in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes among which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and some happy times.  ~Voltaire, L'Ingénu


History... is, indeed, little more than the register of the 'crimes, follies, and misfortunes' of mankind.  But what experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.  ~Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, "Introduction," 1807


History balances the frustration of "how far we have to go" with the satisfaction of "how far we have come."  It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time.  ~Lewis F. Powell, Jr.


The dead hand has too long hampered the freedom of the living.  ~James Robertson


The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared.  These gaps can be filled only by his imagination.  ~Gaetano Salvemini, Historian and Scientist


History knows that it can wait for more evidence and review its older verdicts; it offers an endless series of courts of appeal, and is ever ready to reopen closed cases.  ~William Stubbs


Skepticism is history's bedfellow.  ~Edgar Saltus


The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


History does not unfold:  it piles up.  ~Robert M. Adams, Bad Mouth


The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day.  The present is sordid and prosaic.  Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe.  ~Vincent Starrett, Buried Caesars


History is a pageant and not a philosophy.  ~Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta: The Muse of History


History, like thermodynamics, won't let you out.  ~Ira Haron


Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey.  ~Mason Cooley


History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.  ~Hippolyte Taine


History:  the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.  ~Jules Romains, Men of Good Will


The public history of all countries, and all ages, is but a sort of mask, richly colored.  The interior working of the machinery must be foul.  ~John Quincy Adams


History - that little sewer where man loves to wallow.  ~Francis Ponge


History:  a collection of epitaphs.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary


Unfortunately, it is also true that the age's interests often color the past with unhistoric hues.  ~Wendell H. Stephenson


Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.  ~Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversation: Diogenes and Plato


[T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.  ~Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History


[History is] a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.  ~W. Stull Holt


[W]hat mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.  ~Thomas Carlyle


No one can really know the life of his own day, let alone that of times long past.  Always the historian sees as in a mirror darkly, the reds and the golds rendered drab by the shadows of time.  ~Earl R. Beck, On Teaching History in Colleges and Universities


When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false.  ~Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World


The idea of history in any age, like the idea of property, or of progress, is an unstable compound; it is put together as needed, by historians or by philosophers, out of the irreconcilable opinions of men.  ~F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution


Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.  ~Bruce Catton, Prefaces to History


Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.  ~Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations


One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, - to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns.  This instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.  ~John Jay Chapman, Memories and Milestones


History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler.  ~Henry Glassie


A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.  ~Thomas Babington Macaulay


History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.  ~Guy de Maupassant, Sur l'Eau


Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history.  ~Pieter Geyl, Debates With Historians


[I]t was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.  ~John Toland


[History] is fallible as every man is fallible.  But it is likewise trustworthy, as a man is trustworthy who has looked into himself and come to know how blended are dust and fire in the innermost recesses of the human heart.  ~Arthur Bestor


There is nothing more dangerous than history used as a defense, or history used for preaching; history used as a tool is no longer history.  ~Marcel Trudel


We are never completely contemporaneous with our present.  History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play.  ~Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?


History is the open Bible:  we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly:  our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.  ~George Macaulay Trevelyan


Delusion about history is a serious matter; it can gravely affect the history that is waiting to be made.  ~John Terraine


History supplies little beyond a list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of others.  ~Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary


The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.  ~Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead


Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.  ~Willis Thornton, Fable, Fact and History


And how fascinating history is - the long, variegated pageant of man's still continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of all the myriads of ssockners through space.  ~George Macaulay Trevelyan, An Autobiography


No modern idea has affected history more than the passion of nationalism.  ~Charles R. Poinsatte, Understanding History Through the American Experience


A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.  ~David McCullough


The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale.  He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.  ~Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft


The historian has been the hearth at which the soul of the country has been kept alive.  ~John Morley, Notes on Politics and History


It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.  ~Herbert J. Muller, Freedom in the Western World


You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.  ~Jawaharlal Nehru


The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed.  Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect.  The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind forever.  ~Thomas Babington Macaulay, Machiavelli


History is the story of events, with praise or blame.  ~Cotton Mather


If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring.  Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.  ~Allen Nevins


A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.  ~Michael Oakeshott, On History


Historians are themselves products of history.  ~Paul K. Conkin and Roland N. Stromberg, Heritage and Challenge


History is politics projected into the past.  ~M.N. Pokrovsky


The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side.  In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.  ~José Ortega y Gasset, Historical Reason


It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.  ~Leopold von Ranke, History of the Popes


It is with nations as it is with individuals.  A book of history is a book of sermons.  ~Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke


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


In a certain sense all men are historians.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays: On History


It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us.  We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.  ~E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest


The lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves.  ~James A. Garfield






The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.  ~Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History


History is written by the winners.  ~Alex Haley


[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.  ~Edith Sitwell


History is the daughter of time.  ~Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century


History paints the human heart.  ~Napoleon I


Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.  ~W.R. Inge, Assessments and Anticipations


It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.  ~Henry James, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne


History is an argument without end.  ~Pieter Geyl


This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery.  ~Samuel Johnson


History is a bath of blood.  ~William James, Memories and Studies


History... is an aggregation of truths, half-truths, semi-truths, fables, myths, rumors, prejudices, personal narratives, gossip, and official prevarications.  It is a canvas upon which thousands of artists throughout the ages have splashed their conceptions and interpretations of a day and an era.  Some motifs are grotesque and some are magnificent.  ~Philip D. Jordan


We proceed out of history into history again.  ~Sidney Alexander


The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.  ~Eric Hoffer, The True Believer


[H]istory gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions.  ~Hajo Holborn, History and the Humanities


There is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian.  Without an opinion a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides.  ~Philip Howard


History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.  ~Will and Ariel Durant, Lessons of History


[T]he historian and the detective have much in common.  ~Mark M. Krug, History and the Social Sciences


History is the synthesis of all social sciences turned towards the past.  ~Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie


Civilization is a stream with banks.  The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues.  The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.  Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.  ~Will Durant


The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.  ~Will and Ariel Durant, The Reformation


[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.  ~Lynn White, Jr.


History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted.  Its properties are well known.  It produces dreams and drunkenness.  It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution.  It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.  ~Paul Valéry, Regards sur le Monde Actuel


The study of history is the playground of patriotism.  ~George M. Wrong


History, as long as it continues to happen, is always another chance.  ~R. Jackson Wilson


History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern.  ~Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, Truth and Opinion


History is the propaganda of the victors.  ~Ernst Toller


[Some historians hold that history] is just one damned thing after another.  ~Arnold Toynbee


Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.  ~George Macaulay Trevelyan, Clio, A Muse


People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".  ~Ken Burns


The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.  ~Peter Berger


History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.  ~Ted Koppel


The notion that any one person can describe 'what really happened' is an absurdity.  If ten - or a hundred - people witness an event, there will be ten - or a hundred - different versions of what took place.  ~David and Leigh Eddings


Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.  Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?  ~Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead


[H]istorians have powerful imaginations, which are essential and dangerous.  ~Robert Stinson


As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation.  ~John Smith


The historian reports to us, not events themselves, but the impressions they have made on him.  ~Heinrich von Sybel


If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.  ~John Acton


History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.  ~John Acton


History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit.  ~Fustel de Coulange, La Cité antique, 1864


All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.  ~A.J.P. Taylor


Too many so-called historians are really 'hysterians'; their thinking is more visceral than cerebral.  When their duties as citizens clash with their responsibilities as scholars, Clio frequently takes a back seat.  ~Thomas A. Bailey


History is principally the inaccurate narration of events which ought not to have happened.  ~Earnest Albert Hooten, The Twilight of Man


[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.  ~Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors


Without philosophy, history seems to me to be deaf and dumb.  ~Ferdinand Baur, Symbolik und Mythologic


The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively.  We must concede the ancients their place, as I have argued.  But their place is not simply back there in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves, and resurrected into an ever-changing present.  ~David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country


For the rubble of history, which is undigested and therefore goes on blindly, does not lie so thickly on the ground as in our own consciousness.  ~Herbert Lüthy


Unlike poetry and music, the art of history is cumulative.  ~John Clive, Not By Fact Alone


In studying history we are finding out about ourselves, and in the last resort the natural sciences and even mathematics have the same final end.  ~Vivian Hunter Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History


History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.  ~Jacob Burckhardt


The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.  ~Albert Camus, The Rebel


History is concerned primarily with human phenomena, not with natural; and history is doubly human because, as an idea, it is man's creation, challenging him to transcend the limits of information about himself and to discover what he is by finding meaning in what he has done.  In short, it is man's commentary on man.  ~John Barker, The Superhistorians


For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.  ~Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary


The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.  ~Barbara Tuchman


Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed.  We generalise and idealise the past egregiously.  We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.  ~John Dewey, Characters and Events


[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.  ~William Carlos Williams


The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.  ~Miguel de Unamuno, En Gredos


History is the discipline closest to life; and life is rarely free of contradictions.  ~Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture


History is who we are and why we are the way we are.  ~David McCullough


History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.  ~Henry Miller, Plexus


The historian amputates reality.  ~Gaetano Salvemini, Historian and Scientist


History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.  ~Henry Steele Commanger, The Nature and the Study of History


History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies.  ~Frederick Maurice Powicke, Three Lectures


History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.  ~James Joyce, Ulysses


History is but the nail on which the picture hangs.  ~Alexandre Dumas, Catherine Howard


The future is dark, the present burdensome.  Only the past, dead and buried, bears contemplation.  ~G.R. Elton, The Practice of History


All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: History


History is the essence of innumerable biographies.  ~Thomas Carlyle, On History


History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.  ~Albert Camus, The Rebel


[History is] petrified imagination.  ~Arthur Baer


It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.  ~Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning


[History is a] mixture of error and violence.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


No less than the tourist, the writer of history profits from maps.  ~Charles F. Mullett


Man simply cannot live as the time-animal and the art-animal that he is, without history.  ~Carlton J.H. Hayes


To many of the modern generations, history, like God, is dead.  ~Derek Heather


[H]istory is the sextant of states which, tossed by wind and current, would be lost in confusion if they could not fix their position.  ~Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History


No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.  ~Johan Huizinga, Men and Ideas


A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture.  And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life.  ~Allen Johnson, The Historian and Historical Evidence


The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity.  A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian.  He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.  ~Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire


History attempts to provide society with an artificial collective memory.  ~Mark M. Krug, History and the Social Sciences


A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.  ~Thomas Jefferson


History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.  ~Thomas Jefferson





History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make.  ~Author Unknown


History is a living whole.  If one organ be removed, it is nothing but a lifeless mass.  ~Frederic Harrison, The Meaning of History




The day was counting up its birds and never got the answer right.  ~Author Unknown

And upsidedown in the earth a dead man walks upon my soles when I walk.  ~Bill Knott, "(End) of Summer (1966)"  (Thanks, Laurie)

Night and morning are making promises to each other which neither will be able to keep.  ~Richard Shelton

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.  ~e.e. cummings

Ink smears, as thoughts sometimes do.  ~Terri Guillemets

Never mind.  The self is the least of it.  Let our scars fall in love.  ~Galway Kinnell

Her hearing was keener than his, and she heard silences he was unaware of.  ~D.M. Thomas

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.  ~Jean Cocteau

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.  ~W.S. Merwin

If only I could leave everything as it is, without moving a single star or a single cloud.  Oh, if only I could!  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.  ~Juan Ramon Jimenez

[T]he departing world leaves behind... not an heir, but a pregnant widow.  ~Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, Other Shore

Two and two the mathematician continues to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.  ~James McNeill Whistler, Whistler Versus Ruskin, 1878

We are never prepared for what we expect.  ~James A. Michener, Caravans

The universe is simmering down, like a giant stew left to cook for four billion years.  Sooner or later we won't be able to tell the carrots from the onions.  ~Arthur Bloch

As I was walking up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd go away.
~Hugh Mearns

It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe.  Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.  ~Loren Eiseley, "The Innocent Fox," The Star Thrower, 1978

We have met the enemy and they are us!  ~Walt Kelly, Pogo, 1971

Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane.  Less merciful than man, God never opens the window.  ~Jules Renard, Journal, 1906

Fear is a cloak which old men huddle about their love, as if to keep it warm.  ~William Wordsworth

You can owe nothing, if you give back its light to the sun.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

the high cost of
living isnt so bad if you
dont have to pay for it
~Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel, 1927

Take the so-called standard of living.  What do most people mean by "living"?  They don't mean living.  They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives.  ~e.e. cummings, Introduction, Poems, 1954

You're only as sick as your secrets.  ~Author Unknown

Those who gave away their wings are sad not to see them fly.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Clouds, birds, tree tops
The freedom of being on high
Closer to the sun
Further from the slum,
But farther to fall when they die.
~Carrie Latet

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed waste-paper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.  ~D.H. Lawrence, "Peace and War," Pansies, 1929

She throws her coin into a fountain already filled with hopeful coins, yet wonders if the wishes might become tangled.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
~T.S. Eliot, 1943

The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.  ~Thomas Carlyle

I believe if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.  ~Benito Perez Galdos

You are sad because they abandon you and you have not fallen.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Another way of approaching the thing is to consider it unnamed, unnameable.  ~Francis Ponge

Invent a past for the present.  ~Daniel Stern

My great day came and went, I do not know how.  Because it did not pass through dawn when it came, nor through dusk when it went.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Nothing is not only nothing.  It is also our prison.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

A hunter of shadows, himself a shade.  ~Homer

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.  ~Susan Sontag

Within your lifetime will, perhaps,
As souvenirs from distant suns
Be carried back to earth some maps
Of planets and you'll find that one's
So hard to color that you've got
To use five crayons.  Maybe, not.
~Marlow Sholander, "Maybe"

Everything is a miracle.  It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.  ~Pablo Picasso

No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.  ~Terry Pratchett

I wish I could have known earlier that you have all the time you'll need right up to the day you die.  ~William Wiley

I am the vessel.  The draft is God's.  And God is the thirsty one.  ~Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, 1964

The first step... shall be to lose the way.  ~Galway Kinnell

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine.  They are anti-existential.  Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.  ~Norman Mailer

The Great Way has no gate.
Clear water has no taste.
The tongue has no bone.
In complete stillness, a stone girl is dancing.
~Seung Sahn

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He who does not fill his world with phantoms remains alone.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I would go to heaven, but I would take my hell; I would not go alone.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Love, she said, should be said more slowly, and ran from the house.  Words could not catch her as such.  Honesty is so slow, that is the trouble.  ~Author Unknown

They have stopped deceiving you, not loving you.  And it seems to you that they have stopped loving you.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited.  Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds.  Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a population of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.  ~Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Script

Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe.  The steps to Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous.  ~John Jay Chapman

He who holds me by a thread is not strong; the thread is strong.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Alas! must it ever be so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?
~Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken," 1916

You think you are killing me.  I think you are committing suicide.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.  ~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

It is half dawn and half dark
and in my drunken dreams I smell flowers and hear a skylark...
~Yuan Zhen, translated

You purchase pain with all that joy can give, and die of nothing but a rage to live.  ~Alexander Pope

My heaviness comes from the heights.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
~Robert Frost, In the Clearing, 1962

I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A and Z.  I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone.  I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus.  I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean - 187,796,132, if it would interest you.  ~James Thurber, Many Moons

If you come to a fork in the road, take it.  ~Yogi Berra

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.  ~Tom Stoppard



Hockey belongs to the Cartoon Network, where a person can be pancaked by an ACME anvil, then expanded - accordion-style - back to full stature, without any lasting side effect.  ~Steve Rushin


Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World.  In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.  ~Stephen Leacock


Ice hockey is a form of disorderly conduct in which the score is kept.  ~Doug Larson


By the age of 18, the average American has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence on television, most of them occurring during Game 1 of the NHL playoff series.  ~Steve Rushin


October is not only a beautiful month but marks the precious yet fleeting overlap of hockey, baseball, basketball, and football.  ~Jason Love


A puck is a hard rubber disc that hockey players strike when they can't hit one another.  ~Jimmy Cannon


Half the game is mental; the other half is being mental.  ~Jim McKenny


How would you like a job where, every time you make a mistake, a big red light goes on and 18,000 people boo?  ~Jacques Plante


Some people skate to the puck.  I skate to where the puck is going to be.  ~Wayne Gretzky


Ice hockey players can walk on water.  ~Author Unknown


Hockey players have fire in their hearts and ice in their veins.  ~Author Unknown


Hockey is murder on ice.  ~Jim Murray


Street hockey is great for kids.  It's energetic, competitive, and skilful.  And best of all it keeps them off the street.  ~Author Unknown


My other car is a Zamboni.  ~Hockey Saying


Hockey players wear numbers because you can't always identify the body with dental records.  ~Author Unknown


Don't go through life without goals.  ~Hockey Saying


Hockey is figure skating in a war zone.  ~Author Unknown


High sticking, tripping, slashing, spearing, charging, hooking, fighting, unsportsmanlike conduct, interference, roughing... everything else is just figure skating.  ~Author Unknown


Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.  ~John Leonard


Four out of five dentists surveyed recommended playing hockey.  ~Author Unknown


Give blood.  Play hockey.  ~Author Unknown


All hockey players are bilingual.  They know English and profanity.  ~Gordie Howe


My goal is to deny yours.  ~Hockey Saying


When Hell freezes over, I'll play hockey there too.  ~Author Unknown


Black people dominate sports in the United States - 20 percent of the population and 90 percent of the Final Four.  We own this shit.  Basketball, baseball, football, golf, tennis, and as soon as they make a heated hockey rink we'll take that shit too.  ~Chris Rock


Red ice sells hockey tickets.  ~Bob Stewart


I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out.  ~Rodney Dangerfield


We get nose jobs all the time in the NHL, and we don't even have to go to the hospital.  ~Brad Park


You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.  ~Maya Angelou

Home is not where you live but where they understand you.  ~Christian Morgenstern

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.  ~Harriet Beecher Stowe

Peace - that was the other name for home.  ~Kathleen Norris

Where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Homesick in Heaven

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.  ~Charles Dickens

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
~Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man

Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.  ~John Ed Pearce

Home ought to be our clearinghouse, the place from which we go forth lessoned and disciplined, and ready for life.  ~Kathleen Norris

The light is what guides you home, the warmth is what keeps you there.  ~Ellie Rodriguez

It takes hands to build a house, but only hearts can build a home.  ~Author Unknown

Where thou art - that - is Home.  ~Emily Dickinson

There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.  ~Jane Austen

Home is a shelter from storms - all sorts of storms.  ~William J. Bennett

Every house where love abides
And friendship is a guest,
Is surely home, and home sweet home
For there the heart can rest.
~Henry Van Dyke

You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it.  A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.  ~Casare Pavese

A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.  ~May Sarton

Home is where you can say anything you like cause nobody listens to you anyway.  ~Author Unknown

One's home is like a delicious piece of pie you order in a restaurant on a country road one cozy evening - the best piece of pie you have ever eaten in your life - and can never find again.  After you leave home, you may find yourself feeling homesick, even if you have a new home that has nicer wallpaper and a more efficient dishwasher than the home in which you grew up.  ~Lemony Snicket

Home is where the heart can laugh without shyness.  Home is where the heart's tears can dry at their own pace.  ~Vernon Baker

He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Home, the spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.
~Robert Montgomery

 
I had rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world.  ~George Washington

Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other.  It is the place of confidence.  It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts.  It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule.  ~Frederick W. Robertson

Homecoming unites the past and the present.  ~Author Unknown

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.  ~Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender

A university is a college with a stadium seating over 40,000.  ~Leonard L. Levinson

Homecoming means coming home to what is in your heart.  ~Author Unknown

Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.  ~Tryon Edwards

Academe, n.:  An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.  Academy, n.:  A modern school where football is taught.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.  ~From the television show The Wonder Years

Homecoming means more than kings and queens.  ~Author Unknown

When it comes to anything that's social, whether it's your family, your school, your community, your business or your country, winning is a team sport.  ~Bill Clinton

Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.  ~John Ed Pearce

What about football?  Is it a sport or a concussion?  ~Jim Murray, Los Angeles Times

College is the best time of your life.  When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?  ~David Wood

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.  ~Elisabeth Foley

Homecoming means football, floats, and fun.  ~Author Unknown

October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came -
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.
~George Cooper, "October's Party"

There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.  ~Edwin Denby

Homecoming means tradition.  ~Author Unknown

Sports is human life in microcosm.  ~Howard Cosell

There is only one way to cheer - hard!  ~Author Unknown

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.  ~Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Football is not a contact sport.  It's a collision sport.  Dancing is a good example of a contact sport.  ~Duffy Daugherty

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.  ~Cynthia Ozick

I learned three important things in college - to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes.  ~Agnes DeMille, Dance to the Piper, 1952

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.  ~John Leonard

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance till you drop.
~W.H. Auden

Homecoming means more than winning a competition or a sporting event.  It provides an opportunity for every component of the university to come together to celebrate as a whole.  ~Author Unknown

We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.  ~Herman Melville

If you're not in the parade, you watch the parade.  That's life.  ~Mike Ditka

Bittersweet October.  The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.  ~Carol Bishop Hipps

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.  ~Japanese Proverb

Nobody cares if you can't dance well.  Just get up and dance.  ~Dave Barry

Homecoming means parades, football and reuniting with old friends.  And as I recall from my youth, a little beer.  ~J. Wilson

Shake it 'til the moon becomes the sun.  ~Vada Nobles, Carl Sturken, Evan Rogers, and Alisha Brooks, "Pon de Replay," performed by Rihanna

Does college pay?  They do if you are a good open-field runner.  ~Will Rogers

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.  ~Doug Larson

Homecoming means football, festivities, and friendship.  ~Author Unknown

For a community to be whole and healthy, it must be based on people's love and concern for each other.  ~Millard Fuller

Where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Homesick in Heaven

The reason women don't play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public.  ~Phyllis Diller

Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume.  ~Jean de Boufflers

When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball.  He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest.  The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team.  ~George Raveling

Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.  ~Seneca

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson:  you find the present tense, but the past perfect!  ~Owens Lee Pomeroy

Ah, how good it feels!  The hand of an old friend.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.  ~Maya Angelou

There are several differences between a football game and a revolution.  For one thing, a football game usually lasts longer and the participants wear uniforms.  Also, there are usually more casualties in a football game.  The object of the game is to move a ball past the other team's goal line.  This counts as six points.  No points are given for lacerations, contusions, or abrasions, but then no points are deducted, either.  Kicking is very important in football.  In fact, some of the more enthusiastic players even kick the ball, occasionally.  ~Alfred Hitchcock

There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.  ~Vicki Baum

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

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.  ~Henry Louis Mencken, A Little Book in C Major, 1916

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.  ~Mark Twain

Who lies for you will lie against you.  ~Bosnian Proverb

No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.  ~Thomas Carlyle

A half truth is a whole lie.  ~Yiddish Proverb

A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie.  ~Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment

Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.  ~Austin O'Malley

A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.  ~William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence," Poems from the Pickering Manuscript

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.  ~Aristotle

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.  ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Dare to be true:  nothing can need a lie:  A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby.  ~George Herbert

With lies you may get ahead in the world - but you can never go back.  ~Russian proverb

Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain't lawful tender for a loaf of bread.  ~Josh Billings

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.  ~Ambrose Bierce

A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.  ~Edgar J. Mohn

When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback.  ~Bill Copeland

Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it.  ~Mark Twain

Honesty is never seen sitting astride the fence.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911

A lie may take care of the present, but it has no future.  ~Author Unknown

I never lie because I don't fear anyone.  You only lie when you're afraid.  ~John Gotti

Worse than telling a lie is spending the rest of your life staying true to a lie.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us.  But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.  ~Tad Williams

Truth fears no questions.  ~Unknown

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.  ~Thomas Sowell

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.  ~Thomas Jefferson

I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.  ~Samuel Butler, Note-Books, 1912

There is no well-defined boundary between honesty and dishonesty.  The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other.  ~O. Henry, Rolling Stones, 1912

Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.  ~Oliver Wendell

The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.  ~R.D. Laing

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.  ~Winston Churchill

If you want to ruin the truth, stretch it.  ~Author Unknown

The truth is more important than the facts.  ~Frank Lloyd Wright

Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited.  ~James Cardinal Gibbons

Respect for the truth is an acquired taste.  ~Mark Van Doren, Liberal Education, 1943

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.  ~Winston Churchill

Always telling the truth is no doubt better than always lying, although equally pathological.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms.  For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain.  But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.  ~Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.  ~Rospo Pallenberg and John Boorman, Excalibur, based on Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory

Honesty doesn't always pay, but dishonesty always costs.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

A lie is just the truth waiting to be itself.  ~Terri Guillemets

It is not without good reason said, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.  ~Richard J. Needham

There is always a way to be honest without being brutal.  ~Arthur Dobrin

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.  ~Bertrand Russell

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society.  When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.  ~Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

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

When truth is divided, errors multiply.  ~Eli Siegel, Damned Welcome

Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.  ~Emily Dickinson

Honesty pays, but it don't seem to pay enough to suit some people.  ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard

A little candor never leaves me.  It is what protects me.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Cherish the friend who tells you a harsh truth, wanting ten times more to tell you a loving lie.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.  ~John Updike

No mask like open truth to cover lies,
As to go naked is the best disguise.
~William Congreve

Truth is mighty and will prevail.  There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.  ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935

Reality is bad enough.  Why should I tell the truth?  ~Patrick Sky

Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.  ~Slovenian Proverb

Always tell the truth.  Even if you have to make it up.  ~Author Unknown

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.  ~Adlai Stevenson

The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do.  ~E.V. Lucas

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore."  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.  ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator

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

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The truth needs so little rehearsal.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.  ~Mark Twain

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.  ~Lin Yutang

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.  ~Saki

Some people will not tolerate such emotional honesty in communication.  They would rather defend their dishonesty on the grounds that it might hurt others.  Therefore, having rationalized their phoniness into nobility, they settle for superficial relationships.  ~Author Unknown

It takes two to lie.  One to lie and one to listen.  ~"Homer Simpson," from the television show The Simpsons

There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him.  If he says, "Yes," you know he is a crook.  ~Groucho Marx

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.  ~Mark Twain

Someday a computer will give a wrong answer to spare someone's feelings, and man will have invented artificial intelligence.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.  ~Jerome K. Jerome

Always tell the truth.  If you can't always tell the truth, don't lie.  ~Author Unknown

I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle.  Washington could not lie.  I can lie, but I won't.  ~Mark Twain

Where hope would otherwise become hopelessness, it becomes faith.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.  ~Christopher Reeve

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Things which you do not hope happen more frequently than things which you do hope.  ~Titus Maccius Plautus

Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them.  ~Vincent McNabb

In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man's torments.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878

When the world says, "Give up,"
Hope whispers, "Try it one more time."
~Author Unknown

There is nothing so well known as that we should not expect something for nothing - but we all do and call it Hope.  ~Edgar Howe

If you knew that hope and despair were paths to the same destination, which would you choose?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain.  ~Samuel Johnson

Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops... at all.  ~Emily Dickinson

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.  ~Anne Lamott

The wings of hope carry us, soaring high above the driving winds of life.  ~Ana Jacob

All it takes is one bloom of hope to make a spiritual garden.  ~Terri Guillemets

The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope.
~William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.  ~Marian Zimmer Bradley

You've gotta have hope.  Without hope life is meaningless.  Without hope life is meaning less and less.  ~Author Unknown

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Lord save us all from... a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.  ~Mark Twain

Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark.  ~George Iles

When hope is hungry, everything feeds it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier.  ~Author Unknown

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.  ~Eric Bentley

It is the first purpose of hope to make hopelessness bearable.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.  ~Thomas Hardy

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.  ~Norman Cousins

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.  ~Don Quixote

Hope is necessary in every condition.  The miseries of poverty, sickness, of captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable.  ~Samuel Johnson

It's all one thing - both tend into one scope -
To live upon Tobacco and on Hope,
The one's but smoke, the other is but wind.
~Sir Robert Aytoun of Kincaldie, "Sonnet on Tobacco"

Hope is the physician of each misery.  ~Irish Proverb

God sends the dawn
that we might see
the might-have-beens
that still might be.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

God puts rainbows in the clouds so that each of us - in the dreariest and most dreaded moments - can see a possibility of hope.  ~Maya Angelou

Hope deceives more men than cunning does.  ~Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims, 1746

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.  ~Ouida

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.  ~Eric Hoffer

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.  ~Pearl S. Buck

Hope is a walk through a flowering meadow.  One does not require that it lead anywhere.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Hope is but the dream of those who wake.  ~Matthew Prior

Hope is grief's best music.  ~Author Unknown

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.  ~Baruch SuperSocketoza

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.  ~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you're slamming the door in the face of God.  ~Charles L. Allen

Though you lose all hope, there is still hope, and it loves to surprise.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

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

Hope never abandons you, you abandon it.  ~George Weinberg

Some see a hopeless end, while others see an endless hope.  ~Author Unknown

Hope is patience with the lamp lit.  ~Tertullian

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.  ~Lin Yutang

Hope is the poor man's bread.  ~Gary Herbert

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.  ~Victor Hugo

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.  ~Robert Ingersoll



There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.  ~Winston Churchill


Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.  ~W.C. Fields


Riding:  The art of keeping a horse between you and the ground.  ~Author Unknown


It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall.  ~Mexican Proverb


The wagon rests in winter, the sleigh in summer, the horse never.  ~Yiddish Proverb


Many people have sighed for the 'good old days' and regretted the 'passing of the horse,' but today, when only those who like horses own them, it is a far better time for horses.  ~C.W. Anderson


No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle.  ~Winston Churchill


People on horses look better than they are.  People in cars look worse than they are.  ~Marya Mannes


Horses and children, I often think, have a lot of the good sense there is in the world.  ~Josephine Demott Robinson


It's always been and always will be the same in the world:  The horse does the work and the coachman is tipped.  ~Author Unknown


Heaven is high and earth wide.  If you ride three feet higher above the ground than other men, you will know what that means.  ~Rudolf C. Binding


He knows when you're happy
He knows when you're comfortable
He knows when you're confident
And he always knows when you have carrots.
~Author Unknown


The wind of heaven is that which blows between a horse's ears.  ~Arabian Proverb


Ah, steeds, steeds, what steeds!  Has the whirlwind a home in your manes?  Is there a sensitive ear, alert as a flame, in your every fiber?  Hearing the familiar song from above, all in one accord you strain your bronze chests and, hooves barely touching the ground, turn into straight lines cleaving the air, and all inspired by God it rushes on!  ~Nikolai V. Gogol, Dead Souls, 1842, translated from Russian (above is combination of translations by Bernard Guildert Guerney, Richard Peaver, and Larisa Voloklonsky)


To ride a horse is to ride the sky.  ~Author Unknown


There is no secret so close as that between a rider and his horse.  ~Robert Smith Surtees, "Chapter XXX: Bolting the Badger," Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour, 1853


A horse loves freedom, and the weariest old work horse will roll on the ground or break into a lumbering gallop when he is turned loose into the open.  ~Gerald Raferty


I bless the hoss from hoof to head -
From head to hoof, and tale to mane! -
I bless the hoss, as I have said,
From head to hoof, and back again!
~James Whitcomb Riley


Horses are uncomfortable in the middle and dangerous at both ends.  ~Attributed to both Christopher Stone and Ian Fleming


It's a lot like nuts and bolts - if the rider's nuts, the horse bolts!  ~Nicholas Evans

 
A lovely horse is always an experience.... It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.  ~Beryl Markham


I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that, my art is not above the ordinary.  ~Mark Twain


The horses paw and prance and neigh,
Fillies and colts like kittens play,
And dance and toss their rippled manes
Shining and soft as silken skeins;...
~Oliver Wendell Holmes


...I heard a neigh.  Oh, such a brisk and melodious neigh as that was!  My very heart leaped with delight at the sound.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Chimæra," A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, 1852 (about Pegasus)


A thousand horse and none to ride! -
With flowing tail, and flying mane,
Wide nostrils never stretched by pain,
Mouths bloodless to the bit or rein,
And feet that iron never shod,
And flanks unscarred by spur or rod,
A thousand horse, the wild, the free,
Like waves that follow o'er the sea,
Came thickly thundering on,...
~Lord Byron, XVII, Mazeppa, 1818


A horse is the projection of peoples' dreams about themselves - strong, powerful, beautiful - and it has the capability of giving us escape from our mundane existence.  ~Pam Brown


The essential joy of being with horses is that it brings us in contact with the rare elements of grace, beauty, spirit, and fire.  ~Sharon Ralls Lemon


All I pay my psychiatrist is the cost of feed and hay, and he'll listen to me any day.  ~Author Unknown






When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.  ~William Shakespeare, Henry V


A Hibernian sage once wrote that there are three things a man never forgets:  The girl of his early youth, a devoted teacher, and a great horse.  ~C.J.J. Mullen


A canter is a cure for every evil.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


If the world was truly a rational place, men would ride sidesaddle.  ~Rita Mae Brown


A man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot.  ~John Steinbeck


Among all the sights of the docks, the noble truck-horses are not the least striking to a stranger.  They are large and powerful brutes, with such sleek and glossy coats, that they look as if brushed and put on by a valet every morning.  They march with a slow and stately step, lifting their ponderous hoofs like royal Siam elephants.  Thou shalt not lay stripes upon these Roman citizens; for their docility is such, they are guided without rein or lash; they go or come, halt or march on, at a whisper.  So grave, dignified, gentlemanly, and courteous did these fine truck-horses look - so full of calm intelligence and sagacity, that often I endeavored to get into conversation with them, as they stood in contemplative attitudes while their loads were preparing.  But all I could get from them was the mere recognition of a friendly neigh; though I would stake much upon it that, could I have spoken in their language, I would have derived from them a good deal of valuable information touching the docks, where they passed the whole of their dignified lives.  ~Herman Melville, Redburn. His First Voyage, 1849


A horse is worth more than riches.  ~Spanish Proverb


When you're young and you fall off a horse, you may break something.  When you're my age, you splatter.  ~Roy Rogers


The ass will carry his load, but not a double load; ride not a free horse to death.  ~Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote


There is just as much horse sense as ever, but the horses have most of it.  ~Author Unknown


Brahma was excessively sparing with earth, water, and fire.... The reckless expenditure of air and ether in his composition was amazing.  And, in consequence, he perpetually struggled to outreach the wind, to outrun space itself.  Other animals ran only when they had a reason, but the Horse would run for no reason whatever, as if to run out of his own skin.  ~Rabindranath Tagore


Look back at our struggle for freedom,
Trace our present day's strength to it's source;
And you'll find that man's pathway to glory
Is strewn with the bones of the horse.
~Author Unknown


In riding a horse we borrow freedom.  ~Helen Thomson


It takes a good deal of physical courage to ride a horse.  This, however, I have.  I get it at about forty cents a flask, and take it as required.  ~Stephen Leacock


Feeling down?  Saddle up.  ~Author Unknown


God forbid that I should go to any Heaven in which there are no horses.  ~R.B. Cunninghame Graham, letter to Theodore Roosevelt, 1917


Even an E-type Jaguar looks merely flash beside a really smart pony and trap.  ~Marion C. Garretty


Four things greater than all things are, -
Women and Horses and Power and War.
~Rudyard Kipling, "The Ballad of the King's Jest"


For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost; being overtaken and slain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail.  ~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, June 1758


A horse which stops dead just before a jump and thus propels its rider into a graceful arc provides a splendid excuse for general merriment.  ~Duke of Endinburgh


Again the early-morning sun was generous with its warmth.  All the sounds dear to a horseman were around me - the snort of the horses as they cleared their throats, the gentle swish of their tails, the tinkle of irons as we flung the saddles over their backs - little sounds of no importance, but they stay in the unconscious library of memory.  ~Wynford Vaughan-Thomas


You know horses are smarter than people.  You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people.  ~Will Rogers


They say princes learn no art truly but the art of horsemanship.  The reason is the brave beast is no flatterer.  He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.  ~Ben Jonson, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter and Some Poems, "Illiteratus princeps"


Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilization we will find the hoofprint of the horse beside it.  ~John Moore


Small children are convinced that ponies deserve to see the inside of the house.  ~Maya Patel


To me, horses and freedom are synonymous.  ~Veryl Goodnight


A horse can lend its rider the speed and strength he or she lacks, but the rider who is wise remembers it is no more than a loan.  ~Pam Brown


Where in this wide world can man find nobility without pride,
Friendship without envy,
Or beauty without vanity?
Here, where grace is served with muscle
And strength by gentleness confined
He serves without servility; he has fought without enmity.
There is nothing so powerful, nothing less violent.
There is nothing so quick, nothing more patient.

~Ronald Duncan, "The Horse," 1954


One reason why birds and horses are happy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.  ~Dale Carnegie


The horse through all its trials has preserved the sweetness of paradise in its blood.  ~Johannes Jensen


Horses lend us the wings we lack.  ~Author Unknown


Good people get cheated, just as good horses get ridden.  ~Chinese Proverb


I'd rather have a goddam horse.  A horse is at least human, for God's sake.  ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye


Spending that many hours in the saddle gave a man plenty of time to think.  That's why so many cowboys fancied themselves Philosophers.  ~Charles M. Russell


I go about looking at horses and cattle.  They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young.  I am sick with envy of them.  ~Sherwood Anderson


Somewhere in time's own space
There must be some sweet pastured place
Where creeks sing on and tall trees grow
Some paradise where horses go,
For by the love that guides my pen
I know great horses live again.
~Stanley Harrison


People have always cared me a bit, you see - they're so complicated.  I suppose that's why I prefer horses.  ~From the movie Separate Tables, 1958


There are unknown worlds of knowledge in brutes; and whenever you mark a horse, or a dog, with a peculiarly mild, calm, deep-seated eye, be sure he is an Aristotle or a Kant, tranquilly speculating upon the mysteries in man.  No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.  They see through us at a glance.  And after all, what is a horse but a species of four-footed dumb man, in a leathern overall, who happens to live upon oats, and toils for his masters, half-requited or abused, like the biped hewers of wood and drawers of water?  But there is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.  As for those majestic, magisterial truck-horses of the docks, I would as soon think of striking a judge on the bench, as to lay violent hand upon their holy hides.  ~Herman Melville, Redburn. His First Voyage, 1849


The horse is God's gift to mankind.  ~Arabian Proverb


In my opinion, a horse is the animal to have.  Eleven-hundred pounds of raw muscle, power, grace, and sweat between your legs - it's something you just can't get from a pet hamster.  ~Author Unknown


If your horse says no, you either asked the wrong question, or asked the question wrong.  ~Pat Parelli


Gipsy gold does not chink and glitter.  It gleams in the sun and neighs in the dark.  ~Attributed to the Claddaugh Gypsies of Galway


A woman needs two animals - the horse of her dreams and a jackass to pay for it.  ~Author Unknown


I prefer a bike to a horse.  The brakes are more easily checked.  ~Lambert Jeffries


What delight
To back the flying steed, that challenges
The wind for speed! - seems native more of air
Than earth! - whose burden only lends him fire! -
Whose soul, in his task, turns labour into sport;
Who makes your pastime his!  I sit him now!
He takes away my breath!  He makes me reel!
I touch not earth - I see not - hear not.  All
Is ecstasy of motion!
~James Sheridan Knowles, The Love-Chase


Horses - if God made anything more beautiful, he kept it for himself.  ~Author Unknown


If you want a stable friendship, get a horse.  ~Author Unknown


He's of the colour of the nutmeg.  And of the heat of the ginger.... he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him; he is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts.  ~William Shakespeare, Henry V


My horse's feet are as swift as rolling thunder
He carries me away from all my fears
And when the world threatens to fall asunder
His mane is there to wipe away my tears.
~Bonnie Lewis


And Allah took a handful of southerly wind, blew His breath over it, and created the horse.... Thou shall fly without wings, and conquer without any sword.  Oh, horse.  ~Bedouin Legend


A horse doesn't care how much you know, until he knows how much you care.  ~Pat Parelli


Men are generally more careful of the Breed of their Horses and Dogs than of their Children.  ~William Penn, Fruits of Solitude


A dog may be man's best friend, but the horse wrote history.  ~Author Unknown


The hooves of horses!
Oh! witching and sweet
Is the music earth steals from the iron-shod feet;
No whisper of lover, no trilling of bird,
Can stir me as much as hooves of horses
Have stirred.
~Will H. Ogilvie


The daughter who won't lift a finger in the house is the same child who cycles madly off in the pouring rain to spend all morning mucking out a stable.  ~Samantha Armstrong


He flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.  ~Stephen Leacock


Why did this animal that had prospered so in the Colorado desert leave his amiable homeland for Siberia?  There is no answer.  We know that when the horse negotiated the land bridge... he found on the other end an opportunity for varied development that is one of the bright aspects of animal history.  He wandered into France and became the mighty Percheron, and into Arabia, where he developed into a lovely poem of a horse, and into Africa where he became the brilliant zebra, and into Scotland, where he bred selectively to form the massive Clydesdale.  He would also journey into Spain, where his very name would become the designation for gentleman, a caballero, a man of the horse.  There he would flourish mightily and serve the armies that would conquer much of the known world.   ~James Michener


A horse is poetry in motion.  ~Author Unknown


A Horseman should know neither fear, nor anger.  ~James Rarey


She lifted the drooping muzzle with both hands... It was a special embrace saved for special occasions.  ~Jean M. Auel


O! for a horse with wings!  ~William Shakespeare, Cymbeline


Horse sense, n.:  Stable thinking.  ~Author Unknown


Men are better when riding, more just and more understanding, and more alert and more at ease and more under-taking, and better knowing of all countries and all passages; in short and long all good customs and manners cometh thereof, and the health of man and of his soul.  ~Attributed to Edward Plantagenet


Thanks to Betsy Caldwell for submitting some of these quotes.




Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


Home, the spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.
~Robert Montgomery

 
Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.  ~Charles Dickens


The ornaments of your house will be the guests who frequent it.  ~Author Unknown


He that has a house to put's head in has a good head-piece.  ~William Shakespeare, King Lear


May the roof above us never fall in
And may we good companions beneath it never fall out.
~Irish Blessing


I always thought a yard was three feet, then I started mowing the lawn.  ~C.E. Cowman


The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind - a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house.  ~Woody Allen


No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have but a bit of ground that he can call his own.  However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.  ~Charles Dudley Warner


Where thou art - that - is Home.  ~Emily Dickinson


It takes hands to build a house, but only hearts can build a home.  ~Author Unknown


Every house where love abides
And friendship is a guest,
Is surely home, and home sweet home
For there the heart can rest.
~Henry Van Dyke


People are living longer than ever before, a phenomenon undoubtedly made necessary by the 30-year mortgage.  ~Doug Larson


There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.  ~Joe Ryan


May your home always be too small to hold all of your friends.  ~Author Unknown


And of all man's felicities
The very subtlest one, say I,
Is when for the first time he sees
His hearthfire smoke against the sky.
~Christopher Morley, A Hallowe'en Memory


The fellow that owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store.  ~Frank McKinney Hubbard


One only needs two tools in life:  WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.  ~G.M. Weilacher


A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.  ~James Dent


A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life:  he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.  ~May Sarton


Unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed.  ~D.H. Lawrence


Old houses mended,
Cost little less than new before they're ended.
~Colley Cibber


House, n.  A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus, and microbe.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


It's really the cat's house - we just pay the mortgage.  ~Author Unknown


Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were.  ~Author Unknown


I am grateful for the lawn that needs mowing, windows that need cleaning, and floors that need waxing because it means I have a home.  ~Author Unknown


You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.  ~Rudyard Kipling

My second favorite household chore is ironing.  My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.  ~Erma Bombeck

Nature abhors a vacuum.  And so do I.  ~Anne Gibbons

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.  ~Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966

Housework is something you do that nobody notices until you don't do it.  ~Author Unknown

Our house is clean enough to be healthy, and dirty enough to be happy.  ~Author Unknown

Don't cook.  Don't clean.  No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum - "My God, the floor's immaculate.  Lie down, you hot bitch."  ~Joan Rivers

The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.  ~Erma Bombeck

I think housework is the reason most women go to the office.  ~Heloise Cruse

I'm not going to vacuum until Sears makes one you can ride on.  ~Roseanne Barr

The trouble with living alone is that it's always your turn to do the dishes.  ~Author Unknown

There was no need to do any housework at all.  After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.  ~Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, 1968

Housework, if it is done right, can kill you.  ~John Skow

I am thankful for a lawn that needs mowing, windows that need cleaning and gutters that need fixing because it means I have a home.... I am thankful for the piles of laundry and ironing because it means my loved ones are nearby.  ~Nancie J. Carmody

My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.  ~Erma Bombeck

This is a honeydew day.  That is when you get a day off and the wife says, "Honey, do this," and "Honey, do that" around the house.  ~Jim Lemon

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.  ~Agatha Christie

Law of the Workshop:  Any tool, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.  ~Author Unknown

The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up.  The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now.  They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they'd never clean anything.  ~Dave Barry

I always thought a yard was three feet, then I started mowing the lawn.  ~C.E. Cowman

There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.  ~Joe Ryan

The fellow that owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store.  ~Kin Hubbard

My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be.  No one else cares.  Why should you?  ~Erma Bombeck

You don't get anything clean without getting something else dirty.  ~Cecil Baxter

A clean house is the sign of a boring person.  ~Author Unknown

We labor to make a house a home, then every time we're expecting visitors, we rush to turn it back into a house.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I enjoy mowing the lawn, it relaxes me.  It gets me outdoors, it's good exercise, the freshly cut grass smells great, and the engine is loud enough that I'm sure no one else can hear my thoughts - or intrude upon them.  ~Astrid Alauda

Old houses mended,
Cost little less than new before they're ended.
~Colley Cibber

Cleanliness is next to impossible.  ~Author Unknown

The meal's complete when the kitchen's neat.  ~Author Unknown

They're sure housework won't kill you, but why take the risk?  Author Unknown

When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin.  Or maybe I mean why.  ~Katharine Whitehorn, "Nought for Homework," Roundabout, 1962

My idea of superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.  ~Bette Midler

Vacuums don't clean houses.  People clean houses.  ~Everybody Loves Raymond, "Humm Vac," written by Lew Schneider, original airdate 19 March 2001, spoken by the character Marie Barone

This mess is a place!  ~Author Unknown

Always keep your home presentable, assuming you keep a home for purposes of presentation.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I like hugs and I like kisses,
But what I really love is help with the dishes!
~Author Unknown

Three-fourths of the Earth's surface is water, and one-fourth is land.  It is quite clear that the good Lord intended us to spend triple the amount of time fishing as taking care of the lawn.  ~Chuck Clark

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life:  he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Please don't feed the dust bunnies.  ~Author Unknown

It's all in the attitude - housework is exercise.  Slim your way to a clean home!  ~Linda Solegato

Law of Window Cleaning:  It's on the other side.  ~Author Unknown

When you use a manual push mower, you're "cutting" down on pollution and the only thing in danger of running out of gas is you!  ~Grey Livingston

If the shelves are dusty and the pots don't shine,
it's because I have better things to do with my time.
~Author Unknown

A man who wants time to read and write must let the grass grow long.  ~Sloan Wilson

One only needs two tools in life:  WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.  ~G.M. Weilacher

Dull women have immaculate homes.  ~Author Unknown

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Dust is just a country accent.  ~Author Unknown

The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished and put inside boxes.  ~Dave Barry

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade.  It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.  ~D.H. Lawrence

Thank God for dirty dishes,
they have a tale to tell;
while others may go hungry,
we're eating very well.
~Author Unknown

A new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom knows the corners.  ~Irish Saying

A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.  ~James Dent

This house is protected by killer dust bunnies.  ~Author Unknown

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition:  the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.  ~Simone de Beauvoir

Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots.  ~Hoosier Farmer

I am never five minutes into stripping the clutter from my life before I start running into the clutter that is my life.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There may be dust in my house but there isn't any on me.  ~Author Unknown

God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.  ~Author Unknown

Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts.  It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all.  ~William Temple

Swallow your pride occasionally, it's non-fattening!  ~Author Unknown

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.  ~Andrew J. Holmes, Wisdom in Small Doses

What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.  ~Abraham Lincoln

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.  ~Benjamin Franklin

Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

It wasn't until quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say "I don't know!"  ~Somerset Maugham

Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self.  ~Charles Haddon Spurgeon

If I only had a little humility, I would be perfect.  ~Ted Turner

There are two kinds of egotists:  Those who admit it, and the rest of us.  ~Laurence J. Peter

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.  ~Malcolm S. Forbes

There are a billion people in China.  It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people.  Think of it.  More than a BILLION people.  That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you.  ~A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture

We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm.  ~Winston Churchill

Don't talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave.  ~Wilson Mizner

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.  ~Niccolo Machiavelli

True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.  ~Edward Frederick Halifax

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.  ~Frank Leahy, Look, 10 January 1955

It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.  ~Author Unknown

It is always the secure who are humble.  ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton

In all that surrounds him the egotist sees only the frame of his own portrait.  ~J. Petit-Senn

Humble is such a lonely word.  ~KakSri

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.  ~Barry Switzer

When science discovers the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to find they are not it.  ~Bernard Baily

To have a thing is little, if you're not allowed to show it, to know a thing, is nothing unless others know you know it.  ~Charles Neaves

We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

Blushing is the color of virtue.  ~Diogenes

Glory is largely a theatrical concept.  There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.  ~Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951

When someone sings his own praises, he always gets the tune too high.  ~Mary H. Waldrip

Don't look for more honor than your learning merits.  ~Jewish Proverb

With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

None are so empty as those who are full of themselves.  ~Benjamin Whichcote

We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket; and do not pull it out, and strike it, merely to show that you have one.  ~Lord Chesterfield

People that put themselves above others will fall longer and harder.  ~Gina Lindley

One learns to ignore criticism by first learning to ignore applause.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.  ~Father Strickland, 1863 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Lord, where we are wrong, make us willing to change; where we are right, make us easy to live with.  ~Peter Marshall

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The man who thinks he can live without others is mistaken; the one who thinks others can't live without him is even more deluded.  ~Hasidic Saying

Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.  ~Dwight Morrow

If every fool wore a crown, we should all be kings.  ~Welsh Proverb

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.  ~George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.  ~James McNeill Whistler

You shouldn't gloat about anything you've done; you ought to keep going and find something better to do.  ~David Packard

Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.  ~William Safire

Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a confession of the deficiency it indicates.  He who undervalues himself is justly overvalued by others.  ~William Hazlitt

Modesty is the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.  ~Oliver Herford

Modesty:  The art of encouraging people to find out for themselves how wonderful you are.  ~Source Unknown

Flattery is all right so long as you don't inhale.  ~Adlai Stevenson



Humor is a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one's bottom.  ~Taki


Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective:  an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.  ~Christopher Morley


Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.  ~Irvin S. Cobb


Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.  ~Francis Bacon


Humor results when society says you can't scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public.  ~Tom Walsh


Humor has a way of bringing people together.  It unites people.  In fact, I'm rather serious when I suggest that someone should plant a few whoopee cushions in the United Nations.  ~Ron Dentinger


Every survival kit should include a sense of humor.  ~Author Unknown


Humor is the great thing, the saving thing.  The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.  ~Mark Twain


Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.  ~James Thurber


Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.  ~William James


After God created the world, He made man and woman.  Then, to keep the whole thing from collapsing, He invented humor.  ~Bill Kelly, "Mordillo"


If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.  ~Peter De Vries


Humor is just another defense against the universe.  ~Mel Brooks


Humor is reason gone mad.  ~Groucho Marx


A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.  ~Peter Ustinov


Comedy has to be based on truth.  You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.  ~Sid Caesar


Warning:  Humor may be hazardous to your illness.  ~Ellie Katz


Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that humor excites in those who lack it.  ~George Saintsbury


Humor is... despair refusing to take itself seriously.  ~Arland Ussher


Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.  ~Mary Hirsch


The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes.  ~William Davis


Many a true word is spoken in jest.  ~English Proverb


I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.  ~Frank A. Clark


Above all else: go out with a sense of humor.  It is needed armor.  Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life.  ~Hugh Sidey


There is no defense against adverse fortune which is so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.  ~Thomas W. Higginson


Let your humour always be good-humour, in the double sense of the phrase:  if it comes from a bad humour, it is almost sure to be bad humour.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Humor prevents one from becoming a tragic figure even though he/she is involved in tragic events.  ~E.T. "Cy" Eberhart


Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.  ~Max Eastman


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


There is more logic in humor than in anything else.  Because, you see, humor is truth.  ~Victor Borge, London Times, 3 January 1984


Someone once defined humor as a way to keep from killing yourself.  I keep my sense of humor and I stay alive.  ~Abe Burrows


Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.  ~Roman Gary


Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms.  It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist.  It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.  ~Leo Rosten


A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.  ~Fred Allen

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.  ~H.L. Mencken

A compromise is an agreement whereby both parties get what neither of them wanted.  ~Author Unknown

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.  ~Attributed to Arthur McBride Bloch

A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't.  ~Author Unknown

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today.  It is already tomorrow in Australia.  ~Charles Schulz

All generalizations are bad.  ~R.H. Grenier

All my life, I always wanted to be somebody.  Now I see that I should have been more specific.  ~Jane Wagner, The Search For Intelligent Life In The Universe, performed by Lily Tomlin

The large print giveth, but the small print taketh away.  ~Tom Waits, Small Change

Eagles may soar in the clouds, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.  ~Attributed to both Jason Hutchison and John Benfield

After all, what is your host's purpose in having a party?  Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

How come there's only one Monopolies Commission?  ~Nigel Rees

If you teach your children nothing else, teach them the Golden Rule and "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I have six locks on my door all in a row.  When I go out, I lock every other one.  I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three.  ~Elayne Boosler

Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.  ~George Ade

An expert is a man who tells you a simple thing in a confused way in such a fashion as to make you think the confusion is your own fault.  ~William Castle

If The Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me.  ~Song title by Jimmy Buffet

Man was predestined to have free will.  ~Hal Lee Luyah

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.  ~Aldous Huxley

Murphy was an optimist.  ~O'Toole's Commentary

The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.  ~Nicholas Chamfort

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.  ~Robert Graves

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.  ~Douglas Adams

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Today is the last day of some of your life.  ~Author Unknown

Without geography, you're nowhere.  ~Author Unknown

It's always darkest before the dawn.  So if you're going to steal your neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it.  ~Author Unknown

You can't have everything... where would you put it?  ~Steven Wright

He's turned his life around.  He used to be depressed and miserable.  Now he's miserable and depressed.  ~Harry Kalas, on Garry Maddox, 1981

He who believes that the past cannot be changed has not yet written his memoirs.  ~Torvald Gahlin

I plan on living forever.  So far, so good.  ~Author Unknown

Ability is what will get you to the top if the boss has no daughter.  ~Author Unknown

Love your enemies.  It makes them so damned mad.  ~P.D. East

As to the Seven Deadly Sins, I deplore Pride, Wrath, Lust, Envy and Greed.  Gluttony and Sloth I pretty much plan my day around.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I usually lump organized religion, organized labor, and organized crime together. The Mafia gets points for having the best restaurants.  ~Dave Beard

There's no such thing as fun for the whole family.  ~Jerry Seinfeld

The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind - a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house.  ~Woody Allen

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fiber, and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.  ~Douglas Adams

And on the eighth day God said, "Okay, Murphy, you're in charge!"  ~Author Unknown

May those who love us love us,
and those who do not love us,
may God turn their hearts,
and if He cannot turn their hearts
may He turn their ankles
that we may know them by their limping.
~Irish Prayer

When somebody tells you nothing is impossible, ask him to dribble a football.  ~Author Unknown

The chicken came first - God would look silly sitting on an egg.  ~Author Unknown

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.  ~Author Unknown

A great name for a new country song:  If I'd Shot You Sooner, I'd Be Out of Jail by Now.  ~Author Unknown

Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.  ~Rita Mae Brown

As I may or may not say to the Lord on Judgment Day, "You ask a lot of questions for someone who has so much explaining to do."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.  ~Sir Winston Churchill

Just remember, if the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off.  ~Author Unknown

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes.  That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.  ~Jack Handey

How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves the porch light on?  ~Tom Waits, "Mr Siegal," Heartattack and Vine

Duct tape is like the force.  It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.  ~Carl Zwanzig

A signature always reveals a man's character - and sometimes even his name.  ~Evan Esar

There are truths of which I have an inkling, but of most I have only a penciling.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Home is heaven and orgies are vile,
But I like an orgy, once in a while.
~Ogden Nash, Home, 99 44/100% Sweet Home

Can we actually "know" the universe?  My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.  ~Woody Allen, Getting Even, 1971

A scout troop consists of twelve little kids dressed like schmucks following a big schmuck dressed like a kid.  ~Jack Benny

All my life I've wanted, just once, to say something clever without losing my train of thought.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.  ~Fred Allen

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named Bush, Dick, and Colon.  Need I say more?  ~Chris Rock

Resolve is never stronger than in the morning after the night it was never weaker.  ~From the movie Naked

Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.  ~Colin Sautar

Who says nothing is impossible.  I've been doing nothing for years.  ~Author Unknown

You know why the French don't want to bomb Saddam Hussein?  Because he hates America, he loves mistresses, and he wears a beret.  He is French, people.  ~Conan O'Brien, 2003

A wise saying is something you keep picking up off the floor in front of your fridge.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.  ~Author Unknown

She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.  ~Mae West

If you cannot answer a man's argument, all it not lost; you can still call him vile names.  ~Elbert Hubbard

If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?  ~Author Unknown

She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand.  ~Saul Bellow

It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term.  ~Mark Twain

Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know.  Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know.  Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about.  Amen.  ~Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Lord, lord, lord.  Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.  ~Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless



One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.  ~Moliere


Every man alone is sincere.  At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.  We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs.  We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Friendship," Essays, 1841


He does not believe who does not live according to his belief.  ~Thomas Fuller


Whatever you condemn, you have done yourself.  ~Georg Groddeck, The Book of the It, 1950


Many of us believe that wrongs aren't wrong if it's done by nice people like ourselves.  ~Author Unknown


Your religion is what you do when the sermon is over.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.  ~William Shakespeare, Henry VI


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.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.  ~Jane Addams


That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience," Essays, 1844


All of us are experts at practicing virtue at a distance.  ~Theodore M. Hesburgh


Go put your creed into your deed.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


The most melancholy thing about human nature, is, that a man may guide others into the path of salvation, without walking in it himself; that he may be a pilot, and yet a castaway.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Politeness, n.  The most acceptable hypocrisy.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


Hypocrite: the man who murdered both his parents... pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.  ~Abraham Lincoln


'Tis curious that we only believe as deeply as we live.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


I don't never have any trouble in regulating my own conduct, but to keep other folks' straight is what bothers me.  ~Josh Billings


If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners - let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.  ~Aldous Huxley


Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.  ~H.G. Wells


Affectation is a greater enemy to the face than smallpox.  ~English Proverb


The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scales.  ~Aesop, Fables


The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself.  What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one.  Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.  ~Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963


Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.  ~Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity, 1928


Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar for 1894


In the last analysis we must be judged by what we do and not by what we believe.  We are as we behave - with a very small margin of credit for our unmanifested vision of how we might behave if we could take the trouble.  ~Geoffrey L. Rudd, The British Vegetarian, September/October 1962 


It is a good divine that follows his own instructions.  ~William Shakespeare


The world is full of fools and faint hearts; and yet everyone has courage enough to bear the misfortunes, and wisdom enough to manage the affairs, of his neighbor.  ~Benjamin Franklin


Most everyone seems willing to be a fool himself, but he can't bear to have anyone else one.  ~Josh Billings


They are not all saints who use holy water.  ~English Proverb


The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.  ~André Gide


God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.  ~William Shakespeare


How seldom we weigh our neighbors in the same balance as ourselves.  ~Thomas à Kempis






We are not hypocrites in our sleep.  ~William Hazlitt


Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


When you say that you agree with a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.  ~Otto von Bismarck


Hypocrite reader - my fellow - my brother!  ~St Jerome


Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.  ~Aldous Huxley


When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.  ~George Bernard Shaw


The devil loves nothing better than the intolerance of reformers.  ~James Russell Lowell


It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.  ~Alfred Adler


Live truth instead of professing it.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Those whose conduct gives room for talk are always the first to attack their neighbors.  ~Jean Baptiste Molière, Tartuffe


Most of us are aware of and pretend to detest the barefaced instances of that hypocrisy by which men deceive others, but few of us are upon our guard or see that more fatal hypocrisy by which we deceive and over-reach our own hearts.  ~Laurence Sterne, 1760


Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Saying is one thing, doing another.  We must consider the sermon and the preacher distinctly and apart.  ~Montaigne, Essays, 1588


We are irritated by rascals, intolerant of fools, and prepared to love the rest.  But where are they?  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing.  One that sounds good, and a real one.  ~J. Pierpoint Morgan


History is the chronicle of divorces between creed and deed.  ~Louis Fischer


Throughout our lives, we see in the mirror the same innocent trusting face we have seen there since childhood.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.  ~Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You 


People are very inclined to set moral standards for others.  ~Elizabeth Drew, The New Yorker, 16 February 1987


A man who should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined by night.  ~Thomas Macaulay


We have two kinds of morality side by side:  one which we preach but do not practice and another which we practice but seldom preach.  ~Bertrand Russell


Few love to hear the sins they love to act.  ~William Shakespeare


He rightly reads scripture who turns words into deeds.  ~Saint Bernard of Clairvaux


People will disapprove of you if you're unhappy, or if you're happy in The Wrong Way.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.  ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland


Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots.  ~J. Petit-Senn


The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.  ~Socrates


Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.  ~Jacob M. Braude


Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.  ~François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, 1678


A great deal of what passes for current Christianity consists in denouncing other people's vices and faults.  ~Henry H. Williams


I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end... I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.  ~Abraham Lincoln


The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others.  ~Author Unknown


How many observe Christ's birthday! How few his precepts!
O! 'tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.
~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1757


Just remember, there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything and the wrong way is to keep trying to make everybody else do it the right way.  ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter




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 reach your destiny.  ~Carl Schurz


Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Some people never have anything except ideals.  ~E.W. Howe


When a man forgets his ideals he may hope for happiness, but not till then.  ~John Oliver Hobbes


There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals.  The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.  ~G.K. Chesterton


You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.  ~Norman Douglas, South Wind


We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others, by their acts.  ~Harold Nicolson


Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.  ~John Galsworthy


Materialism is a circumference without a centre.  Idealism is a centre without a circumference.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.  ~David T. Wolf


Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.  ~G.K. Chesterton


An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.  ~Henry L. Mencken


Every dogma has its day, but ideals are eternal.  ~Israel Zangwill


An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe it.  ~Don Marquis

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple.  But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.  ~Victor Hugo

A half-baked idea is okay as long as it's in the oven.  ~Author Unknown

The brain is a commodity used to fertilize ideas.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Every idea I get I have to deny, that's my way of testing it.  ~Alain, Histoire de mes pensées

Ideas can be life-changing.  Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.  ~Jim Rohn

If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.  ~Albert Einstein

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.  ~Pablo Picasso

Ideas are like wandering sons.  They show up when you least expect them.  ~Bern Williams

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy to be called an idea at all.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas.  ~José Marti, letter, 1890

The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.  ~Linus Pauling

My mind contains many good ideas, but it's not always easy to squeeze one out.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant

Drawing is putting a line round an idea.  ~Henri Matisse

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.  ~Mark Amidon

Labor gives birth to ideas.  ~Jim Rohn

There is only one way in which a person acquires a new idea:  by the combination or association of two or more ideas he already has into a new juxtaposition in such a manner as to discover a relationship among them of which he was not previously aware.  ~Francis A. Cartier

Night time is really the best time to work.  All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.  ~Catherine O'Hara

Money never starts an idea.  It is always the idea that starts the money.  ~Owen Laughlin

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.  ~Emile Chartier

Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea.  It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.  ~Nolan Bushnell

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.  ~Anais Nin

When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them.  Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time.  Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.  ~Michael Leboeuf

An original idea.  That can't be too hard.  The library must be full of them.  ~Stephen Fry

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.  ~Victor Hugo

An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.  ~Arnold H. Glasgow

No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half-thought of it ourselves.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The ideas I stand for are not mine.  I borrowed them from Socrates.  I swiped them from Chesterfield.  I stole them from Jesus.  And I put them in a book.  If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?  ~Dale Carnegie

Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas.  ~Paula Poundstone

Ideas have become far more important to us than action - ideas so cleverly expressed in books by the intellectuals in every field.  The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are the more we worship them and the books that contain them.  We are those books, we are those ideas, so heavily conditioned are we by them.  We are forever discussing ideas and ideals and dialectically offering opinions.  Every religion has its dogma, its formula, its own scaffold to reach the gods, and when inquiring into the beginning of thought we are questioning the importance of this whole edifice of ideas.  We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always the present - that is, living is always the present.  We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us.  ~J. Krishnamurti



The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest, for he has not earned it.  ~John Lubbock


Few women and fewer men have enough character to be idle.  ~E.V. Lucas


The hardest work is to go idle.  ~Yiddish Proverb


Idleness is the beginning of all vices.  ~Proverb


There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor:  there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable - among both rich and poor.  ~John Ruskin


The real source of almost all our crimes, if the trouble is taken to trace them to a common origin, will be found to be in idleness.  ~Walter Gaston Shotwell


The only thing wrong with doing nothing is that you never know when you're finished.  ~Author Unknown


Keep doing some kind of work, that the devil may always find you employed.  ~St. Jerome


To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.  ~Samuel Johnson


Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.  ~William E. Barrett


Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.  ~Samuel Johnson


All man's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670


Nobody can think straight who does not work.  Idleness warps the mind.  ~Henry Ford


A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought.  There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor  ~Victor Hugo


Shun idleness.  It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.  ~Voltaire


The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.  ~Aldous Huxley

The most violent element in society is ignorance.  ~Emma Goldman

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance.  ~Saul Bellow

Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.  ~John Dewey

Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity?  ~Steve Polyak

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry.  Most people do.  ~Norman Juster

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.  ~William G. McAdoo

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.  ~Bob Edwards

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.  ~Mark Twain

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.  ~Bertrand Russell

The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.  ~Josh Billings

Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.  ~Tobias Smollett

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society.  If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

You can be sincere and still be stupid.  ~Charles F. Kettering

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.  ~Will Rogers

Ignorance is a right!  Education is eroding one of the few democratic freedoms remaining to us.  ~Christopher Andrea

Your ignorance cramps my conversation.  ~Anthony Hope

It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.  ~Anatole France

History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization.  By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of ignorance.  ~A. Bronson Alcott

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?  ~Author Unknown

Dopeler effect:  The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.  ~Author unknown, supposedly from a Washington Post reader submission word contest in which readers were asked to alter a word by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter and supply a new definition

Ignoranus:  A person who's both stupid and an asshole.  ~Author unknown, supposedly from a Washington Post reader submission word contest in which readers were asked to alter a word by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter and supply a new definition

Light travels faster than sound.  That's why most people seem bright until you hear them speak.  ~Author Unknown

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe.  I dispute that.  I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.  ~Frank Zappa

Two things are infinite, as far as we know - the universe and human stupidity.  ~Attributed to Albert Einstein by Frederick S. Perls (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

We have enough youth, how about a fountain of smart?  ~Author Unknown

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.  ~Michelangelo

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.  Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.  Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.  ~Theodore Geisel

Nothing encourages creativity like the chance to fall flat on one's face.  ~James D. Finley

Some stories are true that never happened.  ~Elie Weisel

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.  ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz.  It's the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz.  You'll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond 'Z' and start poking around!  ~Dr. Seuss

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.  ~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.  ~Francis Bacon

Think left and think right and think low and think high.  Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!  ~Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!

A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant:  first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.  ~Author Unknown

The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.
~Emily Dickinson

Never tell people how to do things.  Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.  ~George Smith Patton, War as I Knew It, 1947

The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.  ~Frank Barron, Think, November-December 1962

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.  ~Mark Twain

Don't expect anything original from an echo.  ~Author Unknown

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.  ~Pablo Picasso

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.  ~G.K. Chesterton

Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.  ~Simone Weil

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.  ~Stephen Leacock

Sometimes imagination pounces; mostly it sleeps soundly in the corner, purring.  ~Terri Guillemets

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.  ~Norman Podhoretz

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.  ~Edgar Allan Poe, "Eleonora"

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.  ~Joseph Joubert

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.  ~Lewis Carroll

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.  ~Ansel Adams

I admit to having an imagination feverish enough to melt good judgment. ~Dean R. Koontz, Seize the Night

Things are only impossible until they're not.  ~Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion.  Then I go out and paint the stars.  ~Vincent Van Gogh

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.  ~Author Unknown

In the realist you have the sorry sight of the five senses deprived of their imagination.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The strongest nation on earth is your imagi-nation.  ~Matt Furey

When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
~Lewis Carroll

Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.  ~Henri Matisse

The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry.  He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell

Trust that little voice in your head that says "Wouldn't it be interesting if..."  And then do it.  ~Duane Michals, "More Joy of Photography"

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.  ~George Scialabba

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.  ~Henry David Thoreau

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
~Emily Dickinson, Poems

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the source of all true art and science.  He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.  ~Albert Einstein

Anyone who can be replaced by a machine deserves to be.  ~Dennis Gunton

To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.  ~William Shakespeare

If you see the magic in a fairy tale, you can face the future.  ~Danielle Steel

Really we create nothing.  We merely plagiarize nature.  ~Jean Baitaillon, quoted in Reader's Digest Quotable Quotes: Wit and Wisdom for All Occasions, 1997

Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.  ~G.K. Chesterton

The hardest thing about reality is returning to it after an hour inside your child's mind.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.  ~Jessamyn West

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.  ~William Butler Yeats

I remembered a story of how Bach was approached by a young admirer one day and asked, "But Papa Bach, how do you manage to think of all these new tunes?"  "My dear fellow," Bach is said to have answered, according to my version, "I have no need to think of them.  I have the greatest difficulty not to step on them when I get out of bed in the morning and start moving around my room."   ~Laurens Van der Post

I'm creative - you can't expect me to be neat too.  ~Author Unknown

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed.  If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.  ~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.  ~Albert Szent-Györgyi

I believe in the imagination.  What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.  ~Duane Michals, Real Dreams

I am now and have always been a stranger to the realm of practical matters.  ~Anton Chekhov

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.  ~Calvin Trillin

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.  ~Anna Freud

To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.  ~George Kneller

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.  ~Tuli Kupferberg

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.  ~Paul Gauguin

You will find more happiness growing down than up.  ~Author Unknown

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery:  He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.  ~G.K. Chesterton

The great man is he who does not lose his child's-heart.  ~Mencius, Book IV

You're never too old to do goofy stuff.  ~From the television show Leave it to Beaver, spoken by the character Ward Cleaver

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.  ~Gaston Bachelard

When I grow up I want to be a little boy.  ~Joseph Heller, Something Happened, 1974

I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.  ~Bob Seger, "Against the Wind"

Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.  ~Pablo Picasso

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.  ~Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943

Everybody's 12 years old in an apple orchard.  ~Rachael Ray, Rachael Ray Show, while making autumn stew, original airdate 11 October 2007

Anticipate the day as if it was your birthday and you are turning six again.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.  Most persons do not see the sun.  At least they have a very superficial seeing.  The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.  The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius.  ~Rebecca Pepper Sinkler

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon.  A happiness weapon.  A beauty bomb.  And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one.  It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air.  Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas.  And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight.  Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in.  With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest.  And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.  ~Robert Fulghum

When you're green you're growing, and when you're ripe you start to rot.  ~Ray Kroc

Adults are obsolete children.  ~Dr. Seuss

A grownup is a child with layers on.  ~Woody Harrelson

The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.  When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.  ~Eugene Ionesco

Some things can only be understood when you're in a tree house.  With a pile of warm chocolate chip cookies.  And a book.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him.  ~Pablo Neruda

I am often accused of being childish.  I prefer to interpret that as child-like.  I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things.  I tend to exaggerate and fantasize and embellish.  I still listen to instinctual urges.  I play with leaves.  I skip down the street and run against the wind.  I never water my garden without soaking myself.  It has been after such times of joy that I have achieved my greatest creativity and produced my best work. ~Leo F. Buscaglia, Bus 9 to Paradise

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.  ~Heraclitus

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.  ~Sam Levenson

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.  ~Norman Podhoretz

In my soul, I am still that small child who did not care about anything else but the beautiful colors of a rainbow.  ~Papiha Ghosh

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.  ~Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littéraires, 1862

Those who play rarely become brittle in the face of stress or lose the healing capacity for humor.  ~Stuart Brown

O men, grown sick with toil and care,
Leave for awhile the crowded mart;
O women, sinking with despair,
Weary of limb and faint of heart,
Forget your years to-day and come
As children back to childhood's house.
~Phoebe Cary

It is a happy talent to know how to play.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell.  That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.  ~Brian Aldiss

A man is getting old when he walks around a puddle instead of through it.  ~R.C. Ferguson

If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.  ~Jean Piaget

[N]egative experiences... and separation from our second side cause most of us to reach adulthood as second-hand people.  ~Stephen G. Scalese, The Whisper in Your Heart

Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three oclock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  ~Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, commonly misattributed to Barbara Jordan because she quoted Fulghum in a commencement address

My childhood may be over, but that doesn't mean playtime is.  ~Ron Olson

The opposite of play is not work.  It's depression.  ~Brian Sutton-Smith (play theorist, 1924-)

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.  We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them.  It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.  Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.  ~Albert Einstein

Always jump in the puddles!  Always skip alongside the flowers.  The only fights worth fighting are the pillow and food varieties.  ~Terri Guillemets

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.  ~Erik H. Erikson

If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Grown-ups love figures.  When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters.  They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like?  What games does he love best?  Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand:  "How old is he?  How many brothers has he?  How much does he weigh?  How much money does his father make?"  Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French

Whoever wants to understand much must play much.  ~Gottfried Benn

Children ask better questions than adults.  "May I have a cookie?" "Why is the sky blue?" and "What does a cow say?" are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than "Where's your manuscript?" Why haven't you called?" and "Who's your lawyer?"  ~Fran Lebowitz

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.  ~Sigmund Freud

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.  It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.  ~Rachel Carson

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.  ~C.S. Lewis

Deep meaning lies often in childish play.  ~Johann Friedrich von Schiller

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.  ~J. Robert Oppenheimer

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.  ~Jean de la Bruyere

If you want to live and thrive, let the spider run alive.  ~American Quaker Saying

Nothing seems to please a fly so much as to be taken for a currant; and if it can be baked in a cake and palmed off on the unwary, it dies happy.  ~Mark Twain

We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.  ~Bill Vaughan

When the bee comes to your house, let her have beer; you may want to visit the bee's house some day.  ~Congo Proverb

The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.
~Alexander Pope

Why didn't Noah swat those two mosquitoes?  ~Author Unknown

Cockroaches really put my "all creatures great and small" creed to the test.  ~Terri Guillemets

Some primal termite knocked on wood;
and tasted it, and found it good.
That is why your Cousin May
fell through the parlor floor today.
~Ogden Nash

The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.  ~Andy Warhol

Hurt no living thing:
Ladybird, nor butterfly,
Nor moth with dusty wing.
~Christina Georgina Rossetti

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.  ~Bradley Millar

What do you suppose?
A bee sat on my nose.
Then what do you think?
He gave me a wink
And said, "I beg your pardon,
I thought you were the garden."
~English Rhyme

Take time to smell the roses and eventually you'll inhale a bee.  ~Author Unknown

God in His wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
~Ogden Nash, "The Fly"

Though snails are exceedingly slow,
There is one thing I'd like to know.
If I out run 'em round the yard,
How come they beat me to the chard?
~Allen Klein

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.  ~Betty Reese

I never could have thought of it,
To have a little bug all lit
And made to go on wings.
~Elizabeth Madox Roberts, "Firefly"

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
~Isaac Watts, "Divine Songs"

The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee, a clover, anytime, to him, is aristocracy.  ~Emily Dickinson

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky.
~Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Silent Noon

We are closer to the ants than to butterflies.  Very few people can endure much leisure.  ~Gerald Brenan

And what's a buterfly?  At best,
He's but a ceterpillar, drest.
~John Grey

Aerodynamically the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it, so it goes on flying anyway.  ~Mary Kay Ash

House, n.  A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus, and microbe.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

We starve the rats, creosote the ticks, swat the flies, step on the cockroaches and poison the scales.  Yet when these pests appear in human form we go paralytic.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Two-legged creatures we are supposed to love as we love ourselves.  The four-legged, also, can come to seem pretty important.  But six legs are too many from the human standpoint.  ~Joseph W. Krutch



A slander is like a hornet; if you can't kill it dead the first time, better not strike at it.  ~Henry Wheeler Shaw


The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved.  ~J. Russel Lynes


I've had a wonderful evening - but this wasn't it.  ~Groucho Marx


Coolidge was known for his terse speech and reticence.  A woman bet her friend that she could get Coolidge to speak to her, which was something he was reluctant to do.  She went up to him and said: "Hello, Mr. President, I bet my friend that I could get you to say three words to me."  "You lose," Coolidge replied dryly, and walked away.  ~Author Unknown


Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.  ~Mark Twain


Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.  ~Oscar Wilde


She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when."  ~P.G. Wodehouse


Nancy Astor:  "If you were my husband, Winston, I should flavour your coffee with poison."
Winston Churchill:  "If I were your husband, madam, I should drink it."


I can't believe that out of 10,000 sperm, you were the quickest.  ~Steven Pearl


Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brain.  So far you are correct.  But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat - at least, not with certainty.  If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I should judge that a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present.  Not the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales.  ~Mark Twain


Some people are like Slinkies... not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.  ~Author Unknown


Her face was her chaperone.  ~Rupert Hughes


I hope they notice the mistletoe tied to my coattails as I leave town.  ~Abe Lemons


She looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.  ~Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation


It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.  ~Rose Macaulay


Dustin Farnum:  "I've never been better!  In the last act yesterday, I had the audience glued to their seats."
Oliver Herford:  "How clever of you to think of it."


O, she is the antidote to desire.  ~William Congreve, Love for Love, 1695


I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.  ~English professor, Ohio University


She has the answer to everything and the solution to nothing.  ~Oscar Levant


You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.  ~Edward Flaherty


I wouldn't be surprised if one day Carl's halo slipped and choked him.  ~Allan Wells, referring to Carl Lewis, 1989


I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics.  ~Johnny Mercer, on a British musical


I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.  ~Charles Baudelaire


The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard.  ~David Gerrold




I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.  ~Joseph Baretti, quoted by James Boswell, 1766, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.  ~William Shakespeare

Transcend political correctness and strive for human righteousness.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.  ~David Star Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair

Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking.  There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught.  ~J.C. Watts

If you have integrity, nothing else matters.  If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.  ~Alan Simpson

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Character is much easier kept than recovered.  ~Thomas Paine

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.  Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.  Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.  Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.  Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.  But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.  ~Buddha

One does evil enough when one does nothing good.  ~German Proverb

There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience.  ~French Proverb

Don't try to be different.  Just be good.  To be good is different enough.  ~Arthur Freed

Your life may be the only Bible some people read.  ~Author Unknown

Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to.  ~Author Unknown

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?  ~William Lloyd Garrison

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.  ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.  ~William Safire

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.  ~Albert Einstein

The only exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions, running down their friends, side-stepping responsibility, and pushing their luck!  ~Author Unknown

But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.  If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him.  It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.  ~Mark Twain, Huck Finn

Character is higher than intellect.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I do good, I feel good.  When I do bad, I feel bad.  That's my religion.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it.  Autograph your work with excellence.  ~Author Unknown

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.  ~Henry Ford

Laws control the lesser man.  Right conduct controls the greater one.  ~Chinese Proverb

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.  ~Mark Twain, "What Is Man?", 1906

If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.  ~John Lubbock

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.  ~James D. Miles

I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed.  ~Matthew Henry

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.  ~Thomas Paine

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right.  ~Isaac Asimov

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.  ~William Shakespeare, Hamlet

A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.  ~Charles Evans Hughes

Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.  ~Aristotle

You do not wake up one morning a bad person.  It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you.  ~Rwandan Proverb

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.  ~Samuel Butler, Erewhon

Every time I've done something that doesn't feel right, it's ended up not being right.  ~Mario Cuomo

My goal in life is to be as good of a person my dog already thinks I am.  ~Author Unknown

To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.  ~Confucius

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh, 1849

You don't carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation.  ~Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

Character is doing the right thing even when it costs more than you want to pay.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

Just do good, don't worry about the road ahead. ~Monk Wansong

I am,
indeed,
a king,
because I know how
to rule myself.
~Pietro Aretino, 1537

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.  ~Michel de Montaigne

Be always sure you're right, then go ahead.  ~Davy Crockett

I have fancied myself a rebel, but at every critical moment of my life, I have been exactly the child my parents raised.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology.  ~Red Auerbach

Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily.  All other "sins" are invented nonsense.  (Hurting yourself is not a sin - just stupid.)  ~Robert A. Heinlein

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.  ~Henry David Thoreau

If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve it.  ~Immanuel Hermass von Fichte

People who fight fire with fire end up with only the ashes of their own integrity.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I have ever met.  ~Dwight Lyman Moody

Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort.  ~Bert Murray

Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.  ~Will Rogers

My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people:  those who work and those who take the credit.  He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.  ~Indira Gandhi

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., speech, Boston, 8 January 1897

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball,
And that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.
~Ogden Nash

In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.  ~Thomas Jefferson

It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Everyone complains of his memory, but no one complains of his judgment.  ~Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665

God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.  ~Chester W. Nimitz

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.  ~Author Unknown

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.  ~Henry Louis Mencken, "Sententiae," This and That: A Mencken Chrestomathy, 1948

The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour.  ~Japanese Proverb

For the human mind is seldom at stay:  If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse.  ~Samuel Richardson

There is an ongoing battle between conscience and self-interest in which, at some point,we have to take sides.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I would rather be right than President.  ~Henry Clay, speech, 1850

If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.  ~Samuel P. Ginder

I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man.  ~Thomas Jefferson, 1809

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.  ~Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

Goodness is beauty in the best estate.  ~Christopher Marlowe

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart.  ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

If we were all to be judged by our thoughts, the hills would be swarming with outlaws.  ~Johann Sigurjonsson

Righteousness is easy in retrospect.  ~Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Persons with weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.  ~Thomas Hardy

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.  ~Elbert Hubbard, A Thousand and One Epigrams, 1911

I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated

Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Sometimes, to do the right thing, we must keep a promise we never made.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.  ~Frank Moore Colby

Values are good things only if they are good values.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

It's impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.  ~Jean Baptiste Molière, Le Misanthrope

If honor be your clothing, the suit will last a lifetime; but if clothing be your honor, it will soon be worn threadbare.  ~William Arnot

Conscience warns us before it reproaches us.  ~Comtesse Diane (Marie Josephine de Suin de Beausacq), Maximes de la vie, 1908

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted.  I don't accept it.  ~Pablo Casals

As soon as you concern yourself with the "good" and "bad" of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter.  ~Morihei Ueshiba

Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?  ~Socrates

Every human being has... an attendant spirit.... If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.  ~Lydia M. Child

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.  ~Will Durant

Every man over forty is responsible for his face.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.  Try to be better than yourself.  ~William Faulkner

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, not forgetting to leave others be as you would have them leave you be.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thought under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.  ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1595

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?  ~Mark Twain

God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.  ~Alfred Korzyybski

You must question a code of ethics that never impedes your progress.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient.  ~Bodie Thoene, Warsaw Requiem

I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

[T]hough of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1890

A man may be born a jackass; but it is his business if he makes himself a double one.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.  ~Ann Landers

Fortune does not change men; it unmasks them.  ~Suzanne Necker

The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale.  Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.  ~Ambrose Bierce

There is a great deal of self-will in the world, but very little genuine independence of character.  ~Frederick W. Faber

If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable.  ~Georges Courteline, La philosophie de Georges Courteline, 1917

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals.  I have within me the great pope, Self.  ~Martin Luther

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself?  There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.  You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.  ~Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.  ~Oscar Wilde

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.  ~Somerset Maugham

Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing.  ~Michael Iapoce, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Boardroom

You can't escape moral judgment through a legal loop hole.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back.  ~Abraham Lincoln

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.  ~Mary Renault

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes.  Or needs to.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Following the Equator, 1897

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown

The only guy I have to get better than is who I am right now.  ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.  ~George Washington

If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul.  ~William Shakespeare

The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to.  ~Arnold H. Glasow

What you allow, you encourage.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.  ~Max Lerner, Actions and Passions, 1949

It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.  ~A.A. Hodge

Have no fear of robbers or murderers.  They are external dangers, petty dangers.  We should fear ourselves.  Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murders.  The great dangers are within us.  Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses?  Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.  ~Victor Hugo

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.  ~Author Unknown

Do whatever you can to capture, or recapture, your life spark - unless it harms others, in which case suffer with as much happiness as you can muster.  Your nobility of spirit will spark itself.  ~Corri Alius

Be careful of selfish motives.  You can mistake them for principles and end up dying for them.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I did not use paint, I made myself up morally.  ~Eleanora Duse, Le Gaulois, 1922

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.  ~Mark Twain

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.  The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.  ~Albert Einstein, "What I Believe," Forum and Century, 1930

A healthy mind has an easy breath.  ~Author Unknown

We judge ourselves by our best acts and most noble intentions, but we will be judged by our last worst act.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.  ~B.C. Forbes

Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.  The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.  ~Buddha

The time is always right to do what is right.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.  You cannot shirk this and be a man.  To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may.  ~Mark Twain

Whether you end up in heaven or hell, it's not God's plan it's your own.  ~Cowboys & Aliens

'Tis better to suffer wrong than do it.  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.  ~G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman, 1905

Conscience is, in most, an anticipation of the opinion of others.  ~Henry Taylor

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.  ~Thomas Paine

Remember, if youre headed in the wrong direction, God allows U-turns!  ~Allison Gappa Bottke

Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.  ~Léon Blum

I'll tell you a big secret, my friend:  Don't wait for the Last Judgment.  It happens every day.  ~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956

If at first you don't succeed, do it like your mother told you.  ~Author Unknown

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.  ~Doug Larson

Take care that no one hates you justly.  ~Publilius Syrus

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.  ~Mark Twain

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.  ~William Lloyd Garrison

You can stand tall without standing on someone.  You can be a victor without having victims.  ~Harriet Woods

Rule #1:  Use your good judgment in all situations.  There will be no additional rules.  ~Nordstrom's Employee Handbook

Have a very good reason for everything you do.  ~Laurence Olivier



We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.  ~Albert Einstein


I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.  ~Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"


If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.  ~Stanley Garn


Common sense is not so common.  ~Voltaire


I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde.  ~Dolly Parton


We should not only use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow.  ~Woodrow Wilson


What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.  ~Sigmund Freud


Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.  ~George Scialabra


If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.  ~Emerson M. Pugh


The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.
~Alexander Pope


There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.  ~Don Herold


Mad, adj.:  Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Some people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly.  ~Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711


Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.  ~Henri Frederic Amiel


A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence.  ~Barbara Walters


The invention of IQ does a great disservice to creativity in education.  ~Joel Hildebrand


Primitive does not mean stupid.  ~Author Unknown


It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.  ~Albert Einstein


The difference between intelligence and education is this:  intelligence will make you a good living.  ~Charles F. Kettering


I think the world is run by C students.  ~Al McGuire


Character is higher than intellect.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.  ~Aldous Huxley


The Internet is the world's largest library.  It's just that all the books are on the floor.  ~John Allen Paulos

The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.  ~Jon Stewart

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.  ~Mitch Kapor, variation of a quote by Jerome Weisner (Getting an education from MIT is like taking a drink from a fire hose.)

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.  ~Bill Gates

Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.  ~Author Unknown

National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway.  ~Tim May

Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward.  ~Al-Waleed bin Talal

Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the Net, it looks like very soon everyone on Earth will have 15 megabytes of fame.  ~M.G. Sriram

A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click.  ~Author Unknown

What, exactly, is the Internet?  Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a "modem" can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo.  ~Dave Barry

I have an almost religious zeal - not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up.  ~Dan Millman

The Internet isn't free.  It just has an economy that makes no sense to capitalism.  ~Brad Shapcott

While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our config.sys settings.  ~Dave Barry

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.  ~Andrew Brown

Internet:  absolute communication, absolute isolation.  ~Paul Carvel

The Internet is clearly about more than sports scores and email now.  It's a place where we can conduct our democracy and get very large amounts of data to very large numbers of people.  ~Frank James

Advances in computer technology and the Internet have changed the way America works, learns, and communicates.  The Internet has become an integral part of America's economic, political, and social life.  ~Bill Clinton

One of the Internet's strengths is its ability to help consumers find the right needle in a digital haystack of data.  ~Jared Sandberg

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.  ~Robert Wilensky, 1996

You can't take something off the Internet - it's like taking pee out of a pool.  ~Author Unknown, 1995

Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as conversation at a bar.  ~George Lundberg

Television to brainwash us all and Internet to eliminate any last resistance.  ~Paul Carvel

The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control.  By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.  ~Vinton Cerf

Hooked on Internet?  Help is a just a click away.  ~Author Unknown

Entire new continents can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen.  Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the Department of Motor Vehicles.  ~Dave Barry, Dave Barry in Cyberspace

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years.  ~Rupert Murdoch

The advent of electronic mail is fostering a revival of "the familiar letter."  ~Author Unknown

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.  ~Penn Jillett

The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, "people without lives."  We don't care.  We have each other.  ~Dave Barry

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.  ~Eric Schmidt

The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity.  ~Clifford Stoll

Warning: the Internet may contain traces of nuts.  ~Author Unknown

Twitter is just a multiplayer notepad.  ~Ben Maddox

The big dispute between the government and Microsoft concerns the Internet "browser," which is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again later.  As you can imagine, the potential market for this service is huge, so Microsoft would like you to use its browser, and not somebody else's.  ~Dave Barry, 1998

Science fiction does not remain fiction for long.  And certainly not on the Internet.  ~Vinton Cerf

Blogs seem to have two magnetic poles, one attracting friends, the other repulsing relatives.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Sometimes I imagine a get-together where I introduce my family to my blogger friends and my blogger friends introduce my family to me.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Five years ago, we thought of the Web as a new medium, not a new economy.  ~Clement Mok

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.  ~Dave Barry

The Internet is the most powerful magnifier of slack ever invented.  ~Author Unknown

Almost overnight, the Internet's gone from a technical wonder to a business must.  ~Bill Schrader

Laying in bed this morning contemplating how amazing it would be if somehow Oscar Wilde and Mae West could twitter from the grave.  ~Dita Von Teese (@DitaVonTeese), May 7, 2009 on Twitter

Cutting through the acronyms and argot that littered the hearing testimony, the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation.  The government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation.  ~Stewart Dalzell, ruling on the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act, 1996

The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.  ~John Gilmore, 1993

#undernocircumstances shud sum1 feel its ok 2 tlk lik this. You have 140 characters. Use them and stop typing like you're illiterate.  ~@Lord_Voldemort7

A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it.  It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the Universe and move bits of it about.  ~Douglas Adams

The Internet interprets the US Congress as system damage and routes around it.  ~Jeanne DeVoto, take-off on a quote by John Gilmore

I believe that social media's greatest gift is in providing every person the forum to be themselves, speak their heart & soul.  ~Jeb Dickerson, April 25, 2009 on Twitter (@JebDickerson), www.howtomatter.com

The Internet is full.  Go away.  ~Author Unknown

If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a "fix" of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.  ~Rob Stampfli

A Mission Statement is a dense slab of words that a large organization produces when it needs to establish that its workers are not just sitting around downloading Internet porn.  ~Dave Barry

If you have a web site, it makes your small business look big.  ~Natalie Sequera

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.  ~Jim Clark

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense.  It accentuates what you would do anyway.  If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone.  If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.  ~Esther Dyson

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.  ~William Gibson

Every bit of software wants you to be "social."  What ever happened to being grumpy and alone in your writer's fugue?  ~Doug Green

On Twitter we get excited if someone follows us.  In real life we get really scared and run away.  ~Author Unknown

No matter how well you know the rules of netiquette, you will eventually offend someone who doesn't.  ~Don Rittner

There are 5,000 great people for every jerk on Usenet.  But that still is a lot of jerks.  Proceed with caution and eyes wide open.  ~Don Rittner

The greatest thing about the internet is that you can quote something and just totally make up the source.  ~Benjamin Franklin

I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist.  ~Richard Turner

A bird's song is beautiful, but if it never stops you feel like shooting it.  ~Laura Ainsley, on over-zealous tweeting

[W]e're into a whole new world with the Internet, and whenever we sort of cross another plateau in our development, there are those who seek to take advantage of it.  So this is a replay of things that have happened throughout our history.  ~Bill Clinton

The only social networking I did this weekend was with my family.  I actually let the battery on my laptop completely die.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

A blogger is constantly looking over his shoulder, for fear that he is not being followed.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics.  ~Denise Caruso, about the Internet

And bring me a hard copy of the Internet so I can do some serious surfing.  ~Scott Adams

First we thought the PC was a calculator.  Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII - and we thought it was a typewriter.  Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television.  With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.  ~Douglas Adams

I had a life once... now I have a computer.  ~Author Unknown

Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.  ~Andy Grove

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable.  It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.  ~Paul A. Samuelson

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the World Wide Web.... Now even my cat has its own page.  ~Bill Clinton, 1996

Using Twitter like a dandelion uses the wind... Spreading messages, not exactly knowing where they might go, some taking roots and blossoming, some making a adventurous journey through the air but not falling on fertile ground.  So what?  A process of beauty and joy.  ~Detlef Cordes, detlefcordes.org

The message for business people contemplating their place in cyberspace is simple and direct:  get linked or get lost.  ~Vic Sussman and Kenan Pollack

I calculated the total time that humans have waited for web pages to load.  It cancels out all the productivity gains of the information age.  Sometimes I think the web is a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.  ~Scott Adams

In cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.  ~John Perry Barlow

A blog is a message in a bottle, both in purpose and likely readership.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws.  The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists.  ~Thomas Nolle

There are three kinds of death in this world.  There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network.  ~Guy Almes

The trouble with the Internet is that it's replacing masturbation as a leisure activity.  ~Patrick Murray

YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, are merging.  The new program will be called YouTwitFace.  ~Author Unknown

Internet users are flocking to the Vatican's new website (so they say).  It turns out though, that most visitors are there to confess after visiting the Cindy Crawford site.  Now, the faithful don't have to kiss the Pope's ring - you just double click on it.  ~Author Unknown

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check.  ~Dan Quayle, attributed

Describing the Internet as the Network of Networks is like calling the Space Shuttle a thing that flies.  ~John Lester

A blogger is an average person who happens to have a need to count his friends every half hour.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The Internet is the trailer park for the soul.  ~Marilyn Manson

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution.  (OK, it doesn't take a genius, or even a politician, to figure out that big changes are afoot when we have a medium that lets someone throw up a virtual storefront on the Web and instantly gain access to the global market.)  ~Steven Levy, 1997

The Internet is a shallow and unreliable electronic repository of dirty pictures, inaccurate rumors, bad spelling and worse grammar, inhabited largely by people with no demonstrable social skills.  ~Author Unknown

We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.  ~Pierre Omidyar

America Online customers are upset because the company has decided to allow advertising in its chat rooms.  I can see why: you've got computer sex, you can download pornography, people are making dates with 10-year-olds.  Hey, what's this?  A Pepsi ad?  They're ruining the integrity of the Internet!  ~Jay Leno

I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr.  Seuss.  ~Dave Barry

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos...  two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hungry, but you haven't been nourished.  ~Clifford Stoll

Chances are, you now know that the marriage of the computer and the telephone is one of the century's seismic technical and economic developments.  In terms of potential social and economic impact, it is often likened to the introduction of assembly-line manufacturing or to the invention of the computer itself.  ~Author Unknown

It was a typical net.exercise - a screaming mob pounding on a greasy spot on the pavement, where used to lie the carcass of a dead horse.  ~Author Unknown

As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion.  ~Stewart Dalzell



Trust your own instinct.  Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.  ~Billy Wilder


Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.  ~Michael Burke


Trust yourself.  You know more than you think you do.  ~Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 1977


Instinct is untaught ability.  ~Bain


Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.  ~John Sterling


Trust your hunches.  They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.  ~Joyce Brothers


Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.  ~Florence Scovel Shinn


Reasoning at every step he treads,
Man yet mistakes his way,
Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads,
Are rarely known to stray.
~William Cowper


The most decisive actions of our life... are most often unconsidered actions.  ~André Gide, The Counterfeiters, 1926


A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.  ~Jawaharlal Nehru


Man will have replicated his own intelligence not when he teaches a computer to reason but when he teaches a computer to have a nagging feeling in its circuits.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


[T]he invisible intelligence that flows through everything in a purposeful fashion is also flowing through you.  ~Wayne Dyer


I suspect we have internal senses.  The mind's eye since Shakespeare's time has been proverbial; and we have also a mind's ear.  To say nothing of dreams, one certainly can listen to one's own thoughts, and hear them, or believe that one hears them: the strongest argument adducible in favour of our hearing any thing.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Instinct is the nose of the mind.  ~Madame De Girardin


I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.  ~Stanley Baldwin




Never waste jealousy on a real man:  it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.  ~George Bernard Shaw


In jealousy there is more self-love than love.  ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665


Envy is a waste of time.  ~Author Unknown


The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.  ~Baltasar Gracian


It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.  ~Lawrence Durrell, Justine, 1957


If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.  ~Charley Reese


He that is not jealous is not in love.  ~St. Augustine


The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.  ~William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693


Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.  ~Josh Billings


Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own.  ~Harold Coffin


Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.  ~Elizabeth Bowen


Envy is thin because it bites but never eats.  ~Spanish Proverb


Calamities are of two kinds:  misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Jealousy is simply and clearly the fear that you do not have value.  Jealousy scans for evidence to prove the point - that others will be preferred and rewarded more than you.  There is only one alternative - self-value.  If you cannot love yourself, you will not believe that you are loved.  You will always think it's a mistake or luck.  Take your eyes off others and turn the scanner within.  Find the seeds of your jealousy, clear the old voices and experiences.  Put all the energy into building your personal and emotional security.  Then you will be the one others envy, and you can remember the pain and reach out to them.  ~Jennifer James


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.  ~Maya Angelou


Jealousy is the great exaggerator.  ~Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, The Conspiracy of Fiesco, 1783


Jealousy and love are sisters.  ~Russian Proverb


As iron is eaten by rust, so are the envious consumed by envy.  ~Antisthenes


Jealousy is an awkward homage which inferiority renders to merit.  ~Mme. de Puixieux


Jealousy is the dragon in paradise; the hell of heaven; and the most bitter of the emotions because associated with the sweetest.  ~A.R. Orage


Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.  ~George Eliot


[T]he ear of jealousy heareth all things.  ~The Bible (Apocrypha), Wisdom of Solomon 1:10


Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.  ~Honore de Balzac






Jealousy injures us with the dagger of self-doubt.  ~Terri Guillemets


Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld


Envy is ignorance.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


O jealousy! thou magnifier of trifles.  ~Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller


Never love unless you can
Bear with all the faults of man:
Men will sometimes jealous be,
Though but little cause they see.
~Thomas Campion, "Never Love"


Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse:  envy alone wants both.  ~Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy


Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ.
~William Shakespeare, Othello


The jealous bring down the curse they fear upon their own heads.  ~Dorothy Dix


Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.  ~Mark Twain


Jealousy is always born with love, but does not always die with it.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims


Whoever envies another confesses his superiority.  ~Samuel Johnson, The Rambler


It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.  ~Aeschylus


O! beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
~William Shakespeare, Othello


Envy is a symptom of lack of appreciation of our own uniqueness and self worth.  Each of us has something to give that no one else has.  ~Elizabeth O'Connor


Envy assails the noblest:  the winds howl around the highest peaks.  ~Ovid


A show of envy is an insult to oneself.  ~Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko


Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.  ~William Hazlitt, Characteristics, 1823


Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits.  ~Paul Eldridge


The truest mark of being born with great qualities is being born without envy.  ~Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld


Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.  ~Havelock Ellis, On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue, 1937


Jealousy... is a mental cancer.  ~B.C. Forbes


If envy were a fever, all the world would be ill.  ~Danish Proverb


Envy slays itself by its own arrows.  ~Author Unknown


And oft, my jealousy shapes faults that are not.  ~William Shakespeare




The name of Jesus is the one lever that lifts the world.  ~Author Unknown


In every pang that rends the heart
The Man of Sorrows has a part.
~Michael Bruce


I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are very wise and very beautiful; but I never read in either of them:  "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden."  ~St Augustine


He changed sunset into sunrise.  ~Clement of Alexandria


Every character has an inward spring; let Christ be that spring.  Every action has a keynote; let Christ be that note, to which your whole life is attuned.  ~Henry Drummond


No man can follow Christ and go astray.  ~William H.P. Faunce


When Jesus comes, the shadows depart.  ~Author unknown, inscription on a Scottish castle


If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies.  Yet distance makes no difference.  He is praying for me.  ~Robert M. McCheyne


Sun of my soul!  Thou Saviour dear,
It is not night if Thou be near.
~John Keble


Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires.  But on what did we rest the creations of our genius?  Upon force.  Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte


The head that once was crowned with thorns
Is crowned with glory now.
~Thomas Kelley


They gave him a manger for a cradle, a carpenter's bench for a pulpit, thorns for a crown, and a cross for a throne.  He took them and made them the very glory of his career.  ~W.E. Orchard


The King of love my Shepherd is,
Whose goodness faileth never;
I nothing lack if I am His
And He is mine forever.
~Henry William Baker


What good is having someone who can walk on water if you don't follow in his footsteps?  ~Author Unknown


How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer's ear;
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.
~John Newton


The best of men
That e'er wore earth about Him was a Sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.
~Thomas Dekker


[Christ] does not give [men] light but from moment to moment; the instant He withdraws, all is darkness.... God does not give them a stock of holiness.  ~Johnn Wesley


Trumpets!  Lightnings!  The earth trembles!  But into the Virgin's womb thou didst descent with noiseless tread.  ~Agathias Scholasticus


And all the good you've done will soon be swept away,
You've begun to matter more than the things you say.
~Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber, Jesus Christ Superstar


I know of a world that is sunk in shame,
Where hearts oft faint and tire;
But I know of a Name, a precious Name,
That can set that world on fire:
Its sound is sweet, its letters flame.
I know of a Name, a precious Name,
'Tis Jesus.
~J. Wilbur Chapman


As the print of the seal on the wax is the express image of the seal itself, so Christ is the express image - the perfect representation of God.  ~St Ambrose


If Christ is not divine, every impulse of the Christian world falls to a lower octave, and light and love and hope decline.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


All the powers of darkness vanish;
Christ our Day-Star mounts the skies.
~Author Unknown


If Jesus Christ were to come today people would not even crucify him.  They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he has to say, and make fun of it.  ~Thomas Carlyle


We faintly hear, we dimly see,
In differing phrase we pray;
But dim or clear, we own in Him
The life, the truth, the way.
~John Greenleaf Whittier


If I might comprehend Jesus Christ, I could not believe on Him.  He would be no greater than myself.  Such is my consciousness of sin and inability that I must have a superhuman Saviour.  ~Daniel Webster


Had Christ the death of death to death
Not given death by dying,
The gates of life had never been
To mortals open lying.
~Author Unknown


I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.  Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


The wise still seek Him.  ~Author Unknown


The unique impression of Jesus upon mankind - whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of the world - is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.  Jesus belonged to the race of prophets.  He saw with open eyes the mystery of the soul.  One man was true to what is in you and me.  He, as I think, is the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of man.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Jesus died too soon.  He would have repudiated His doctrine if He had lived to my age.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


The dying Jesus is the evidence of God's anger toward sin; but the living Jesus is the proof of God's love and forgiveness.  ~Lorenz Eifert


The pearl is the queen of gems and the gem of queens.  ~Author Unknown

Jewelry takes people's minds off your wrinkles.  ~Sonja Henie

These gems have life in them:  their colors speak, say what words fail of.  ~George Eliot

I have always felt a gift diamond shines so much better than one you buy for yourself.  ~Mae West

There is in them a softer fire than the ruby, there is the brilliant purple of the amethyst, and the sea green of the emerald - all shining together in incredible union.  Some by their splendor rival the colors of the painters, others the flame of burning sulphur or of fire quickened by oil.  ~Pliny, about the opal

I never worry about diets.  The only carrots that interest me are the number of carats in a diamond.  ~Mae West

There are worlds in an opal.  ~Terri Guillemets

Perhaps time's definition of coal is the diamond.  ~Kahlil Gibran

As though pure white snow flashed and sparkled with the color of bright ruddy wine, and was overcome by this radiance.  ~Author unknown, about opal

Don't ever wear artistic jewelry; it wrecks a woman's reputation.  ~Colette, Gigi, 1944, translated

No gold-digging for me; I take diamonds!  We may be off the gold standard someday.  ~Mae West

This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip.  ~Richard Burton

I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever.  ~Anita Loos

Gold! gold! gold! gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold!
~Thomas Hood

The jeweler allows me to wear the sapphire blue lake on my finger, the emerald green leaves around my neck, and take the citrine sunset with me wherever I go.  Jewelry has become my daytime link to nature in an office with no windows.  And if I have to work late, there's nothing like diamond stars and a pearl full moon against an onyx night sky.  ~Astrid Alauda, "Office With No Windows"

My husband gave me a necklace.  It's fake.  I requested fake.  Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head.  ~Rita Rudner

Diamonds are only chunks of coal,
That stuck to their jobs, you see.
~Minnie Richard Smith, "Stick to Your Job"

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rich and rare were the gems she wore,
And a bright gold ring on her hand she bore.
~Thomas Moore

Let us not be too particular.  It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.  ~Mark Twain

October's child is born for woe,
And life's vicissitudes must know;
But lay an Opal on her breast,
And hope will lull those woes to rest.
~Author Unknown

Now the melancholy God protect thee, and the tailor make thy garments of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is opal.  ~William Shakespeare, The Twelfth Night

With melted opals for my milk,
Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
~Gwendolyn Brooks

Posy and pearls
Amethyst and gold
Forever you and I
Our precious love to hold.
~Astrid Alauda

The three rings of marriage are the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffering.  ~Author Unknown

But not gold in commercial quantities,
Just enough gold to make the engagement rings
And marriage rings of those who owned the farm.
What gold more innocent could one have asked for?
~Robert Frost

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage.  They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.  ~Rita Rudner

For years it has done its job.  It has led me not into temptation.  It has reminded my husband numerous times at parties that it's time to go home.  It has been a source of relief to a dinner companion.  It has been a status symbol in the maternity ward.  ~Erma Bombeck, about her wedding ring

A woman wears her tears like jewelry.  ~Author Unknown

Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children - honored as the jewelry of God....  ~Thomas De Quincey

emerald as heavy
as a golf course, ruby as dark
as an afterbirth,
diamond as white as sun
on the sea...
~Anne Sexton

Mysterious opals contain the wonders of the skies - sparkling rainbows, fireworks, and lightning, shifting and moving in their depths.  ~Author Unknown

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels:  it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.  ~Salvador Dal

Among Life's precious jewels,
Genuine and rare,
The one that we call friendship
Has worth beyond compare.
~Author Unknown

For me the diamond dawns are set
In rings of beauty...
~John Townsend Trowbridge

If my love to you can't be said in a posy, it can't be said in a library.  ~Grey Livingston

The questions are diamonds you hold in the light.  Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.  The same questions, asked again, bring you just the answers you need just the minute you need them.  ~Richard Bach, Running From Safety

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.  ~Thomas Carlyle

Our love is a posy
Encircling our lives.
~Grey Livingston

The story of Harold Ross, the New Yorker and me is a mere footnote to the story of our time, and we might as well face the truth that to researchers of the future, poking about among the ruins of time, we shall all be tiny glitters.  But then, so are diamonds.  ~James Thurber

Some asked me where the rubies grew,
And nothing I did say;
But with my finger pointed to
The lips of Julia.
~Robert Herrick

The rarest things in the world, next to a spirit of discernment, are diamonds and pearls.  ~Jean de la Bruyere, translated from French

The earth is like a beautiful bride who needs no manmade jewels to heighten her loveliness.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Poesy engraved on the ring
Love engraved on my heart.
~Astrid Alauda

It was as though he had cut up the sky, melted down a flower garden, tossed in some jewels and made it into glass.  ~Hugh McKean, this is not referring to jewelry but to Tiffany's glass

Some men's memory is like a box where a man should mingle his jewels with his old shoes.  ~George Savile

Hamlet:  Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?
Ophelia:  'Tis brief, my lord.
Hamlet:  As woman's love.
~William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Gold cannot be pure, and people cannot be perfect.  ~Chinese Proverb

I would rather be adorned by beauty of character than jewels.  Jewels are the gift of fortune, while character comes from within.  ~Titus Maccius Plautus

Not on one strand are all life's jewels strung.  ~William Morris

If wisdom and diamonds grew on the same tree we could soon tell how much men loved wisdom.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.  ~Chinese Proverb

Brief as the posy
Briefer yet my time
on earth with you.
Marry me.
~Grey Livingston

When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.  ~Peter Marshall

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well.  I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.  ~Harriet Beecher Stowe, Old Town Folks, 1869

Diamonds are a girl's best friend and a man's worst enemy.  ~Author Unknown

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

I had very good dentures once.  Some magnificent gold work.  It's the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.  ~Graham Greene

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.  ~Emma Goldman

Do not judge from mere appearances; for the lift laughter that bubbles on the lip often mantles over the depths of sadness, and the serious look may be the sober veil that covers a divine peace and joy.  The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart dances under coarse wool.  ~Edwin Hubbel Chapin

I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades.  I've lost a total of 789 pounds.  By all accounts, I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.  ~Erma Bombeck

But I do mean to say, I have heard her declare,
When at the same moment she had on a dress
Which cost five hundred dollars, and not a cent less,
And jewelry worth tem times more, I should guess,
That he had not a thing in the wide world to wear!
~William Allen Butler, "Nothing to Wear"

A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a witty person, but a pebble in the hands of a fool.  ~Author Unknown

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.  ~William Makepeace Thackeray

My crown is in my heart, not in my head,
Nor decked with diamonds and Indian stones,
Nor to be seen; my crown is called contentment;
A crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy.
~William Shakespeare

I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.  I'm not quite sure where that is just yet.  But I know what it's like.... It's like Tiffany's.... Not that I give a hoot about jewelry.  Diamonds, yes.  But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty...  ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1958, spoken by the character Holly Golightly

I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.  ~Mary Worley Montagu

Many individuals have, like uncut diamonds, shining qualities beneath a rough exterior.  ~Juvenal

Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way in the world, without them it is like a great rough diamond, very well in a closet by way of curiosity, and also for its intrinsic value; but most prized when polished.  ~Lord Chesterfield

In the age of acorns, before the times of Ceres, a single barley-corn had been of more value to mankind than all the diamonds of the mines of India.  ~Henry Brooke

Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies,
But keep your fancy free.

~A.E. Housman

There are three things extremely hard:  steel, a diamond, and to know one's self.  ~Benjamin Franklin

Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond districts of the mind.  ~William R. Alger

The countless gold of a merry heart,
The rubies and pearls of a loving eye,
The indolent never can bring to the mart,
Nor the secret hoard up in his treasury.
~William Blake

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

Clasp my love around your neck,
Wear my heart on your finger.
My soul will be your pendant:
I live to adorn you -
You're the precious one.
~Grey Livingston, "Genuine Adoration"

Why is it that men can be bastards and women must wear pearls and smile?  ~Lynn Hecht Schafren

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.  ~Federico Fellini

She is mine own,
And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.
~William Shakespeare

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.  ~Honore de Balzac

The most precious jewels are not made of stone, but of flesh.  ~Robert Ludlum

The number one sign you have nothing to do at work:  The 4th Division of Paperclips has overrun the Pushpin Infantry and General White-Out has called for a new skirmish.  ~Fred Barling, "Humorscope"

Find a job you like and you add five days to every week.  ~H. Jackson Brown

Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.  ~Doug Larson

Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America.  If I'm not there, I go to work.  ~Robert Orben

If a trainstation is where the train stops, what's a workstation?  ~Author Unknown

We pretend to work because they pretend to pay us.  ~Author Unknown

Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work.  ~John G. Pollard

When people go to work, they shouldn't have to leave their hearts at home.  ~Betty Bender

Many people quit looking for work when they find a job.  ~Author Unknown

A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D.  Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B.  ~"Fats" Domino

Monday is a lame way to spend 1/7 of your life.  ~Author Unknown

If you have a job without any aggravations, you don't have a job.  ~Malcolm S. Forbes

A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.  ~George Jean Nathan

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas.  If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.  ~Howard Aiken

A Mission Statement is a dense slab of words that a large organization produces when it needs to establish that its workers are not just sitting around downloading Internet porn.  ~Dave Barry

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.  ~James Matthew Barrie

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.  ~Arnold Toynbee

The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.  ~Stanley J. Randall

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.  ~Douglas Adams

I have never liked working.  To me a job is an invasion of privacy.  ~Danny McGoorty

Researchers at Harvard say that taking a power nap for an hour in the afternoon can totally refresh you.  They say that by the time you wake up you'll feel so good, you'll be able to start looking for a new job.  ~Jay Leno

Whenever it is possible, a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money.  ~William Lyon Phelps

I've met a few people in my time who were enthusiastic about hard work.  And it was just my luck that all of them happened to be men I was working for at the time.  ~Bill Gold

A baseball game is twice as much fun if you're seeing it on the company's time.  ~William C. Feather

If a man love the labour of any trade apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Your Business clothes are naturally attracted to staining liquids.  This attraction is strongest just before an important meeting.  ~Scott Adams

Law of the Alibi:  If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire.  ~Author Unknown

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

Don't waste time learning the "tricks of the trade."  Instead, learn the trade.  ~Attributed to both James Charlton and H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

You're no good unless you are a good assistant; and if you are, you're too good to be an assistant.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Corporations no longer try to fit square pegs into round holes; they just fit them into square cubicles.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao, until
You bring fresh toner.
~Bill Torcaso,  1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

A certificate does not make you certified.  Attitude, performance, commitment to self and team - these and a certificate make you certified.  ~Author Unknown

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.  ~Ogden Nash

There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.  ~William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues

Commuter - one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train,
And then rides back to shave again.
~E.B. White, "The Commuter," Poems and Sketches, 1982

Oh, you hate your job?  Why didn't you say so?  There's a support group for that.  It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar.  ~Drew Carey

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.  ~Confucius

There's no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting.  ~David Letterman

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

The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.  ~Robert Frost

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.  ~Niccolo Machiavelli

Wednesdays are like Mondays in the middle of the week!  ~Lee Fox Williams

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.  ~Honoré de Balzac, "Scnes de la vie Parisienne," La Maison Nucingen, 1838

Eventually the person who tries to fix the problem will be blamed for causing it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

For many people a job is more than an income - it's an important part of who we are.  So a career transition of any sort is one of the most unsettling experiences you can face in your life.  ~Paul Clitheroe

If you are the boss it's wise to remember that there are lots of things you don't know and lots of people who hope you won't find out.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies.  ~Rudyard Kipling

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.  ~C. Northcote Parkinson, 1958

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.  ~Dean Acheson

Today's Parenting Tip:  Treat a difficult child the way you would your boss at work.  Praise his achievements, ignore his tantrums and resist the urge to sit him down and explain to him how his brain is not yet fully developed.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

What is it that you like doing?  If you don't like it, get out of it, because you'll be lousy at it.  ~Lee Iacocca

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.  ~Bertrand Russell

What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.  ~Pearl Bailey

Retired is being twice tired, I've thought
First tired of working,
Then tired of not.
~Richard Armour

Statistics indicate that, as a result of overwork, modern executives are dropping like flies on the nation's golf courses.  ~Ira Wallach

I think my idea of retirement might be to one day work a 40-hour week.  ~Vince McMahon

If you don't like your job you don't strike.  You just go in every day and do it really half-assed.  That's the American way.  ~Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas.  ~Paula Poundstone

The best time to start thinking about your retirement is before the boss does.  ~Author Unknown

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

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.  ~Earl Warren

Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.  ~Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations

Justice is open to everyone in the same way as the Ritz Hotel.  ~Judge Sturgess

Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.  ~John Godfrey Saxe, 1869 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.  ~Judge Learned Hand, in P. Hamburger, The Great Judge, 1946

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men.  ~Ignazio Silone

When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.  ~Norm Crosby

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

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The trouble with the laws these days is that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs.  ~Author Unknown

Justice is incidental to law and order.  ~John Edgar Hoover

Justice may be blind, but she has very sophisticated listening devices.  ~Edgar Argo

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious.  We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.  ~Thomas Szasz

Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.  ~Erik Pepke

No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is.  ~Isaac Rosenfeld

Somebody recently figured out that we have 35 million laws to enforce the ten commandments.  ~Attributed to both Bert Masterson and Earl Wilson

I've never had a problem with drugs.  I've had problems with the police.  ~Keith Richards

There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick.  ~Grover Whalen

In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.  ~Lenny Bruce

Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms.  They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice.  ~Charles T. Sprading, Freedom and its Fundamentals

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers in the first place.  ~Lord Halifax

It's strange that men should take up crime when there are so many legal ways to be dishonest.  ~Author unknown, quoted in Sunshine magazine

Hunger makes a thief of any man.  ~Pearl S. Buck, quoted in You Said a Mouthful, edited by Ronald D. Fuchs

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.  ~Edmund Burke

But how is this legal plunder to be identified?  Quite simply.  See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.  See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.  ~Frederic Bastiat, The Law

The more laws the more offenders.  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

Law: the only game where the best players get to sit on the bench.  ~Author Unknown

It ain't no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don't break any.  ~Mae West

Law never made men a whit more just.  ~Henry David Thoreau

If you don't know there's a trampoline in the room, you're not going to dust the ceiling for prints.  ~From the television show Law & Order

Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.  ~Charles Evans Hughes

The jury, passing on the prisoner's life,
May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two
Guiltier than him they try.
~William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

In keeping people straight, principle is not as powerful as a policeman.  ~Abel Hermant, Le Bourgeois, 1906

When there's a single thief, it's robbery.  When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation.  ~Vanya Cohen

I'm convinced that every boy, in his heart, would rather steal second base than an automobile.  ~Tom Clark

We don't give our criminals much punishment, but we sure give 'em plenty of publicity.  ~Will Rogers

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.  ~William Ernest Hocking

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.  ~Jonathan Swift, A Critical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind, 1707

One of irony's greatest accomplishments is that one cannot punish the wrongdoing of another without committing a wrongdoing himself.  ~Anonymous

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.  ~Henry Ford

Poverty is the mother of crime.  ~Marcus Aurelius

When I see the Ten Most Wanted Lists... I always have this thought:  If we'd made them feel wanted earlier, they wouldn't be wanted now.  ~Edie Cantor

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.  ~Anatole France (Jacques Anatole François Thibault), The Red Lily, 1894

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.  ~Edmund Burke, Second Speech on Conciliation, 1775

Our government... teaches the whole people by its example.  If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.  ~Louis Dembitz Brandeis

Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer.  But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master.  ~Jesse Jackson

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts.  ~H.L. Mencken

The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.  ~Lady Marguerite Blessington

It is not a Justice System.  It is just a system.  ~Bob Enyart

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.  ~George Herbert

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.  ~Bertrand Russell, Look, 1954

A rule that cannot be bent will certainly be broken.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.  ~S.I. Hayakawa

Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion.  ~Wendell Phillips

An appeal... is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.  ~Finley Peter Dunne

Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised.  ~Edward Dahlberg, The Sorrows of Priapus, 1957

Law is not justice and a trial is not a scientific inquiry into truth.  A trial is the resolution of a dispute.  ~Edison Haines

It is easier to commit murder than to justify it.  ~Aemilius Papinianus

The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want.  ~Aristotle, Politics

Corn can't expect justice from a court composed of chickens.  ~African Proverb

Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.  ~Author Unknown

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.  ~Tacitus, Annals

The houses of lawyers are roofed with the skins of litigants.  ~Welsh Proverb

The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be.  ~Lao-tzu

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.  ~Honoré de Balzac

Just because the power is out doesn't mean we unplug the constitution.  ~Law and Order, "Darkness"

If you don't get enough time-outs as a child, you get them as a grownup.  ~Andrew Bonifacio

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.  ~Howard Scott

As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?  ~Will Rogers

A lawyer is a gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it for himself.  ~Lord Brougham

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.  ~Bill Vaughan

The United States is a nation of laws:  badly written and randomly enforced.  ~Frank Zappa

Rather let the crime of the guilty go unpunished than condemn the innocent.  ~Justinian I, Law Code, A.D. 535

Judge:  a law student who marks his own papers.  ~H.L. Mencken

Thieves for their robbery have authority
When judges steal themselves.
~William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.  ~Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel

Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth!  They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of the government.  ~Pierre Joseph Proudhon, quoted in The Match!

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law

There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court.  ~Clarence Darrow, 1936

If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.  ~Lysander Spooner, Trial by Jury

It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it.  ~Remy de Gourmont

It is hard to say whether doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery.  ~Edmund Burke

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime.  Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime.  It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.  ~Emma Goldman, Anarchism

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.  ~Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own

Having your fate rest in the hands of a jury is the same as entrusting yourself to surgery with a mentally retarded doctor.  ~Bill Messing, quoted in Dream World, by Fred Woodworth

Good lawyers know the law; great lawyers know the judge.  ~Author Unknown

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.  ~Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe

Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained.  True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests.  In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.  ~Emma Goldman, Anarchism

Hug a police officer.  It's the law!  ~Author Unknown

Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices.  This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please.  ~David Dudley Field

Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes.  The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.  As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort - as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.  ~Robert Ingersoll, Crimes Against Criminals

Every crime is born of necessity.  If you want less crime, you must change the conditions.  Poverty makes crime.  Want, rags, crusts, misfortune - all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal.  And what do you do with him?  You punish him.  Why not punish a man for having consumption?  The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical.  What do you do with the criminal?  You send him to the penitentiary.  Is he made better?  Worse.  The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him.  You mark him.  You put him in stripes.  At night you put him in darkness.  His feeling for revenge grows.  You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won't let him reform if he wants to.  ~Robert Ingersoll, A Lay Sermon



How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.  ~Wayne Dyer


My actions are my only true belongings.  I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.  My actions are the ground upon which I stand.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh


According to the karma of past actions, one's destiny unfolds, even though everyone wants to be so lucky.  ~Sri Guru Granth Sahib


Worthless people blame their karma.  ~Burmese Proverb


As she has planted, so does she harvest; such is the field of karma.  ~Sri Guru Granth Sahib


Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.  ~Tryon Edwards


There are the waves and there is the wind, seen and unseen forces.  Everyone has these same elements in their lives, the seen and unseen, karma and free will.  ~Kuan Yin


Whatever we do lays a seed in our deepest consciousness, and one day that seed will grow.  ~Sakyong Mipham


Like gravity, karma is so basic we often don't even notice it.  ~Sakyong Mipham


Before you begin on the journey of revenge, dig two graves.  ~Proverb


O youth or young man, who fancy that you are neglected by the gods, know that if you become worse, you shall go to worse souls, or if better to the better  In every succession of life and death, you will do and suffer what like may fitly suffer at the hands of like.  This is the justice of heaven.  ~Plato


Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.  ~George Eliot


There is a destiny that makes us brothers: none goes his way alone,
All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.
~Edwin Markham


Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven.  ~Mary Baker Eddy


Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.  ~William Shakespeare


Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.  ~Edwin Hubbel Chapin


Belief in karma ought to make the life pure, strong, serene, and glad.  Only our own deeds can hinder us; only our own will can fetter us.  Once let men recognize this truth, and the hour of their liberation has struck.  Nature cannot enslave the soul that by wisdom has gained power and uses both in love.  ~Annie Besant


My karma ran over your dogma.  ~Author Unknown


As the blazing fire reduces wood to ashes, similarly, the fire of Self-knowledge reduces all Karma to ashes.  ~Bhagavad Gita


Those who were pre-ordained to have no good karma at all - gazing into the lamp of emotional attachment, they are burnt, like moths in a flame.  ~Sri Guru Granth Sahib


If a householder moulds himself according to the circumstances just like nature moulds Herself according to seasons and performs his Karma then only shall he acquire happiness.  ~Rig Veda


Without the karma of good deeds, they are only destroying themselves.  ~Sri Guru Granth Sahib


Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein.  ~Proverb


The cool thing about free will is that even if one has a huge bag of karma there is still a lot of free will for all those souls coming into the world.  ~Kuan Yin


Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get.  ~Frederick Douglas


People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become.  And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.  ~Edith Wharton


Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If you haven't any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.  ~Bob Hope

Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up.  ~Jesse Jackson

A good character is the best tombstone.  Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered.  Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.  ~Charles H. Spurgeon

It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.  ~Author Unknown

Today, give a stranger one of your smiles.  It might be the only sunshine he sees all day.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Treat everyone with politeness, even those who are rude to you - not because they are nice, but because you are.  ~Author Unknown

What this world needs is a new kind of army - the army of the kind.  ~Cleveland Amory

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion.  ~Dalai Lama

During my second year of nursing school our professor gave us a quiz.  I breezed through the questions until I read the last one:  "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?"  Surely this was a joke.  I had seen the cleaning woman several times, but how would I know her name?  I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank.  Before the class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our grade.  "Absolutely," the professor said.  "In your careers, you will meet many people.  All are significant.  They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello."  I've never forgotten that lesson.  I also learned her name was Dorothy.  ~Joann C. Jones

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.  ~Rudyard Kipling

Don't be yourself - be someone a little nicer.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

There is no greater loan than a sympathetic ear.  ~Frank Tyger

Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone in order to do it.  ~Author Unknown

A fellow who does things that count, doesn't usually stop to count them.  ~Variation of a saying by Albert Einstein

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.  ~Mark Twain

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.  ~Seneca

A kind word is like a Spring day.  ~Russian Proverb

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.  ~Samuel Johnson

There is one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life - reciprocity.  ~Confucius

Don't wait for people to be friendly, show them how.  ~Author Unknown

The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway.  ~Henry Boye

When I was young, I admired clever people.  Now that I am old, I admire kind people.  ~Abraham Joshua Heschel

If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape?  No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love.  ~Mark Twain

Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.
~Adam Lindsay Gordon

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong.  Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.  ~George Washington Carver

You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.  ~John Wooden

Kindness, like a boomerang, always returns.  ~Author Unknown

If those who owe us nothing gave us nothing, how poor we would be.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The best portion of a good man's life - his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.  ~William Wordsworth

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.  ~Winston Churchill

Real generosity is doing something nice for someone who will never find out.  ~Frank A. Clark

The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid.  ~Author Unknown

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.  ~Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt

In a world full of people who couldn't care less, be someone who couldn't care more.  ~Author Unknown

Love thy neighbor, and if it requires that you bend your understanding of the truth, the Truth will understand.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.  ~Epictetus

One can pay back the loan of gold, but one dies forever in debt to those who are kind.  ~Malayan Proverb

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.  ~Marian Wright Edelman

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.  ~Leo Buscaglia

Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.  ~John Watson, 1897, commonly attributed to Plato as "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

[E]very day you should reach out and touch someone.  People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back.  ~Maya Angelou

This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched.  It is a fact, however surprising.  And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle; we are bound not to irritate him, nor press hardly upon him nor help his lower self.  ~John Watson, 1903

A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses.  ~Chinese Proverb

There is no effect more disproportionate to its cause than the happiness bestowed by a small compliment.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

As the bus slowed down at the crowded bus stop, the Pakistani bus conductor leaned from the platform and called out, "Six only!"  The bus stopped.  He counted on six passengers, rang the bell, and then, as the bus moved off, called to those left behind:  "So sorry, plenty of room in my heart - but the bus is full."  He left behind a row of smiling faces.  It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it.  ~The Friendship Book of Francis Gay, 1977

We always prefer war on our own terms to peace on someone else's.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Have you had a kindness shown?
Pass it on;
'Twas not given for thee alone,
Pass it on;
Let it travel down the years,
Let it wipe another's tears,
'Til in Heaven the deed appears -
Pass it on.
~Henry Burton, Pass It On

Make it a practice to judge persons and things in the most favorable light at all times and under all circumstances.  ~Saint Vincent de Paul

Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something.  ~H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Be thoughtful of others and you will not be shy, for they are incompatible addictions.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The best way to knock the chip off your neighbor's shoulder is to pat him on the back.  ~Author Unknown

Open your heart - open it wide; someone is standing outside.  ~Quoted in Believe: A Christmas Treasury by Mary Engelbreit

Because that's what kindness is.  It's not doing something for someone else because they can't, but because you can.  ~Andrew Iskander

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight.  Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward.  Your life will never be the same again.  ~Og Mandino

If every man's internal care
Were written on his brow,
How many would our pity share
Who raise our envy now?
~Peitro Metastasio

Kindness is the greatest wisdom.  ~Author Unknown

A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.  ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"

If thou are a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf.  ~Thomas Fuller

Even when you do not feel big hearted, you can give yourself permission to act that way.  ~Lama Willa Miller

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.  ~Alexander Pope, Epilogue to the Satires, 1738

Life is short but there is always time for courtesy.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Social Aims

The best practical advice I can give to the present generation is to practice the virtue which the Christians call love.  ~Bertrand Russell

If we cannot be clever, we can always be kind.  ~Alfred Fripp

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.  ~Max Beerbohm

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.  ~Booker T. Washington

The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.  ~John E. Southard

Getting money is not all a man's business:  to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.  ~Samuel Johnson

The first and highest law must be the love of man to man.  Homo homini Deus est - this is the supreme practical maxim, this is the turning point of the world's History.  ~Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

Love someone who doesn't deserve it.  ~Author Unknown

The more sympathy you give, the less you need.  ~Malcolm S. Forbes

Treat everyone you meet as if they are God in drag.  ~Ram Dass

Always carry with you a little reasonable doubt, should you meet someone who needs to be found innocent.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world.  The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.  ~Baha'u'llah

There are no traffic jams when you go the extra mile.  ~Attributed to both Zig Ziglar and Dr. Kenneth McFarland

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.  ~Nelson Henderson

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.  ~H.L. Mencken

To err on the side of kindness is seldom an error.  ~Liz Armbruster, on www.robertbrault.com

Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.  ~James Matthew Barrie

In about the same degree as you are helpful, you will be happy.  ~Karl Reiland

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
~William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, much later adapted to "So shines a good deed in a weary world" by David Seltzer for the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory  (Thanks Aidan!)

I expect to pass through life but once.  If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.  ~William Penn

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

How beautiful a day can be
When kindness touches it!
~George Elliston

Sometimes someone says something really small, and it just fits right into this empty place in your heart.  ~From the television show My So-Called Life

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim.  ~William Feather

Real charity doesn't care if it's tax-deductible or not.  ~Dan Bennett

When your suffering is a little greater than my suffering I feel that I am a little cruel.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.  ~Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Always be a little kinder than necessary.  ~James M. Barrie

If you step on people in this life, you're going to come back as a cockroach.  ~Willie Davis

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.  ~Albert Einstein

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.  ~Ingrid Bergman

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point.  That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know.  ~Mistinguett (Jeanne Bourgeois), Theatre Arts, December 1955

Is not a kiss the very autograph of love?  ~Henry Finck

A kiss, when all is said, what is it?
A rosy dot placed on the "i" in loving;
'Tis a secret told to the mouth instead of to the ear.
~Edmond Rostand

Kissing is a means of getting two people so close together that they can't see anything wrong with each other.  ~Rene Yasenek

How did it happen that their lips came together?  How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill?  A kiss, and all was said.  ~Victor Hugo

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

A kiss that speaks volumes is seldom a first edition.  ~Clare Whiting

I am in favor of preserving the French habit of kissing ladies' hands - after all, one must start somewhere.  ~Sacha Guitry

I kissed my first girl and smoked my first cigarette on the same day.  I haven't had time for tobacco since.  ~Arturo Toscanini

Give me a kisse, and to that kisse a score;
Then to that twenty, adde a hundred more;
A thousand to that hundred; so kisse on,
To make that thousand up a million;
Treble that million, and when that is done,
Let's kisse afresh, as when we first begun.
~Robert Herrick, "To Anthea (III)"

In trying to get our own way, we should remember that kisses are sweeter than whine.  ~Author Unknown

Stolen kisses require an accomplice.  ~Just One Fool Thing After Another: A Cowfolks' Guide to Romance

Always kiss your children goodnight, even if they're already asleep.  ~H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

kisses are a better fate
than wisdom.
~e.e. cummings

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.  ~Thomas Carlyle

A man snatches the first kiss, pleads for the second, demands the third, takes the fourth, accepts the fifth - and endures all the rest.  ~Helen Rowland

Love's first snow-drop, virgin kiss.  ~Robert Burns

'Twas not my lips you kissed
But my soul
~Judy Garland

What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?  ~Robert Browning, A Toccata of Galuppi's

Once he drew 
With one long kiss my whole soul thro'
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

People who throw kisses are mighty hopelessly lazy.  ~Bob Hope

A kiss without a hug is like a flower without the fragrance.  ~Proverb

A kiss is just a pleasant reminder that two heads are better than one.  ~Author Unknown

Were kisses all the joys in bed,
One woman would another wed.
~William Shakespeare, Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music, IV

What lies lurk in kisses.  ~Heinrich Heine

Happiness is like a kiss - it feels best when you give it to someone else.  ~Author Unknown

The soul that can speak through the eyes can also kiss with a gaze.  ~Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

"May I print a kiss on your lips?" I said,
And she nodded her full permission:
So we went to press and I rather guess
We printed a full edition.
~Joseph Lilientha

Kissing is like drinking salted water.  You drink, and your thirst increases.  ~Chinese Proverb

[T]hen I did the simplest thing in the world.  I leaned down... and kissed him.  And the world cracked open.  ~Agnes de Mille

A kiss seals two souls for a moment in time.  ~Levende Waters

See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea: -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love's Philosophy

Her kisses left something to be desired... the rest of her.  ~Author Unknown

I ran up the door, opened the stairs, said my pajamas and put on my prayers - turned off my bed, tumbled into my light, and all because he kissed me good-night!  ~Author Unknown

Never a lip is curved with pain
That can't be kissed into smile again.
~Brete Harte

The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial one in any love story.  ~Emil Ludwig

At the first kiss I felt
Something melt inside me
That hurt in an exquisite way
All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish,
All the secrets that slept deep within me came awake,
Everything was transformed and enchanted
And made sense.
~Hermann Hesse

A kiss is the upper persuasion for a lower invasion.  ~Author Unknown

The only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child.  ~Joe Houldsworth

Kisses kept are wasted;
Love is to be tasted.
There are some you love, I know;
Be not loathe to tell them so.
Lips go dry and eyes grow wet
Waiting to be warmly met.
Keep them not in waiting yet;
Kisses kept are wasted.
~Edmund Vance Cooke

Kisses are like tears, the only real ones are the ones you can't hold back.  ~Author Unknown

A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years.  ~Rupert Brooke

How delicious is the winning 
of a kiss at love's beginning.
~Thomas Campbell

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Professor at the Breakfast-Table

Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.
~Dorothy Parker

Friends are kisses blown to us by angels.  ~Author Unknown

Each kiss a heart-quake...  ~Lord Byron, Don Juan

[L]eave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
~Ben Jonson, To Celia

It takes a lot of experience for a girl to kiss like a beginner.  ~Ladies Home Journal, 1948

Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.  ~Margaret Mitchell

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me;
Say I'm growing old, but add Jenny kissed me.
~Leigh Hunt, Jenny Kissed Me

A man's kiss is his signature.  ~Mae West

Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made
For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.
~William Shakespeare

(So,when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)
~e.e. cummings

I wasn't kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth.  ~Chico Marx

I married the first man I ever kissed.  When I tell this to my children they just about throw up.  ~Barbara Bush

A man had given all other bliss,
And all his worldly worth for this, 
To waste his whole heart in one kiss 
Upon her perfect lips.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ancient lovers believed a kiss would literally unite their souls, because the spirit was said to be carried in one's breath.  ~Eve Glicksman



The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.  ~Ralph W. Sockman


Knowledge is a sacred cow, and my problem will be how we can milk her while keeping clear of her horns.  ~Albert Szent-Györgyi, "Teaching and Expanding Knowledge," Science, 4 December 1964


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


Knowledge is haunted by the ghost of past opinion.  ~Author Unknown


A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.  ~Michael Garrett Marino


In your thirst for knowledge, be sure not to drown in all the information.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book


What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.  ~George Bernard Shaw


One part of knowledge consists in being ignorant of such things as are not worthy to be known.  ~Crates


The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.  ~Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers


Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities:  the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.  ~Abbott Lawrence Lowell


All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.  ~Maurice Maeterlinck


Knowledge is the true organ of sight, not the eyes.  ~Panchatantra


We are here and now.  Further than that, all knowledge is moonshine.  ~H.L. Mencken


If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.  ~Susanne K. Langer


To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Oftentimes the supposed increasers of knowledge have only given a new name, and a worse, to what every body knew before.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?  ~Thomas Henry Huxley


Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.  ~Carl G. Jung




No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.  ~John Donne


Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.  ~Alexander the Great


In union there is strength.  ~Aesop


So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth.  ~Bahá'u'lláh


The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.  ~James Baldwin


Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.  ~Booker T. Washington


Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.  ~Virginia Burden, The Process of Intuition


Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.  ~Kenyan Proverb


One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion.  One is not just a man.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell


"Independence"... [is] middle-class blasphemy.  We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.  ~G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion, 1912


A snowflake is one of God's most fragile creations, but look what they can do when they stick together!  ~Author Unknown


You cannot contribute anything to the ideal condition of mind and heart known as Brotherhood, however much you preach, posture, or agree, unless you live it.  ~Faith Baldwin


No man is free who is not a master of himself.  ~Epictetus


Every man is the architect of his own fortune.  ~Sallust


Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.  ~Seneca


I don't know what the future may hold, but I know who holds the future.  ~Ralph Abernathy


We don't accomplish anything in this world alone... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something.  ~Sandra Day O'Connor


Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.  ~Henry Ford


Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.  ~Helen Keller


We all participate in weaving the social fabric; we should therefore all participate in patching the fabric when it develops holes.  ~Anne C. Weisberg


Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.  ~Mohammed Ali


A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's.  ~Richard Whately


We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.  ~Herman Melville


We cannot destroy kindred:  our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break.  ~Marquise de Sévigné


I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.  I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Each of us is a being in himself and a being in society, each of us needs to understand himself and understand others, take care of others and be taken care of himself.  ~Haniel Long


Everybody can be great.  Because anybody can serve.  You don't have to have a college degree to serve.  You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.... You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace.  A soul generated by love.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.


A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.  ~Henry Ford


We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.  ~Native American Proverb


Many hands make light work.  ~John Heywood


Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.  ~Walter Savage Landor


The purpose of life is a life of purpose.  ~Robert Byrne


[I]f you have a purpose in which you can believe, there's no end to the amount of things you can accomplish.  ~Marian Anderson


Faith is like radar that sees through the fog.  ~Corrie Ten Boom, Tramp for the Lord


Faith is courage; it is creative while despair is always destructive.  ~David S. Muzzey


Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.  ~Rabindranath Tagore


Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.  ~Victor Hugo


Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.  ~Martin Luther King Jr.


Faith makes the discords of the present the harmonies of the future.  ~Robert Collyer


We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.  ~Franklin Delano Roosevelt


For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact.  It is a historical truth.  No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.  ~Maya Angelou


"I must do something" always solves more problems than "Something must be done."  ~Author Unknown


The time is always right to do what is right.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.


Act as if what you do makes a difference.  It does.  ~William James


We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.  ~Langston Hughes


Keywords for the above quotes:  Nguzo Saba, Principles, Umoja, Unity, Kujichagulia, Self-Determination, Ujima, Collective Work, Responsibility, Ujamaa, Cooperative Economics, Nia, Purpose, Kuumba, Creativity, Imani, Faith


I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade.  It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.  ~D.H. Lawrence

Heaven is blessed with perfect rest but the blessing of earth is toil.  ~Henry van Dyke

If you want to kill time, try working it to death.  ~Sam Levonson

To labor is to pray.  ~Motto of the Benedictines

A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work.  ~Geoffrey Norman

The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.  ~Isak Dinesen

Sweat cleanses from the inside.  It comes from places a shower will never reach.  ~George Sheehan

No man is born into the world whose work
Is not born with him; there is always work
And tools to work withal, for those who will....
~James Russell Lowell

Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.  ~Charles Wagner

God sells us all things at the price of labor.  ~Leonardo da Vinci

Nothing got without pains but an ill name and long nails.  ~Scottish Proverb

"I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want."  ~Voltaire

Boredom is a sickness the cure for which is work; pleasure is only a palliative.  ~Le Duc de Lévis, Mémoires

What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions.  ~Arnold Glasow

Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.  ~Marc Chagall

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair.  Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.  ~Charles Baudelaire

When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.  ~Pablo Picasso

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.  ~Oscar Wilde

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies.  Very few people can endure much leisure.  ~Gerald Brenan, Thoughts in a Dry Season

Without labor nothing prospers.  ~Sophocles

Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body.  No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.  ~Thomas Jefferson, 1787

It is only the constant exertion and working of our sensitive, intellectual, moral, and physical machinery that keep us from rusting, and so becoming useless.  ~Charles Simmons

Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.  It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.  ~Adam Smith

Take a man out of the trenches, make him a straw boss, and he develops a belly.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Employment is nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness.  ~Galen

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.  ~Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

For me the diamond dawns are set
In rings of beauty,
And all my ways are dewy wet
With pleasant duty.
~John Townsend Trowbridge

People love chopping wood.  In this activity one immediately sees results.  ~Albert Einstein

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.  ~Alice Walker

A mind always employed is always happy.  This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.  ~Thomas Jefferson

God give me work, till my life shall end
And life, till my work is done.
~Epitaph of Winifred Holtby

A man who has no office to go to - I don't care who he is - is a trial of which you can have no conception.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.  ~Henry Ford

Temperance and labor are the two true physicians of man.  ~Jean Jacques Rousseau

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.  ~Thomas A. Edison

Sweat silently.  Let's have no squawking about a little expenditure of energy.  ~Martin H. Fischer

It is better to wear out than to rust out.  ~Richard Cumberland

We seem as a nation to be suffering from a mania for play.  The huge development of pleasure-chasing automobiles merely symbolizes our universal restless eagerness to be running after something, anything, that we can classify as diversion.  Under pressure from tormenting constituents our legislatures are piling up holidays.  And the cry of labor everywhere is "Cut down hours; cut down hours," until it seems as if brief, tired minutes were all that would be left for work.  The obvious deduction is that work is always something to be got rid of, as if it were a curse.  Yet life is work.  ~Author unknown, editorial from Labor Digest, June 1922, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren

When everything is finished, the mornings are sad.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Maybe a person's time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.  ~Frank A. Clark

Thank God every morning when you get up, that you have something to do that day which must be done, whether you like it or not.  Being forced to work and forced to do your best will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle never know.  ~Charles Kingsley



Heaven is blessed with perfect rest but the blessing of earth is toil.  ~Henry van Dyke


God sells us all things at the price of labor.  ~Leonardo da Vinci


The man who doesn't relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.  ~Marc Chagall


Without labor nothing prospers.  ~Sophocles


Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.  It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.  ~Adam Smith


Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.  ~Ovid


Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.  ~Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard


A mind always employed is always happy.  This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.  ~Thomas Jefferson


God give me work, till my life shall end
And life, till my work is done.
~Epitaph of Winifred Holtby


Sometimes it's important to work for that pot of gold.  But other times it's essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow.  ~Douglas Pagels, These Are the Gifts I'd Like to Give to You


The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.  ~H.L. Mencken


There is precious little hope to be got out of whatever keeps us industrious, but there is a chance for us whenever we cease work and become stargazers.  ~H.M. Tomlinson


The end of labor is to gain leisure.  ~Aristotle


It is labour indeed that puts the difference on everything.  ~John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690


If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend.  ~Doug Larson


Labor Day is a glorious holiday because your child will be going back to school the next day.  It would have been called Independence Day, but that name was already taken.  ~Bill Dodds


We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.  ~John Locke

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.  ~Julia Penelope

The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant.  If omitted in one place, they turn up in another.  When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells."  ~Author Unknown

English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.  ~Author Unknown

The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction.  It is up to the individual to ask himself:  Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self?  When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.  ~D.H. Lawrence

Lymph, v.:  to walk with a lisp.  ~From a Washington Post reader submission word contest

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.  ~Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907

One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.  ~Kevin Smith

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.  ~Jane Wagner

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.  ~Quentin Crisp

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.  ~Carl Sandburg, New York Times, 13 February 1959

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.  ~Franklin P. Jones

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.  ~Mark Twain

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.  ~Marshall Lumsden

What words say does not last.  The words last.  Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.  ~Abigail Adams

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.  ~Wendell L. Willkie

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.  ~Edward R. Murrow

If you can speak three languages you're trilingual.  If you can speak two languages you're bilingual.  If you can speak only one language you're an American.  ~Author Unknown

Sometimes it's just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams - assuming you don't drown in the metaphor.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I like the word "indolence." It makes my laziness seem classy.  ~Bern Williams

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.  ~Samuel Johnson

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.  ~Walter Kaufmann

The English language is nobody's special property.  It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.  ~Derek Walcott

Language is the dress of thought.  ~Samuel Johnson

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.  ~Aldous Huxley

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.  ~Lewis Thomas

Any noun can be verbed  ~Variation of a saying by Alan J. Perlis (see below)

In English every word can be verbed.  ~Alan J. Perlis

Verbing weirds language.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.  ~William James

Almost all words do have color and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone's eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too.  ~Gladys Taber

There's always something that you can't pin down with words.  Words fall flat all the time - look at the word dust around you.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Be not the slave of Words.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book I, chapter 8

Words, too, have genuine substance - mass and weight and specific gravity.  ~Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.  When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.  ~George Orwell

Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.  ~Mark Amidon

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.  ~Martin H. Fischer

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.  ~Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Note-Books

I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose.  I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries.  Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Our language is funny - a fat chance and slim chance are the same thing.  ~J. Gustav White

Words want to be free!  ~Author Unknown

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book II, chapter 4

Oaths are but words, and words but wind.  ~Samuel Butler (1612-1680), Hudribas

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.  There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.  ~Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity.  ~Gustave Flaubert

Words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Im memoriam A.H.H.," 1850

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.  ~Winston Churchill

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom.  For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Swearing was invented as a compromise between running away and fighting.  ~Peter Finley Dunne, Mr. Dooley's Opinions, 1900

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.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous name, the names of the others being monosyllabic.  This advantage of the Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling out some simple Greek word, like "epixoriambikos."  Still, it is now thought by the learned that other agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have been concerned in the decline of "the glory that was Greece" and the rise of "the grandeur that was Rome."  There can be no doubt, however, that by simplifying the name of W (calling it "wow," for example) our civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better endured.  ~Ambrose Bierce

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate.  They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.  ~Mark Twain

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise - that which is common to you, me, and everybody.  ~Thomas Earnest Hulme, Speculations, 1923

Let's not become so worried about not offending anybody that we lose the ability to distinguish between respect and paranoia.  ~Larry King, about political correctness, How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: The Secrets of Good Communication

The PC [political correctness] movement exists not in order to improve the well-being of those whose oppression it purports to combat.  Rather, its purpose is to wrap its proponents in a kind of verbal comfort-blanket.  ~Erik Kowal, as posted on wordwizard.com

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.  ~Samuel Butler

A different language is a different vision of life.  ~Federico Fellini

If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

"Children, don't speak so coarsely," said Mr. Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters' speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it.  He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.  ~Robertson Davies, Tempest Tost

When a German dives into a sentence, you won't see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.  ~Mark Twain

Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.  ~Author Unknown

Learn a new language and get a new soul.  ~Czech Proverb

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.  ~George Orwell

The word "good" has many meanings.  For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.  ~G.K. Chesterton





Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night.  ~Chuck Palahniuk





The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon.  There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.  ~Norman Mailer





Las Vegas:  all the amenities of modern society in a habitat unfit to grow a tomato.  ~Jason Love


There is always a sneer in Las Vegas.  The mountains around it sneer.  The desert sneers.  And arrogant in the middle of its wide valley, dominating those diligent sprawling suburbs, the downtown city sneers like anything.  ~Jan Morris


For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.  ~Hunter S. Thompson


Las Vegas is sort of like how God would do it if he had money.  ~Steve Wynn


It's a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and retard the dawn, when everybody knows that if you're feeling lucky you're really feeling time in its rawest form, and if you're not feeling lucky, they've got a clock at the bus station.  ~Michael Herr


Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs.  ~Tom Wolfe


I mean, what do you do in Las Vegas?  You gamble - and you go to strip clubs.  ~Scott Caan


Las Vegas is Everyman's cut-rate Babylon.  Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperor's orgy is now a democratic institution.  "Topless Pizza Lunch."  ~Alistair Cooke


It's hard to imagine a bigger desert oasis than Las Vegas.  ~Cinnamon Stomberger


What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.  ~Jeff Candido and Jason Hoff, advertising slogan written for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, 2002


Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City.  Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up by the sheer will of true believers.  ~Sarah Vowell


In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.  ~Steven Wright


Las Vegas - my favorite desert mirage.  ~Val Saintsbury


For me, Vegas is a vacation from being overinhibited, in the highly overinhabited yet uninhabitable city of complete uninhibition.  ~Tammy Bloemzaken


The difference between Las Vegas and Atlantic City is the difference between getting conned by a beautiful call girl and getting mugged by a crack head.  ~Drew Carey


The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town.  The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside.  The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays.  Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert.  Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange.  But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion.  Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert - a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.  ~Jean Baudrillard


In the case of an earthquake hitting Las Vegas, be sure to go straight to the Keno Lounge.  Nothing ever gets hit there.  ~Author Unknown


Retirement is like a long vacation in Las Vegas.  The goal is to enjoy it the fullest, but not so fully that you run out of money.  ~Jonathan Clements


I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.  ~Woody Allen

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.  ~Jean Houston

Even if there is nothing to laugh about, laugh on credit.  ~Author Unknown

Mirth is God's medicine.  Everybody ought to bathe in it.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.  ~Jack Handey, "Deep Thoughts," Saturday Night Live

The most wasted of all days is that in which we have not laughed.  ~Nicolas Chamfort, translated from French

Laughter is an instant vacation.  ~Milton Berle

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!  ~Agnes Repplier

So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.  ~Gordon W. Allport

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.  ~Victor Borge

What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul.  ~Yiddish Proverb

When people are laughing, they're generally not killing each other.  ~Alan Alda

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion.  I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.  ~Kurt Vonnegut

A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book.  ~Irish Proverb

Laughter gives us distance.  It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.  ~Bob Newhart

A hearty laugh gives one a dry cleaning, while a good cry is a wet wash.  ~Puzant Kevork Thomajan

There can never be enough said of the virtues, dangers, the power of a shared laugh.  ~Françoise Sagan

I've always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, "Ain't that the truth."  ~Quincy Jones

Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.  ~Henri Bergson

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.  What puts man in a higher state of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.  ~Max Eastman

A man isn't poor if he can still laugh.  ~Raymond Hitchcock

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.  ~Kurt Vonnegut

Remember, men need laughter sometimes more than food.  ~Anna Fellows Johnston

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book I, chapter 4

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.  ~Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

A good time to laugh is any time you can.  ~Linda Ellerbee

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Watching a child's laughter teach a candle's flame how to dance.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Whoever said "laughter is the best medicine" never had gonorrhea.  ~Kat Likkel and John Hoberg, My Name Is Earl, "Robbed a Stoner Blind," original airdate 16 November 2006

A good, real, unrestrained, hearty laugh is a sort of glorified internal massage, performed rapidly and automatically.  It manipulates and revitalizes corners and unexplored crannies of the system that are unresponsive to most other exercise methods.  ~Author unknown, from an editorial in New-York Tribune, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren

Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.  ~Ken Kesey

It is bad to suppress laughter.  It goes back down to your hips.  ~Author Unknown

It was not a laugh but merely a loud smile.  ~Author Unknown

If you are too busy to laugh, you are too busy.  ~Proverb

Seven days without laughter makes one weak.  ~Mort Walker

A laugh is a smile that bursts.  ~Mary H. Waldrip

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.  ~Victor Hugo

[L]aughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life.  ~Hugh Sidey

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

Carry laughter with you wherever you go.  ~Hugh Sidey

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.  ~Arnold Glasow

Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of sense and nonsense.  ~Author Unknown

We do have a zeal for laughter in most situations, give or take a dentist.  ~Joseph Heller

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.  ~Jules Renard

I like the word "indolence." It makes my laziness seem classy.  ~Bern Williams

All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.  ~Mark Kennedy

Efficiency is intelligent laziness.  ~David Dunham

People who throw kisses are mighty hopelessly lazy.  ~Bob Hope

Tomorrow is the only day in the year that appeals to a lazy man.  ~Jimmy Lyons

It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?  ~Ronald Reagan

What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient.  ~Bodie Thoene, Warsaw Requiem

Laziness will cause you pain.  ~Slogan on T-shirt worn at the Vee Arnis Jitsu School of Self-Defense

There is no cure for laziness but a large family helps.  ~Herbert Prochnov

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.  ~Charlie McCarthy

We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.  ~Adam Clayton Powell, Keep the Faith, Baby!, 1967

I slip from workaholic to bum real easy.  ~Matthew Broderick

The time will come when winter will ask you what you were doing all summer.  ~Henry Clay

That destructive siren, sloth, is ever to be avoided.  ~Horace

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?  ~Paul Sweeney

The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence.  Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.  ~Søren Kierkegaard

If Joan of Arc could turn the tide of an entire ware before her 18th birthday, you can get out of bed.  ~E. Jean Carroll

It is easier to mend neglect than to quicken love.  ~Saint Jerome

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.  ~Charles Dickens

People that are organized are just too lazy to get up and look for it.  ~Author Unknown

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid.  Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to encourage in others.  ~Oscar Wilde

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.  ~Milton Friedman

Remember the difference between a boss and a leader; a boss says "Go!" - a leader says "Let's go!"  ~E.M. Kelly

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility.  He says "I was beaten," he does not say "My men were beaten."  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A leader leads by example, whether he intends to or not.  ~Author Unknown

Leadership is action, not position.  ~Donald H. McGannon

You can't lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself.  ~Gene Mauch

The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone.  You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it.  ~Elaine Agather

You don't have to hold a position in order to be a leader.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

Example is not the main thing in influencing others.  It is the only thing.  ~Albert Schweitzer

Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.  ~Robert Jarvik

You do not lead by hitting people over the head.  That's assault, not leadership.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.  ~Thomas J. Watson

If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

A leader is a dealer in hope.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte, attributed

Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.  ~Tom Peters 

One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you.  ~Dennis A. Peer

A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.  ~John C. Maxwell

A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists.
~Witter Bynner, The Way of Life According to Laotzu

The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.  ~Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep.  ~Charles Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand-Périgord

A man is only a leader when a follower stands beside him.  ~Mark Brouwer

I suppose that leadership at one time meant muscle; but today it means getting along with people.  ~Indira Gandhi

Leaders need to be optimists.  Their vision is beyond the present.  ~Rudy Giuliani

A leader leads by example not by Force.  ~Sun Tzu

A leader who doesn't hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.  ~Golda Meir

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

He led his regiment from behind -
He found it less exciting.
But when away his regiment ran,
His place was at the fore, O.
~W.S. Gilbert

Leadership is based on a spiritual quality; the power to inspire, the power to inspire others to follow.  ~Vince Lombardi

We have great managers who haven't spent a day in management school.  Do we have great surgeons that haven't spent a day in surgical school?  ~Henry Mintzberg

Every leader needs to look back once in a while to make sure he has followers.  ~Author Unknown

The art of leadership is saying no, not yes.  It is very easy to say yes.  ~Tony Blair

There is a significant difference between a leader and a cheerleader.  ~Author Unknown

I praise loudly, I blame softly.  ~ Catherine the Great

Leadership:  the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that person is crazy.  ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"

No man is a leader until his appointment is ratified in the hearts and minds of his men.  ~Author Unknown

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

A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved.  He inspires the power and energy to get it done.  ~Ralph Nader

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.  ~Charles Simic

Management is nothing more than motivating other people.  ~Lee Iacocca

There go my people.  I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.  ~Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

I am not a labor leader.  I don't want you to follow me or anyone else.  If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness you will stay right where you are.  I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out.  ~Eugene V. Debs

To lead the people, walk behind them.  ~Lao-Tzu

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.  ~Eric Hoffer

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.  ~Clay P. Bedford

Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study.  Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life.  ~Henry L. Doherty

I am learning all the time.  The tombstone will be my diploma.  ~Eartha Kitt

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.  ~Attributed to Harry S Truman

A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.  ~Chinese Proverb

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.  ~Paul Eldridge

When the student is ready, the master appears.  ~Buddhist Proverb

Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.  You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.  ~Vilfredo Pareto

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.  ~Jacob Bronowski

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.  ~Mark Twain

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

You learn something every day if you pay attention.  ~Ray LeBlond

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.  ~Antisthenes

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.  ~Alexander Pope

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.  ~Thomas Huxley

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.  ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928

I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.  ~Abraham Lincoln

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.  ~Mohammed

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.  ~Chinese Proverb

All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.  ~Martin H. Fischer

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.  ~Winston Churchill

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.  ~Mortimer Adler

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.  ~Willa Cather

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I am defeated, and know it, if I meet any human being from whom I find myself unable to learn anything.  ~George Herbert Palmer

Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will.  ~Vernon Howard

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I find four great classes of students:  The dumb who stay dumb.  The dumb who become wise.  The wise who go dumb.  The wise who remain wise.  ~Martin H. Fischer

No matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to learn a new language, science, or the bicycle, he has entered a new realm as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world.  ~Frances Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  ~Henry Ford

It is not hard to learn more.  What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Each day learn something new, and just as important, relearn something old.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.  ~Russell Hoban

You have learned something.  That always feels at first as if you had lost something.  ~H.G. Wells

I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.  ~Dudley Field Malone

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.  ~Thomas Szasz

I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.  ~Bernard Keble Sandwell

Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later.  ~Dana Stewart Scott

His studies were pursued but never effectually overtaken.  ~H.G. Wells

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.  ~Alvin Toffler

Learning is a lifetime process, but there comes a time when we must stop adding and start updating.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Learning without thought is labor lost.  ~Confucius

The pupil can only educate himself.  Teachers are the custodians of apparatus upon which he himself must turn and twist to acquire the excellencies that distinguish the better from the poorer of God's vessels.  ~Martin H. Fischer

The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book.  You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.  ~Lesley Conger

The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.  ~Henry S. Haskins

We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.  ~Lloyd Alexander

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.  ~Marvin Minsky

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.  ~John Lubbock

A watched child never learns.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Learning is like rowing upstream:  not to advance is to drop back.  ~Chinese Proverb

People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong.  ~Bill Vaughan

A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been.  ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.  ~Aristotle

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.  ~Agnes Repplier

The real problem of leisure time is how to keep others from using yours.  ~Arthur Lacey

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.  ~Henry David Thoreau

All of us, from time to time, need a plunge into freedom and novelty, after which routine and discipline will seem delightful by contrast.  ~André Maurois

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.  ~Roger von Oech

Fun is about as good a habit as there is.  ~Jimmy Buffet

We all need empty hours in our lives or we will have no time to create or dream.  ~Robert Coles

Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, has disappeared.  Leisure [has become] entertainment.  ~Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987

To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well.  ~George Santayana

Leisure:  A fancy word for people who don't want to admit they're bored.  ~Gene Perret

If you are losing your leisure, look out; you may be losing your soul.  ~Logan P. Smith

I would not exchange my leisure hours for all the wealth in the world.  ~Comte de Mirabeau

People tend to forget that play is serious.  ~David Hockney

Leisure tends to corrupt, and absolute leisure corrupts absolutely.  ~Edgar A. Shoaff

We seldom enjoy leisure we haven't earned.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.  ~Phyllis Theroux

Never write a letter while you are angry.  ~Chinese Proverb

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.  ~Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine, 1954

I am tired, Beloved,
of chafing my heart against
the want of you;
of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
~Amy Lowell, "The Letter"

Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.  ~Lord Byron

What a wonderful thing is the mail, capable of conveying across continents a warm human hand-clasp.  ~Author Unknown

It takes two to write a letter as much as it takes two to make a quarrel.  ~Elizabeth Drew

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

The best time to frame an answer to the letters of a friend, is the moment you receive them.  Then the warmth of friendship, and the intelligence received, most forcibly cooperate.  ~William Shenstone

What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters.  You can't reread a phone call.  ~Liz Carpenter

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; for, thus friends absent speak.  ~John Donne

Or don't you like to write letters.  I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.  ~Ernest Hemingway

A strange volume of real life in the daily packet of the postman.  Eternal love and instant payment!  ~Douglas Jerrold, The Postman's Budget

If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The one good thing about not seeing you is that I can write you letters.  ~Svetlana Alliluyeva

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.  ~Sydney Smith

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.  ~Emily Dickinson

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.  ~Sigmund Freud

The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace.  Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.  ~Anna Quindlen

A woman seldom writes her Mind, but in her Postscript.  ~Richard Steele, Spectator

When a man sends you an impudent letter, sit right down and give it back to him with interest ten times compounded, and then throw both letters in the wastebasket.  ~Elbert Hubbard

The talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.  ~Henry Tilney

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Grammar is the grave of letters.  ~Elbert Hubbard

When he wrote a letter, he would put that which was most material in the postscript, as if it had been a by-matter.  ~Francis Bacon, "Of Cunning," Essays

Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose.  In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires... ~Elizabeth Hardwick

Then there's the joy of getting your desk clean, and knowing that all your letters are answered, and you can see the wood on it again.  ~Lady Bird Johnson

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent.  We are no longer in the passing, we have arrived.  ~Knut Hamsun

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.  ~Lawrence Durrell

Friends will write me letters.  They run out of room on the front of the letter.  They write "over" on the bottom of the letter.  Like I'm that much of a moron.  Like I need that there.  Because if it wasn't there, I'd get to the bottom of the page:  "And so Kathy and I went shopping and we..."  That's the craziest thing!  I don't know why she would just end it that way.  ~Ellen DeGeneres

One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer.  ~Lord Byron

There must be millions of people all over the world who never get any love letters... I could be their leader.  ~Charlie Brown

In a man's letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process.  Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.  ~Samuel Johnson

The post office has a great charm at one point of our lives.  When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for.  ~Jane Austen

My songs are just little letters to me.  ~Ani Difranco

Chain letters are the postal equivalent of intestinal flu:  you get it and pass it along to your friends.  ~Bob Garfield

A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely.  ~Pam Brown

If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't.  And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing.  ~Edward Bulwer Lytton

A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises.  One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Never write a letter if you can help it, and never destroy one!  ~John A. MacDonald

I wonder if Eve could write letters in Paradise!  But, poor Eve, she had no one to write to - no one to whom to tell what Eden was, no beloved child to whom her love traveled through any or all space.  Poor Eve!  ~Catharine M. Sedgwick

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.  ~D.H. Lawrence

I sometimes think one of the great blessings we shall enjoy in heaven, will be to receive letters by every post and never be obliged to reply to them.  ~Washington Irving

A Letter is a Joy of Earth -
It is denied the Gods
~Emily Dickinson, 1885

His sayings are generally like women's letters; all the pith is in the postscript.  ~William Hazlitt

O ay, letters - I had letters - I am persecuted with letters - I hate letters - nobody knows how to write letters; and yet one has 'em, one does not know why - they serve one to pin up one's hair.  ~William Congreve, The Way of the World, spoken by the character Mrs Millamant

Mr Witwould:  "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters?  I find I must keep copies."
Mrs Millamant:  "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose."
~William Congreve, The Way of the World

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name.  And I leave them where they are, for I know that wherever I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.  ~Walt Whitman

Politeness is as much concerned in answering letters within a reasonable time, as it is in returning a bow, immediately.  ~Lord Chesterfield

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.  ~Walt Whitman

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.  ~Anatole Broyard

To acknowledge the receipt of letters is always proper, to remove doubts of their miscarriage.  ~George Washington

What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.  ~Archibald MacLeish, "The Premise of Meaning," American Scholar, 5 June 1972

When I got my library card, that's when my life began.  ~Rita Mae Brown

Libraries:  The medicine chest of the soul.  ~Library at Thebes, inscription over the door

A library is thought in cold storage.  ~Herbert Samuel

The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book.  You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.  ~Lesley Conger

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library.  The only entrance requirement is interest.  ~Lady Bird Johnson

As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school.  I actually believed all those books belonged to her.  ~Erma Bombeck

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.  ~John Lubbock

A library is but the soul's burial-ground.  It is the land of shadows.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

To those with ears to hear, libraries are really very noisy places.  On their shelves we hear the captured voices of the centuries-old conversation that makes up our civilization.  ~Timothy Healy

A man's library is a sort of harem.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1860

My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.  ~Cicero

Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.  ~William Dyer

Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
~Richard Armour, "Library"

A great library contains the diary of the human race.  ~George Mercer Dawson

I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air.  ~Sholem Asch

The richest person in the world - in fact all the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library.  ~Malcolm Forbes

My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.  ~Joseph Howe, 1824

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.  ~Jorge Luis Borges

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.  ~Andrew Carnegie

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.  ~Lemony Snicket

Th' first thing to have in a libry is a shelf.  Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure.  But th' shelf is th' main thing.  ~Finley Peter Dunne

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books.  It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual.  A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.  ~Norman Cousins

A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.  ~Jo Godwin

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library.  A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.  The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Books," Society and Solitude

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.  ~Samuel Johnson

What a place to be in is an old library!  It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state.  I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets.  I could as soon dislodge a shade.  I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.  ~Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia

No possession can surpass, or even equal a good library, to the lover of books.  Here are treasured up for his daily use and delectation, riches which increase by being consumed, and pleasures that never cloy.  ~John Alfred Landford

Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable.  Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed.  ~Charles Medawar

For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him.  Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted.  Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution.  Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye.  ~Curse Against Book Stealers, Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.  ~Mark Twain, 1894

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.  ~Shelby Foote

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.  ~Germaine Greer

There are 70 million books in American libraries, but the one I want to read is always out.  ~Tom Masson

Librarian is a service occupation.  Gas station attendant of the mind.  ~Richard Powers

The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library.  He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Nutrimentum spiritus (food for the soul).  ~Berlin Royal Library, inscription

Shera's Two Laws of Cataloging:  Law #1, No cataloger will accept the work of any other cataloger.  Law #2:  No cataloger will accept his/her own work six months after the cataloging.  ~Jesse Shera, 1977

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.  I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.  ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.  ~Hans Christian Andersen

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me."  ~Erma Bombeck

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.  ~Robert Byrne

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.  This makes it hard to plan the day.  ~Elwyn Brooks White

Life is simple, it's just not easy.  ~Author Unknown

A life without cause is a life without effect.  ~Barbarella

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished.  If you're alive, it isn't.  ~Richard Bach

Life is not always fair.  Sometimes you get a splinter even sliding down a rainbow.  ~Terri Guillemets

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden 

I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it.  ~Jack Handey

Life is a foreign language:  all men mispronounce it.  ~Christopher Morley, Thunder on the Left

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
~Robert Frost, "Cluster of Faith," 1962

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.  ~Kathy Norris

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.  ~Emily Dickinson

Yes, I will try to be.  Because I believe that not being is arrogant.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant

I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.  ~Quentin Crisp

As we struggle to make sense of things, life looks on in repose.  ~Author Unknown

I think I've discovered the secret of life - you just hang around until you get used to it.  ~Charles Schulz

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.  ~Arthur Miller

Life is like a blanket too short.  You pull it up and your toes rebel, you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder; but cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable night.  ~Marion Howard

Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.  ~Author Unknown

You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth.  ~Charles Johnson

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.  ~Danny Kaye

I have a simple philosophy:  Fill what's empty.  Empty what's full.  Scratch where it itches.  ~Alice Roosevelt Longworth 

Life is like a coin.  You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once.  ~Lillian Dickson

We are born wet, naked, and hungry.  Then things get worse.  ~Author Unknown

Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.  ~Author Unknown

Life is a cement trampoline.  ~Howard Nordberg

To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him.  ~Jeremy Taylor

Life... is like a box of chocolates - a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that no one ever asks for, unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates.  So, you're stuck with mostly undefinable whipped mint crap, mindlessly wolfed down when there's nothing else to eat while you're watching the game.  Sure, once is a while you get a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but it's gone too fast and the taste is fleeting.  In the end, you are left with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, which, if you are desperate enough to eat, leaves nothing but an empty box of useless brown paper.  ~The X-Files

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.  ~Author Unknown

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.  ~Grandma Moses

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.  ~Jim Carrey

The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.  ~John, Viscount Morley, Address on Aphorisms

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.  ~Erich Fromm

My formula for living is quite simple.  I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night.  In between, I occupy myself as best I can.  ~Cary Grant

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.  ~Havelock Ellis

Living involves tearing up one rough draft after another.  ~Author Unknown

My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.  ~Louis Adamic

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, in London and Westminster Review, 12 November 1838

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire.  I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl.  Let him come out as I do, and bark.  ~Samuel Johnson

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told:  "I am with you kid.  Let's go."  ~Maya Angelou

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Why torture yourself when life'll do it for you?  ~Author Unknown

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.  ~George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma, 1906

Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays;
Hither and thither, and mates, and slays.
~Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, 1859

Life: It is about the gift not the package it comes in.  ~Dennis P. Costea, Jr.

...the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.  ~Walt Whitman, "O Me! O Life!", Leaves of Grass

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.  The world owes you nothing.  It was here first.  ~Mark Twain

Life is the game that must be played.  ~Edwin Arlington Robinson

You will 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.  ~Albert Camus

There is no wealth but life.  ~John Ruskin

I know what things are good:  friendship and work and conversation.  These I shall have.  ~Rupert Brooke

Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise.  ~Jerome K. Jerome

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.  ~Henry David Thoreau

I've learned never to be surprised if what must inevitably happen happens right now.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is not a final.  It's daily pop quizzes.  ~Author Unknown

Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne.  Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool.  ~Gioacchino Rossini

We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones.  ~Paul Eldridge

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.  ~T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.  ~Anton Chekhov

Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don't be afraid.  ~Frederick Buechner

Life is like sailing.  You can use any wind to go in any direction.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love.  ~Diego Marchi

I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
~Robert Browning

Today, fill your cup of life with sunshine and laughter.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Life may have no meaning.  Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant

Life is an incurable Disease.  ~Abraham Cowley

Different shades of life make the painting more beautiful.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

The philosophy of mine earth can be summed up as this:  Sunshine creates happiness, and I create myself.  Nights are long and life is predominantly good.  Wind is refreshing.  Tea is wisdom.  Do the best you can, and be good to yourself so that you can above all be good to others.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Human life is purely a matter of deciding what's important to you.  ~Anonymous

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.  ~Albert Camus

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.  ~Christopher Isherwood

I ask of life to shine meaning in everyone who is searching.  ~Aurora Hernandez

The only way to have a life is to commit to it like crazy.  ~Angelina Jolie

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.  ~Bruce Crampton

Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
~Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Let No Charitable Hope

To succeed in life, you need three things:  a wishbone, a backbone and a funnybone.  ~Reba McEntire

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.  ~Thomas Carlyle

I say to my child, I will explain to you as much of life as I can, but you must remember that there is a part of life for which you are the explanation.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.  ~Havelock Ellis

Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.  ~Joseph Addison

We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts.  Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.  ~Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 1945

Give us Lord, a bit o' sun,
A bit o' work and a bit o' fun;
Give us all in the struggle and sputter
Our daily bread and a bit o' butter.
~From an inn in Lancaster, England

All human things hang on a slender thread, the strongest fall with a sudden crash.  ~Ovid

The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins.  ~Heywood Broun

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we should dance.  ~Author Unknown

When compiling his great dictionary, the young Noah Webster travels to the Himalayas, where he climbs to the cave of the world's wisest man.  "O, great sage," he says, "tell me the meaning of life."  The sage sits Noah at his feet and, with great solemnity, commences to unfold the meaning of life.  When finished, he places a hand on the young man's shoulder and says, "Do you have any other questions, my son?"   Noah flips a page in his notebook and says, "You wouldn't know the meaning of lift, would you?"  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is a long process of getting tired.  ~Samuel Butler

I really enjoy life I'm just not good at it.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

He who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for.  ~Moroccan Proverb

The kaleidoscope of colour which is my life, shows the interesting choices I've made along the way.  ~Antie Koekie

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.  ~Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

I wish to die knowing that I took a fleeting instant of eternity and fashioned from it a lifetime.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

God asks no man whether he will accept life.  That is not the choice.  You must take it.  The only question is how.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.  ~Douglas Adams

Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?  ~George Bernard Shaw

There is a time early in life when there seem to be countless reasons for happiness, and then you discover your mom is making them up.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life.  It goes on.  ~Robert Frost

To whoever invented fantasy, redwood trees, and apple pie for breakfast:  well done.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Life is like a ten-speed bicycle.  Most of us have gears we never use.  ~Charles Schulz

There is no finish line.  ~Nike advertisement

It may be life is only worthwhile at moments.  Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.  ~Sherwood Anderson

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse.  I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.  ~Ludwig Wittgenstein

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.  ~Vita Sackville-West

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century.  ~William Lyon Phelps

Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.  ~James Russell Lowell

In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back.  ~Charlie Brown

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.  ~Fred Allen

Not unfortunately the universe is wild - game-flavoured as a hawk's wing.  ~B.P. Blood

The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.  ~Chinese Proverb

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle.  But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth.  Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize:  a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes.  All is a miracle.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

You live and learn.  At any rate, you live.  ~Douglas Adams

Life can be easy, it is only question of choosing between solutions and illusions.  ~Didier Dhaese

Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life.  Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.  ~Learned Hand

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Life is the sum of all your choices.  ~Albert Camus

Life is a brief opportunity to do something prehumously.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light.  Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky.  Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.  ~Seneca

Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

If A equals success, then the formula is:  A = X + Y + Z, where X is work, Y is play, and Z is keep your mouth shut.  ~Albert Einstein

I gave my life to learning how to live.
Now that I have organized it all...
It is just about over.
~Sandra Hochman

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.  Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.  ~Anaïs Nin

Life is not fair, nor has it ever been, but the morning seems determined to dawn until it is.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is a horizontal fall.  ~Jean Cocteau

Today was good.  Today was fun.  Tomorrow is another one.  ~Dr. Seuss

[P]erhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late.  It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.  ~George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Adam Bede

Only a few things are really important.  ~Marie Dressler

We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.  ~Henry Miller

Everything that occurs in your life is part of God's plan to wake you up.  ~Leonard Jacobson

Life is like eating artichokes; you have got to go through so much to get so little.  ~Thomas Aloysius Dorgan

Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities.  It also holds pitfalls.  The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.  ~Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates," Side Effects, 1980

There is a lesson we learn early and harmlessly, or late and traumatically - that there are things we can break that our parents can't fix.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is a ticket to the greatest show on earth.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Life has no auto-settings.  No batteries.  You gots to wind it up!  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Life's like a novel with the end ripped out.  ~Danny Orton and Blair Daly, "Stand"

If you stop struggling, then you stop life.  ~Huey Newton

Sometimes questions are more important than answers.  ~Nancy Willard, quoted in The Meaning of Life, compiled by Hugh S. Moorhead

It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.  ~Phillips Brooks

My quest for cosmic understanding is a book I have picked up and put down many times, always forgetting to insert a bookmark.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that they enjoy life.  ~William Lyon Phelps

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around.  ~David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965

If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret.  ~Confucius

To drink the sunshine and to dream at night.... ~Author Unknown, "The Fall of Man"

Each day of human life contains joy and anger, pain and pleasure, darkness and light, growth and decay.  Each moment is etched with nature's grand design - do not try to deny or oppose the cosmic order of things.  ~Morihei Ueshiba

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

You don't want to get to the end of life's journey and discover you never left the interstate.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.
~Ben Jonson, To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison, 1640

We should give meaning to life, not wait for life to give us meaning.  ~Stacy

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate.  ~R.D. Laing

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

Many of us are equal to life's emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it.  ~James Gibbons Huneker

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.  ~Ogden Nash

I do like a little bit of butter to my bread.  ~A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

I believe in pink.  I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner.  I believe in kissing, kissing a lot.  I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong.  I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls.  I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles.  ~Audrey Hepburn

How we long to remove the clutter from our lives not realizing that the clutter is our lives.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

My friend asked me the essence of life and I smiled.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.  ~Henry Van Dyke

People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Shall I redirect my life's journey because down some sideroad might be some trifle I'm entitled to?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is a long lesson in humility.  ~James M. Barrie 

In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings." ~From the movie Mansfield Park

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.  ~Anton Chekhov

To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.  ~Samuel Butler

Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.  ~Kathleen Norris

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.  ~Mark Twain

Life's a party.  Invite yourself.  ~Gary Johnson

You can hope for a miracle in your life, or you can realize that your life is the miracle.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him.  ~Lemony Snicket

Life is not like a box of chocolates.  It's more like a jar of jalapenos.  What you do today might burn your ass tomorrow.  ~Author Unknown

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.  ~José Ortega y Gasset

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination.  But the combination is locked up in the safe.  ~Peter De Vries, Let Me Count the Ways, 1965

Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

I have come one step away from everything.  And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life.  ~Friedrich Hegel

Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence.  ~Joseph Wood Krutch

There are no extra pieces in the universe.  Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle.  Deepak Chopra

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean.  I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else.  But I don't have to know an answer....  I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly.  It doesn't frighten me.  ~Richard Phillips Feynman

Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind.  ~Timothy Fuller

Life is a series of family photos in which you keep moving to the rear until finally you're a portrait in the background.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God.  We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend.  I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it.  We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens.  ~Jason Q., from generationterrorists.com

Life is little more than a loan shark:  It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.  ~Luigi Pirandello

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner:  that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Life never tires of testing the proposition that life must go on.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.  It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.  ~H.L. Mencken

Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of.  ~Agnes' Law

Chance is always powerful, let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.  ~Ovid

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.  The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Life is a series of collisions with the future.  ~José Ortega y Gasset

To the student I would say, "Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there's a tough essay question."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.  ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Life is half spent before we know what it is.  ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651

When life throws you lemons, make orange juice.  It will leave them wondering how the hell you did that.  ~Author Unknown

Why does a person even get up in the morning?  You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die.  Life is so stupid I can't stand it.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust - we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.  ~Albert Einstein, in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929

Jack Palance:  "Do you know what the secret of life is?  One thing.  Just one thing.  You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit."
Billy Crystal:  "Yeah, but what's that one thing?"
Jack Palance:  "That's what you've got to figure out."
~From the movie City Slickers

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.  ~Dennis Wholey

Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like.  ~Author Unknown

Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night.  It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.  ~Crowfoot, 1890, as quoted in Catch the Whisper of the Wind compiled by Cheewa James

Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers?  ~Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal, 1950

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.  ~Garrison Keillor

Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.  ~Mel Brooks

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.  ~e.e. cummings

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.  ~Brendan Gill

Life is a series of family photos in which eventually you stop showing up.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.  ~Thomas Merton

Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?  ~Maurice Freehill

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.  ~Chinese Proverb

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.  ~James Thurber

In a profound sense every man has two halves to his being; he is not one person so much as two persons trying to act in unison.  I believe that in the heart of each human being there is something which I can only describe as a "child of darkness" who is equal and complementary to the more obvious "child of light."  ~Laurens van der Post

Moonlight is sculpture.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Firelight will not let you read fine stories but it's warm and you won't see the dust on the floor.  ~Irish Proverb

We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own.  ~Ben Sweetland

Light gives of itself freely, filling all available space.  It does not seek anything in return; it asks not whether you are friend or foe.  It gives of itself and is not thereby diminished.  ~Michael Strassfeld

Lethargics are to be laid in the light, and exposed to the rays of the sun for the disease is gloom.  ~Aretaeus

Live in rooms full of light.  ~Cornelius Celsus

We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light.  ~Evelyn Dunbar

You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.  ~Arlo Guthrie

There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.  ~Edith Wharton

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 light from within.  ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.  ~Maori Proverb

The hero is the one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.  The saint is the man who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light.  ~Felix Adler

Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.  ~Plato

When you possess light within, you see it externally.  ~Anaïs Nin

You can owe nothing, if you give back its light to the sun.  ~Antonio Porchia

Dare to reach out your hand into the darkness, to pull another hand into the light.  ~Norman B. Rice

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!  ~John Muir

The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun.
~John Greenleaf Whittier

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.  ~Vladimir Nabokov

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...  ~Susan Polis Shutz

From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that's been our unifying cry, "More light."  Sunlight.  Torchlight.  Candlelight.  Neon, incandescent lights that banish the darkness from our caves to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators.  Big floods for the night games at Soldier's Field.  Little tiny flashlights for those books we read under the covers when we're supposed to be asleep.  Light is more than watts and footcandles.  Light is metaphor.  Light is knowledge, light is life, light is light.  ~Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.  ~Aaron Rose

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.  ~Charles Simic

A smile is the light in the window of your face that tells people you're at home.  ~Author Unknown

His high endeavors are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright.
~William Wordsworth

They may as well have called the sun a ball of flaming joy.  ~Terri Guillemets

Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us: but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist in.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

In the beginning there was nothing.  God said, "Let there be light!"  And there was light.  There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.  ~Ellen DeGeneres

Light is good from whatever lamp it shines.  ~Author Unknown

Light can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare, living, dead, misty, clear, hot, dark, violet, springlike, falling, straight, sensual, limited, poisonous, calm and soft.  ~Sven Nykvist

Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and then we'll need no other light.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What is to give light must endure burning.  ~Viktor Frankl

A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
and closed them beneath the kisses of night.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Sensitive Plant," 1820

Love is not consolation.  It is light.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.  ~Blaise Pascal

For light I go directly to the Source of light, not to any of the reflections.  ~Peace Pilgrim

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.  ~Annie Dillard

Joy requires one to be awake,
Adjusting the heart's ambience to bright.
Some prefer the dark, as is their right,
On grounds of agony, and to forsake
Not only bliss, but all that's blessed by light.
~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com

I think you might dispense with half your doctors if you would only consult Dr. Sun more.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Where there is sunshine the doctor starves.  ~Flemish Proverb

Sun spreads through the treetops like an epidemic.  ~Dave Bonta, from The Morning Porch blog at www.morningporch.com/post/96792742/orange-tabby

Light comes to us unexpectedly and obliquely.  Perhaps it amuses the gods to try us.  They want to see whether we are asleep.  ~H.M. Tomlinson

Sunshine is my quest.  ~Winston Churchill

Light, God's eldest daughter...  ~Thomas Fuller

Alas! must it ever be so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?
~Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton

We all walk in the dark and each of us must learn to turn on his or her own light.  ~Earl Nightingale

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

Into my heart's night
Along a narrow way
I groped; and lo! the light,
An infinite land of day.
~Rumi

Sometimes just looking up and seeing the light is enough.  ~Terri Guillemets

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

Keep your flame lit, and you will never feel darkness.  ~J. Parker

What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunlight.  ~Joseph Joubert

There they stand, the innumerable stars, shining in order like a living hymn, written in light.  ~N.P. Willis

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your path is illuminated by the light
Yet darkness lets the stars shine bright.
~J.L.W. Brooks

I'll tell you how the sun rose a ribbon at a time.  ~Emily Dickinson

Auld Daddy Darkness...
See him in the corners hidin' frae the licht,
See him at the window gloomin' at the nicht...
~James Ferguson

No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.  ~Terry Pratchett

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.  ~John Denver, "Sunshine on My Shoulders"

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.  ~Howard Nemerov

This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness....
~Ted Kooser, from "A Happy Birthday"

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.  ~Matthew Arnold

The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come.  At the darkest moment comes the light.  ~Joseph Campbell

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.  ~Benjamin Franklin

Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules.  ~Douglas Adams

It's a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it's light out.  ~Calvin

He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day:
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
Himself his own dungeon.
~John Milton

If there is one spot of sun spilling onto the floor, a cat will find it and soak it up.  ~Jean Asper McIntosh

I will love the light for it shows me the way.  Yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.  Og Mandino

Though my soul may set in darkness,
It will rise in perfect light,
I have loved the stars too fondly
To be fearful of the night.
~Sarah Williams

The stars are the street lights of eternity.  ~Author Unknown

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Wine is sunlight, held together by water.  ~Galileo

Your life is something opaque, not transparent, as long as you look at it in an ordinary human way.  But if you hold it up against the light of God's goodness, it shines and turns transparent, radiant and bright.  And then you ask yourself in amazement:  Is this really my own life I see before me?  ~Albert Schweitzer

An age is called "dark," not because the light fails to shine but because people refuse to see it.  ~James Michener

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.  ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.  ~Jean Giraudoux

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself?  There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.  You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.  ~Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.  ~Doug Larson

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.  ~Epictetus

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.  ~Isaiah Berlin

Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf.  ~Native American Indian Proverb

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.  ~Winston Churchill

You never get people's fuller attention than when you're listening to them.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed.  Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities.... I listen to them and they go away delighted.  ~Andre Gide

I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying.  Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying.  ~Charles C. Finn

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Home is where you can say anything you like cause nobody listens to you anyway.  ~Author Unknown

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.  ~Peter F. Drucker

"Silent" and "listen" are spelled with the same letters.  ~Author Unknown

If animals could talk, the world would lose its best listeners.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

My wife says I never listen to her.  At least I think that's what she said.  ~Author Unknown

The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.  ~Robert Fulghum

Lots of people talk to animals.... Not very many listen, though.... That's the problem.  ~Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.  ~Tommy Smothers

I guess I've spent my life listening to what wasn't being said.  ~Eli Khamarov, America Explained!

Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.  ~James Baldwin

No one is listening until you fart.  ~Author Unknown

Women like silent men.  They think they're listening.  ~Marcel Achard, Quote, 4 November 1956



Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.  ~Ezra Pound


A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.  ~Mark Twain


Literature is the question minus the answer.  ~Roland Barthes


Literature is news that stays news.  ~Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934


When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.  But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.  ~Samuel Lover, Handy Andy, 1842


Every man's memory is his private literature.  ~Aldous Huxley


What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.  ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951


I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart.  ~Richard Livingstone


What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!  ~James Russell Lowell


The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light.  If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.  ~Anatole France


When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before.  You see more in you than there was before.  ~Clifton Fadiman


The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891


The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition.  We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.  ~Samual McChord Crothers


A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.  ~Italo Calvino, The Literature Machine


With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future.  I live now.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us.  ~Michael Cibenko

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.  ~Robert Nathan, So Love Returns

You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.  ~Jan Glidewell

Would you keep a chive on your tooth just because you enjoyed last night's potato?  ~From the television show Boston Common

I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future.  ~David Gerrold

Do not let your shadow walk you.  You are not a slave of the past.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

I can't wait all my life
On a street of broken dreams.
~Journey, "It Could Have Been You"

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.  ~Oscar Wilde

It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crops.  ~George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today.  I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great.  If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.  ~Art Buchwald

If you are still talking about what you did yesterday, you haven't done much today.  ~Author Unknown

Don't let yesterday use up too much of today.  ~Cherokee Indian Proverb

The past is a good place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.  ~Author Unknown

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.  ~Edna Ferber

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.  ~Carl Sandburg, "Prairie," Complete Poems, 1950

The past is never there when you try to go back.  It exists, but only in memory.  To pretend otherwise is to invite a mess.  ~Chris Cobbs

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.  ~Euripides, Alexander

The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post.  ~L. Thomas Holdcroft

We cannot carry our father's corpse with us everywhere we go.  ~Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 1913

The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free.  Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.  ~Herman Melville, White Jacket

No yesterdays are ever wasted for those who give themselves to today.  ~Brendan Francis

I need neither future nor past, but to learn to take today not too fast.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

People are always asking about the good old days.  I say, why don't you say the good now days?  ~Robert M. Young

The memories you have are just recordings of things past, not chains to bind you.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives, I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace.  ~Author Unknown

"Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well.  What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better.  ~George E. Woodberry

Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.  ~Jerome K. Jerome, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1889

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.  ~Alexander Graham Bell

You have to wake up a virgin each morning.  ~Jean-Louis Barrault

We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it.  But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.  ~John Newton

If you have one eye on yesterday, and one eye on tomorrow, you're going to be cockeyed today.  ~Author Unknown

Stay on top of your past so you can have a better view of your future.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Our past is like a footprint.  It only confirms we were there.  No burden on our future does it bear.  Bring the rain, clear the pane of clutter.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Nothing is worth more than this day.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Today is the greatest
Day I've ever known
Can't live for tomorrow,
Tomorrow's much too long....
~Billy Corgan, "Today," Siamese Dream (Smashing Pumpkins), 1993

The living moment is everything.  ~D.H. Lawrence

Why not just live in the moment, especially if it has a good beat?  ~Goldie Hawn

Take your eyes off what you lost.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.  ~Montaigne

Nothing ever gets anywhere.  The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere.  The moment is the only thing that counts.  ~Jean Cocteau, Professional Secrets, 1922

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead.  It is going on all the time.  ~Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Forever is composed of nows.  ~Emily Dickinson

Could we see when and where we are to meet again, we would be more tender when we bid our friends goodbye.  ~Marie Louise De La Ramee

The other day a man asked me what I thought was the best time of life.  "Why," I answered without a thought, "now."  ~David Grayson

It is only possible to live happily-ever-after on a day-to-day basis.  ~Margaret Bonnano

Yesterday is history.  Tomorrow is a mystery.  And today?  Today is a gift.  That's why we call it the present.  ~Babatunde Olatunji, a similar version is also attributed to Alice Morse Earle

Trust no future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within and God o'erhead.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Psalm of Life

Finish each day and be done with it.  You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can.  Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.  ~Alan Watts

It's not what if, it's what now.  ~Author Unknown

Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are.  Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart.  Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow.  Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so.  One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return.  ~Mary Jean Iron

We are always getting ready to live but never living.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.  ~Sholem Asch, The Nazarene, 1939

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.  ~Jean de la Bruyere

If you worry about what might be, and wonder what might have been, you will ignore what is.  ~Author Unknown

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.  ~James Thurber

We crucify ourselves between two thieves:  regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.  ~Fulton Oursler

Chasing the past, I stumbled into the future.  ~T.A. Sachs

Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.  ~André Gide, Nourritures Terrestres

Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy? Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic? Am I to concern myself with an allotment of days I never had and was never promised? Must I check off each day of my life as if I am subtracting from this imaginary hoard? No, on the contrary, I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived. And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

In today already walks tomorrow.  ~Friedrich von Schiller

When I am anxious it is because I am living in the future.  When I am depressed it is because I am living in the past.  ~Author Unknown

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.  ~Abraham Maslow

The future is always beginning now.  ~Mark Strand, Reasons for Moving

I never think of the future.  It comes soon enough.  ~Albert Einstein

Life lived for tomorrow will always be just a day away from being realized.  ~Leo Buscaglia

The future is no place to place your better days.  ~Dave Matthews

The future is an opaque mirror.  Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.  ~Jim Bishop

If a man examine carefully his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future.  His well-being is always ahead.  ~Emerson, Journals, 1827

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.  ~Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade.  It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.  ~D.H. Lawrence

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living.  We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.  ~Dale Carnegie

Pile up too many tomorrows and you'll find that you've collected nothing but a bunch of empty yesterdays.  ~The Music Man

We steal if we touch tomorrow.  It is God's.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.  ~Isak Dinesen

Slight not what's near through aiming at what's far.  ~Euripides

Life's a journey, not a destination.  ~Aerosmith

If you wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes.  If you don't wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes.  ~Senegalese Proverb

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.  ~Abraham Lincoln



But, logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.  ~Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett Dunsany, "Weeds & Moss," My Ireland


Logic:  The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.  ~Aldous Huxley


Logic hasn't wholly dispelled the society of witches and prophets and sorcerers and soothsayers.  ~Raymond F. Jones, The Non-Statistical Man


Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.  ~Benjamin Jowett


If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.  ~Samuel Butler


Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss-up.  ~Charles Sanders Peirce


No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.  ~Niels Bohr


Logic is one thing and commonsense another.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, 1927


Reason:  The arithmetic of the emotions.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary


Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities.  ~Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man


Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière


A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.  ~Rabindranath Tagore


Logic is logic.  That's all I say.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The One-Hoss Shay


He that cannot reason is a fool.
He that will not is a bigot.
He that dare not is a slave.
~Andrew Carnegie


Common sense, however it tries, cannot avoid being surprised from time to time.  ~Bertrand Russell


He is a true fugitive who flies from reason.  ~Marcus Aurelius


If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.  ~Rita Mae Brown


Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.  ~Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper, 1929 (Thanks, Jeff)


A wise man is not governed by others, nor does he try to govern them; he prefers that reason alone prevail.  ~La Bruyère, Characters, 1688


The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670


Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous.  A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged.  ~Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon


The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.  ~Mother Teresa

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.  ~Albert Einstein

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved.  It is God's finger on man's shoulder.  ~Charles Morgan

You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.  ~Jonathan Carroll, "Outside the Dog Museum"

Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs.  ~Ovid

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.  ~Eric Fromm

Love has no desire but to fulfill itself.  To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.  To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners.  Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway.  ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.  ~W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1949

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

When love is not madness, it is not love.  ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river.  ~Malagasy Proverb

Do I love you because you're beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

For you see, each day I love you more
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
~Rosemonde Gerard

Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate!  ~Sandra J. Dykes

Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense.  ~Mark Overby

Love is a symbol of eternity.  It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.  ~Author Unknown

Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker.  ~Author Unknown

Love is a sweet tyranny, because the lover endureth his torments willingly.  ~Proverb

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.  ~Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.  ~Peter Ustinov

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595

The art of love... is largely the art of persistence.  ~Albert Ellis

Love one another and you will be happy.  It's as simple and as difficult as that.  ~Michael Leunig

Who would give a law to lovers?  Love is unto itself a higher law.  ~Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524

Who, being loved, is poor?  ~Oscar Wilde

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.  ~Henry David Thoreau

To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Without love, what are we worth?  Eighty-nine cents!  Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.  ~Laurence Marks, M*A*S*H, "Love Story," original air date 7 January 1973, spoken by the character Hawkeye

A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it.  ~Frank A. Clark

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.  ~Robert Heinlein

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it.  You and you alone make me feel that I am alive.  Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.  ~George Moore

We loved with a love that was more than love.  ~Edgar Allan Poe

If I love you, what business is it of yours?  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The hardest-learned lesson:  that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

My debt to you, Belovèd,
Is one I cannot pay
In any coin of any realm
On any reckoning day.
~Jessie B. Rittenhouse

We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.  ~Quoted by Alexandra Penney in Self

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.  ~Jean Anouilh

When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage.  ~Bill Balance

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.  ~Rose Franken

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.  ~Ben Hecht

A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasnt put there to stay -
Love isnt love
'Til you give it away.
~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, "You Are Sixteen (Reprise)"
(Thanks, Krystel)

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.  ~Swedish Proverb

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.  ~Henry Van Dyke

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.  ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975

Passion makes the world go round.  Love just makes it a safer place.  ~Ice T, The Ice Opinion, quoted in Reader's Digest, "Quotable Quotes," February 2002

Love is no respecter of age or practicality
Neither morality: unabashed
She enters where she will
Unheeding that her immortal fires
Burn up human hearts...
~Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me, www.originals.net

Love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses.  ~Lord Dewar

When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.  ~Natalie Clifford Barney

Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.  ~John Bulwer

'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come.  ~Lord Byron

A hundred hearts would be too few
To carry all my love for you.
~Author Unknown

Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots.  ~Author unknown, as printed in The Hoosier Farmer

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.  ~Lynda Barry

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life.  ~Cher

Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.  ~Ursula K. Le Guin

Love is not singular except in syllable.  ~Marvin Taylor

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.  ~John Ciardi

People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.  ~Douglas Yates

Love never reasons but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles lest it has done too little.  ~Hannah More (Thanks, Steven)

Ah me! why may not love and life be one?  ~Henry Timrod

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.  ~Robert Browning

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.  ~William Shakespeare, "Sonnet CXVI"

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.  ~Leo Tolstoy

It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken.  ~Marguerite de Valois

A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love.  ~Mother Teresa

You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from.  ~Werner Erhard

Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a winding path walked arm in arm.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation.  And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Love me and the world is mine.  ~David Reed

It would be impossible to "love" anyone or anything one knew completely.  Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object.  ~Paul Valéry, Tel quel, 1943

The love game is never called off on account of darkness.  ~Tom Masson

They who meet on an April night are forever lost in love, if there's moonlight all about and there's no moon above.  ~E.Y. "Yip" Harburg and Fred Saidy, dialogue just before the song "Old Devil Moon" in the musical Finian's Rainbow  (Thanks, Katherine!)

Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.  ~David Byrne

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.  ~Robert Frost

You know you're in love when you don't want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.  ~Dr. Seuss

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.  ~Zora Neale Hurston

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.  ~Emily Brontë

The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

An old man in love is like a flower in winter.  ~Portuguese Proverb

Will you love me in December as you do in May,
Will you love me in the good old fashioned way?
When my hair has all turned gray,
Will you kiss me then and say,
That you love me in December as you do in May?
~James J. Walker

I don't think you can keep someone you truly love at arm's length on purpose, they'll always end up in your arms.  ~Holly Nichole Miller

Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.  ~Honoré de Balzac

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Love is the poetry of the senses.  ~Honoré de Balzac

Love is a game that two can play and both win.  ~Eva Gabor

Without love, the rich and poor live in the same house.  ~Author Unknown

The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters.  It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it.  ~Francis Quarles, Emblems

Love is like those second-rate hotels where all the luxury is in the lobby.  ~Paul-Jean Toulet

We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack.  ~Marie Ebner Von Eschenbach, Aphorism

We picture love as heart-shaped because we do not know the shape of the soul.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.  ~François, duc de La Rochefoucauld

Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can't.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Love, and a cough, cannot be hid.  ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651

Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what's missing.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Poetry spills from the cracks of a broken heart, but flows from one which is loved.  ~Christopher Paul Rubero

A man is not where he lives, but where he loves.  ~Latin Proverb

The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate

Be everything with so much love in your heart that you would never want to do it any other way.  ~Amrit Desai

I need the starshine of your heavenly eyes,
After the day's great sun.
~Charles Hanson Towne

A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be.  ~Nicholas de Chamfort

Love is not consolation.  It is light.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights.  If you hear bells, get your ears checked.  ~Erich Segal

Love is the greatest touch-up artist of all.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.  ~Fyodor Dostoevski

Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.  ~Elinor Glyn

True love, to whom my heart is prey,
How dost thou hold me in thy sway,
That in each day I find no fault
But daily wait for love's assault.
~Pernette du Guillet

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.  ~William Butler Yeats

Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Smiles escape from clouds above and angels ring a chorus of your love.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.  ~Author Unknown

Love is what you've been through with somebody.  ~James Thurber, quoted in Life magazine, 1960

Love is being stupid together.  ~Paul Valery

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.  ~Charles Baudelaire

Open your heart and take us in,
Love - love and me.
~W.E. Henley

On a cloudy night, when nothing seems above, still, there is love.  Always love.  For something, from someone.  It's never done.  Never.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love.  I'd stepped in it a few times.  ~Rita Rudner

Fall not in love therefore; it will stick to your face.  ~Tony Hendra, "Deteriorata"

Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so.  ~Charles du Bos

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.  ~D.H. Lawrence

Love is an electric blanket with somebody else in control of the switch.  ~Cathy Carlyle

I love you like crazy, baby
'Cuz I'd go crazy without you.
~Pixie Foudre

What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.  ~William Carlos Williams

I learned the real meaning of love.  Love is absolute loyalty.  People fade, looks fade, but loyalty never fades.  You can depend so much on certain people, you can set your watch by them.  And that's love, even if it doesn't seem very exciting.  ~Sylvester Stallone

Ah, lady, when I gave my heart to thee,
It passed into thy lifelong regency.
~Gilbert Parker

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.  ~Plato

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.  ~William Shakespeare

Love is like a friendship caught on fire.  In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering.  As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.  ~Bruce Lee

Life only starts when love comes.  ~From the movie Bill of Divorcement, 1932

Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravelled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star: -
So many times do I love again.
~Thomas Lovell Beddoes

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.  ~George Jean Nathan

Love makes time pass; time makes love pass.  ~French Proverb

True love stories never have endings.  ~Richard Bach (Thanks, Bonnie)

It is not that love is blind.  It is that love sees with a painter's eye, finding the essence that renders all else background.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I love you as you are, but do not tell me how that is.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

When you're attracted to someone it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously, so what we know as fate is two neuroses knowing that they're a perfect match.  ~Jeff Arch, Nora Ephron, and David S. Ward, Sleepless in Seattle

Platonic love is love from the neck up.  ~Thyra Smater Winsolow

The music may have stopped but my heart beats to another tune, this rhythm called love.  ~A.C. Van Cherub

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.  ~Tom Robbins

The eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.  ~Margaret Atwood

Love is not a matter of what happens in life.  It's a matter of what's happening in your heart.  ~Ken Keyes

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.  ~Lao Tzu

You really shouldn't say "I love you" unless you mean it.  But if you mean it, you should say it a lot.  People forget.  ~Author unknown, attributed to an 8-year-old named Jessica

Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all else is surely desert.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life.  ~John Milton

Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.  ~Zelda Fitzgerald

Men love because they are afraid of themselves, afraid of the loneliness that lives in them, and need someone in whom they can lose themselves as smoke loses itself in the sky.  ~V.F. Calverton

Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too.  ~Author unknown, attributed to an 8-year-old named Greg

Lust fades, so you'd better be with someone who can stand you.  ~Alan Zweibel and Jessie Nelson, The Story of Us

Ah! a blessing beyond all fate
My sole mate 'tis my soul mate.
~Pixie Foudre

Love is a Mystery.  You can't find it; it has to find you.  ~Author Unknown

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.  ~Victor Hugo

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.  ~Pablo Picasso

Your fortune is misfortune if it is not Love.  ~Silent Lotus

I was half in love with her by the time we sat down.  That's the thing about girls.  Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.  ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1945

Love means nothing in tennis, but it's everything in life.  ~Author Unknown

You see, I'd never stopped to wonder why it was that millions of boys all over creation weren't seeing her and instantly falling in love with her, worshipping her body and mind and soul and spirit as I did.  It never occurred to me until this precise moment that maybe lots of boys wouldn't have thought she was gorgeous.  Maybe she only seemed so gorgeous to me because - and this is the shocker - her face came alive when I walked in front of it.  ~Author Unknown (I got this from a magazine story years ago but then lost the magazine - anyone know the attribution?)

Before you love, learn to run through the snow leaving no footprint.  ~Turkish Proverb

What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.  ~Pearl Bailey

Love is how you earn your wings.  ~Karen Goldman

Love is when you can be your true self with someone, and you only want to be your true self because of them.  ~Terri Guillemets

Once a man has won a woman's love, the love is his forever.  He can only lose the woman.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.  ~Germaine Greer

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.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

We're all a little weird.  And life is a little weird.  And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love.  ~Robert Fulghum, True Love

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.  ~Voltaire

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.  ~William Shakespeare

There's no denying that the only real unhappiness in life is losing a man.... Death isn't nature's greatest mistake - falling in love is.  If we didn't do that, all the misery in life would be cut right out of it.  Oh my goodness, so would all the fun.  So, what are you gonna do about it.  ~When Ladies Meet, 1941 movie written by Rachel Crothers, John Meehan, Leon Gordon, S.K. Lauren, and Anita Loos, spoken by the character Bridgie Drake  (not sure if this is also in the 1933 movie or 1932 play - anyone know?)

While God waits for His temple to be built of love, men bring stones.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

Love is why I came here in the first place.  ~John Denver

Your love has gone all through my body
like honey in water,
as a drug is mixed into spices,
as water is mingled with wine....
~Author Unknown

Love is metaphysical gravity.  ~R. Buckminster Fuller

Love is my religion - I could die for it.  ~John Keats

It is not necessary to be strong in every place if in the place you are vulnerable, you are loved.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex.  ~Dan Greenburg

Love would never be a promise of a rose garden unless it is showered with light of faith, water of sincerity and air of passion.  ~Author Unknown

Just because somebody doesn't love you the way you want them to, doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.  ~Author Unknown

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?  ~Author Unknown

Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart.  ~Author Unknown

A man finds love and is satisfied.  A woman finds love and insists on turning it into happiness.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Love is missing someone whenever you're apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you're close in heart.  ~Kay Knudsen

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.  ~Henry Louis Mencken

Love knows no answer for it does not question.  ~Silent Lotus

You learn to like someone when you find out what makes them laugh, but you can never truly love someone until you find out what makes them cry.  ~Author Unknown

Sometimes we make love with our eyes.  Sometimes we make love with our hands.  Sometimes we make love with our bodies.  Always we make love with our hearts.  ~Author Unknown

True love is when you put someone on a pedestal, and they fall - but you are there to catch them.  ~Author Unknown

You know when you have found your prince because you not only have a smile on your face but in your heart as well.  ~Author Unknown

Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart.  ~Author Unknown

Trip over love, you can get up.  Fall in love and you fall forever.  ~Author Unknown

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image.  Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.  ~Thomas Merton

Love is not blind - it sees more, not less.  But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.  ~Julins Gordon

And what's romance?  Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like it, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it's always daisy-time.  ~D.H. Lawrence

To the world you might be one person, but to one person you might be the world.  ~Author Unknown

No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Be it in the garden, the nursery or the bedroom, a loving touch compensates for an unskilled hand.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I guess, when you get down to it, a loving touch compensates for an unskilled hand about everywhere except in an airplane cockpit.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I am so tired - so tired.
I see too many people,
Read too many books.
Do too many things.
I hate the theaters,
I hate my work,
I want you, - only you....
Come to me between the cool sheets
And let me burrow my head in your shoulder....
~Pauline Cohn, "Rest"

It's so easy to fall in love but hard to find someone who will catch you.  ~Author Unknown

I'm far from perfect, but I'll be perfect for that imperfect person that's perfect for me.  ~Amanda Bynes

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others.  That is what the world calls a romance.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Come live in my heart and pay no rent.  ~Samuel Lover

Romance is dead - it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.  ~Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.  ~Emma Goldman, The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation

I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.  ~Thomas Moore

Love isn't blind, it's retarded.  ~Don Foster and Susan Beavers, Two and a Half Men

Free love? as if love is anything but free.  Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.  ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.  ~Miguel de Unamuno

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.  ~Michel de Montaigne

I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone.  ~Javan

Like I've always said, love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun.  ~Armistead Maupin, Maybe the Moon  (Thanks, David)

Part of the reason that men seem so much less loving than women is that men's behavior is measured with a feminine ruler.  ~Francesca M. Cancian

What I need to live has been given to me by the earth.  Why I need to live has been given to me by you.  ~Author Unknown

A heart that loves is always young.  ~Greek Proverb

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.  ~Claudia Ghandi

Falling in love is so hard on the knees.  ~Aerosmith

In true love the smallest distance is too great, and the greatest distance can be bridged.  ~Hans Nouwens

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.  ~Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain, 1922

In springtime, love is carried on the breeze.  Watch out for flying passion or kisses whizzing by your head.  ~Terri Guillemets

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.  ~G.K. Chesterton

I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long.  If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.  ~George Bernard Shaw

The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.  ~Edward Thomas

[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.  ~Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.  ~Wilson Mizner

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.  ~William Shakespeare

Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit.  ~R.E. Shay

Luck is the by-product of busting your fanny.  ~Don Sutton

Everything in life is luck.  ~Donald Trump

Name the greatest of all inventors.  Accident.  ~Mark Twain

Luck never gives; it only lends.  ~Swedish Proverb

Luck:  when your burst of energy doesn't run afoul of someone else's.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Go and wake up your luck.  Persian Saying

Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves.  ~Larry King

Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent.  ~Langston Coleman

It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned.  ~Frank A. Clark

Luck never made a man wise.  ~Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

Luck is when opportunity knocks and you answer.  ~Author Unknown

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.  ~Thomas Jefferson

What do you get when you cross poison ivy with a four-leaf clover?  A rash of good luck.  ~Author Unknown

Luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don't depend on it.  ~Author Unknown

Shallow men believe in luck.  Strong men believe in cause and effect.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?  ~Jean Cocteau

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.  ~Harry Golden

Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others.  If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter which fork you use.  ~Emily Post

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

To disagree, one doesn't have to be disagreeable.  ~Barry M. Goldwater and Jack Casserly, Goldwater

Good manners are just a way of showing other people that we have respect for them.  ~Bill Kelly

Politeness is the art of choosing among one's real thoughts.  ~Abel Stevens

Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were.  ~Author Unknown

The test of good manners is to be patient with bad ones.  ~Gabirol (Solomon ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol), The Choice of Pearls

Learn young about hard work and manners - and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Whoever one is, and wherever one is, one is always in the wrong if one is rude.  ~Maurice Baring

I don't think you want too much sincerity in society.  It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good manners:  The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.  ~Bennett Cerf

A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy.  ~Lord Halifax

There can be no defence like elaborate courtesy.  ~E.V. Lucas

Visitors should behave in such a way that the host and hostess feel at home.  ~J.S. Farynski

Outcomes rarely turn on grand gestures or the art of the deal, but on whether you've sent someone a thank-you note.  ~Bernie Brillstein, The Little Stuff Matters Most

Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

People count up the faults of those who keep them waiting.  ~French Proverb

Politeness, n.  The most acceptable hypocrisy.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.  ~Eric Hoffer

Says the rude child:  "No, I won't do it."  Says the courteous grown-up:  "Yes, I won't do it."  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Good manners can replace morals.  It may be years before anyone knows if what you are doing is right.  But if what you are doing is nice, it will be immediately evident.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Courtesies cannot be borrowed like snow shovels; you must have some of your own.  ~John Wanamaker

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.  ~Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living: Diaries

Treat people as you would like to be treated.  Karma's only a bitch if you are.  ~Author Unknown

It's not a slam at you when people are rude - it's a slam at the people they've met before.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Treat everyone with politeness, even those who are rude to you - not because they are nice, but because you are.  ~Author Unknown

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners?  Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?  ~John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.  ~Author Unknown



What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.  ~H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques, 1916


The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.  ~Peter De Vries


To keep the fire burning brightly there's one easy rule:  Keep the two logs together, near enough to keep each other warm and far enough apart - about a finger's breadth - for breathing room.  Good fire, good marriage, same rule.  ~Marnie Reed Crowell


I love being married.  It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.  ~Rita Rudner


Marriage, n.  A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all two.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Newlyweds become oldyweds, and oldyweds are the reasons that families work.  ~Author Unknown


Chains do not hold a marriage together.  It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.  ~Simone Signoret


Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate.  ~Barnett R. Brickner


A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.  ~Anne Taylor Fleming


Woke up in bed with a gorgeous woman, who I'm going to have lunch and the rest of my life with.  ~Jason Barmer, pedestriansaint.com


More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse.  ~Doug Larson


One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.  ~Judith Viorst


Never get married in the morning, because you never know who you'll meet that night.  ~Paul Hornung


Divorce:  The past tense of marriage.  ~Author Unknown


Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other.  Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.  ~Katherine Hepburn


A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce.  The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage.  ~Robert Anderson, Solitaire & Double Solitaire


There is no such cozy combination as man and wife.  ~Menander


Two things are owed to truthfulness - lasting marriages and short friendships.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation.  It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through eternity.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Never go to bed mad.  Stay up and fight.  ~Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966


In the opinion of the world, marriage ends all, as it does in a comedy.  The truth is precisely the opposite:  it begins all.  ~Anne Sophie Swetchine


In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare.  Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.  ~Robert Sexton


An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.  ~Pliny the Younger, Letters


If you made a list of the reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a hell of a lot of overlapping.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.  ~W. Somerset Maugham


If two stand shoulder to shoulder against the gods,
Happy together, the gods themselves are helpless
Against them while they stand so.
~Maxwell Anderson


After the chills and fever of love, how nice is the 98.6º of marriage!  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for granted relationship.  ~Iris Murdoch


English Law prohibits a man from marrying his mother-in-law.  This is our idea of useless legislation.  ~Author Unknown


A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity.  The order varies for any given year.  ~Paul Sweeney


Matrimony is a process by which a grocer acquired an account the florist had.  ~Francis Rodman


Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.  ~Beverley Nichols


Valentine's Day is when a lot of married men are reminded what a poor shot Cupid really is.  ~Author Unknown


Love is a flower which turns into fruit at marriage.  ~Finnish Proverb


A dress that zips up the back will bring a husband and wife together.  ~James H. Boren


All marriages are happy.  It's the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.  ~Raymond Hull


One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.  ~George MacDonald


As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.  ~Socrates


Love seems the swiftest but it is the slowest of all growths.  No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.  ~Mark Twain


Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife; she has thought much worse things about you.  ~Jean Rostand, Le Mariage, 1927


Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.  ~Isadora Duncan


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 part.  ~G.B. Shaw, Getting Married, 1908


A first-rate marriage is like a first-rate hotel:  expensive, but worth it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Our wedding was many years ago.  The celebration continues to this day.  ~Gene Perret


Here's to matrimony, the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented!  ~Heinrich Heine


The reason for much matrimony is patrimony.  ~Ogden Nash


I figure that the degree of difficulty in combining two lives ranks somewhere between rerouting a hurricane and finding a parking place in downtown Manhattan.  ~Claire Cloninger, "When the Glass Slipper Doesn't Fit and the Silver Spoon is in Someone Else's Mouth"


A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals


Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Three rings of marriage are the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffering.  ~Author Unknown


Though marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves 'em still two fools.  ~William Congreve


Marriage ceremony:  an incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family.  ~O.C. Ogilvie






A man in love is incomplete until he has married.  Then he's finished.  ~Zsa Zsa Gabor


One should never know too precisely whom one has married.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Bigamy is having one husband or wife too many.  Monogamy is the same.  ~Oscar Wilde


Spouse:  someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single.  ~Author Unknown


Marriage means commitment.  Of course, so does insanity.  ~Author Unknown


Like good wine, marriage gets better with age - once you learn to keep a cork in it.  ~Gene Perret


Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.  ~Mae West


My wife says I never listen to her.  At least I think that's what she said.  ~Author Unknown


I never knew what real happiness was until I got married.  And by then it was too late.  ~Max Kauffman


Don't smother each other.  No one can grow in shade.  ~Leo Buscaglia


Don't marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can't live without.  ~James C. Dobson


I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.  ~Lord Byron


The chief reason why marriage is rarely a success is that it is contracted while the partners are insane.  ~Joseph Collins


We have the greatest pre-nuptial agreement in the world.  It's called love.  ~Gene Perret


It takes a loose rein to keep a marriage tight.  ~John Stevenson


Mistress:  something between a mister and a mattress.  ~Author Unknown


Mother-in-law:  a woman who destroys her son-in-law's peace of mind by giving him a piece of hers.  ~Author Unknown


Bachelor:  the only man who has never told his wife a lie.  ~Author Unknown


Wedding rings:  the world's smallest handcuffs.  ~Author Unknown


How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.  ~Oscar Wilde


Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.  ~Stephen Leacock, Literary Lapses, 1910


The most dangerous food is wedding cake.  ~American Proverb


Strange to say what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.  ~Samuel Pepys


Home cooking:  where many a man thinks his wife is.  ~Author Unknown


Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


Marriage is not a word - it is a sentence.  ~Author Unknown


Our marriage has always been a 50-50 proposition - with the possible exception of closet space.  ~Gene Perret


There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.  ~Adela Rogers St. Johns


When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.  ~Sacha Guitry, Elles et toi, 1948


It isn't tying himself to one woman that a man dreads when he thinks of marrying; it's separating himself from all the others.  ~Helen Rowland, Violets and Vinegar


Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.  ~Marlene Dietrich


Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman.  ~Joseph Joubert


Never strike your wife - even with a flower.  ~Hindu Proverb


The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.  ~Peter Devries


The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.  ~Brendan Behan


So heavy is the chain of wedlock that it needs two to carry it, and sometimes three.  ~Alexandre Dumas, fils


Marriage is three parts love and seven parts forgiveness of sins.  ~Langdon Mitchell


Bride, n.  A woman with a fine prospect behind her.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


If your husband and a lawyer were drowning and you had to choose, would you go to lunch or to a movie?  ~Author Unknown


What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.  ~George Levinger


Love-matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.  ~Countess of Blessington


Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.  ~Sydney J. Harris


That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger.  ~George Eliot


The husband who doesn't tell his wife everything probably reasons that what she doesn't know won't hurt him.  ~Leo J. Burke


You can never be happily married to another until you get a divorce from yourself.  Successful marriage demands a certain death to self.  ~Jerry
McCant


Married life teaches one invaluable lesson:  to think of things far enough ahead not to say them.  ~Jefferson Machamer


It's easy to understand love at first sight, but how do we explain love after two people have been looking at each other for years?  ~Author Unknown


The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.  ~Honore de Balzac, The Physiology of Marriage


Never marry for money.  Ye'll borrow it cheaper.  ~Scottish Proverb


Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness?  It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means.  ~Henny Youngman


It's a nasty divorce when they can't agree on how to divvy up the His and Hers towels.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.  ~Gabriel García Márquez


She cried, and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.  ~Tommy Manville


By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.  ~Socrates


A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.  ~Ruth Bell Graham


Pity all newlyweds.  She cooks something nice for him, and he brings her flowers, and they kiss and think:  How easy marriage is.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


One man's folly is another man's wife.  ~Helen Rowland


Women hope men will change after marriage but they don't; men hope women won't change but they do.  ~Bettina Arndt, Private Lives, 1986


Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses.  ~English Proverb


It was Mrs. Campbell, for instance, who, on a celebrated occasion, threw her companion into a flurry by describing her recent marriage as "the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue."  ~Alexander Woollcott, While Rome Burns


Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him.  After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.  ~Marilyn Monroe


A perfect marriage is one in which "I'm sorry" is said just often enough.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Marriage must constantly fight against a monster which devours everything:  routine.  ~Honore de Balzac


Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.  ~H.L. Mencken


In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism.  Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again.... We are not ridiculous to ourselves.  We are ageless.  That is the luxury of the wedding ring.  ~Enid Bagnold, Autobiography, 1969


Many marriages are simply working partnerships between businessmen and housekeepers.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The highest happiness on earth is marriage.  ~William Lyon Phelps


Marriage is more than four bare legs in a bed.  ~Hoshang N. Akhtar


A fellow ought to save a few of the long evenings he spends with his girl till after they're married.  ~Kin Hubbard


Two mothers-in-law.  ~Lord John Russell, on being asked what he would consider a proper punishment for bigamy


Though women are angels, yet wedlock's the devil.  ~Byron, Hours of Idleness


A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.  ~Joey Adams


A question asked in a Surrey school exam went:  "Why do cocks crow early every morning?"  A twelve-year-old replied:  "My dad says they have to make the most of it while the hens are asleep."  ~Quoted in the Peterborough Daily Telegraph, 1983


A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.  ~H.L. Mencken


Marriage is a meal where the soup is better than the dessert.  ~Austin O'Malley


One shouldn't be too inquisitive in life
Either about God's secrets or one's wife.
~Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales


Most wives think of their husbands as bumbling braggarts with whom they happen to be in love.  ~Jackie Gleason


For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.  ~Bill Cosby, Love and Marriage


I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy.  First, let her think she's having her own way.  And second, let her have it.  ~Lyndon B. Johnson


Marriage is a ghastly public confession of a strictly private intention.  ~Ian Hay


Some marriages break up, and some do not, and in our world you can usually explain the former better than the latter.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


My mother said it was simple to keep a man, you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom.  I said I'd hire the other two and take care of the bedroom bit.  ~Jerry Hall


The marriage state, with or without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.  ~Richard Steele, The Spectator


Adultery is the application of democracy to love.  ~Henry Louis Mencken, "Sententiae," A Book of Burlesques, 1920


A dog is much like a married man, obeying his master's voice for the sake of his master's touch.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.  ~Andre Maurois


Marriage:  A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite sex solemnly agree to harass and spy on each other for ninety-nine years, or until death do them join.  ~Elbert Hubbard


In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other.  In the later years, you fight because you do.  ~Joan Didion


Marriage isn't all that it's cracked up to be.  Let me tell you, honestly.  Marriage is probably the chief cause of divorce.  ~Larry Gelbart, M*A*S*H, "Bulletin Board," original airdate 14 January 1975, spoken by the character Frank Burns


When a girl marries she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.  ~Helen Rowland


In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin - consideration for their feelings.  As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.  ~Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal, 1974


Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won't even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.  ~Helen Rowland


Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck.  If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.  ~Jean Kerr, Mary, Mary, 1960


Marriage changes passion - suddenly you're in bed with a relative.  ~Author Unknown


It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail.  All that marriage does is to show people up.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick


A wedding is just like a funeral except that you get to smell your own flowers.  ~Grace Hansen


The view that a peptic ulcer may be the hole in a man's stomach through which he crawls to escape from his wife has fairly wide acceptance.  ~John Allan Dalrymple Anderson


Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


I've been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.  ~Lee Grant


Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid.  ~Harlan Miller


The man who never in his life
Has washed the dishes with his wife
Or polished up the silver plate -
He still is largely celibate.
~Christopher Morley, Washing the Dishes


A love that lasts for twenty years may be better than love, but it isn't love.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


God created sex.  Priests created marriage.  ~Voltaire


To avoid mistakes and regrets, always consult your wife before engaging in a flirtation.  ~E.W. Howe


The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.  ~Henny Youngman


Marriage is a mistake every man should make.  ~George Jessel


I guess walking slow getting married is because it gives you time to maybe change your mind.  ~Virginia Cary Hudson, O Ye Jigs & Juleps, 1962  (Thanks, Charlene)


A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.  ~Helen Rowland


My husband and I divorced over religious differences.  He thought he was God, and I didn't.  ~Author Unknown


Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other never forgets them.  ~Ogden Nash


One thing you learn in a long marriage is how many sneezes to wait before saying, "Bless you."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Husbands are like fires.  They go out when unattended.  ~Zsa Zsa Gabor


The concern that some women show at the absence of their husbands, does not arise from their not seeing them and being with them, but from their apprehension that their husbands are enjoying pleasures in which they do not participate, and which, from their being at a distance, they have not the power of interrupting.  ~Michel de Montaigne


But married once, a man is stak'd or pown'd, and cannot graze beyond his own hedge.  ~Philip Massinger, Fatal Dowry, 1632


Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.  ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld


Why do married men gain weight while bachelors don't?  Bachelors go to the refrigerator, see nothing they want, then go to bed.  Married guys go to the bed, see nothing they want, then go to the refrigerator.  ~Author Unknown


I never married because there was no need.  I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband.  I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.  ~Marie Corelli


Women seem to be all right on bargains till it comes to picking out a husband.  ~Kin Hubbard


After a few years of marriage, a man can look right at a woman without seeing her - and a woman can see right through a man without looking at him.  ~Helen Rowland


Why get married?  For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state.  If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.  ~Quentin Crisp, "The Art of Celibacy"






Wives are young men's mistresses; companions for middle age; and old men's nurses.  ~Francis Bacon, "Of Marriage and Single Life," Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, 1625


Marriage:  A word which should be pronounced "mirage."  ~Herbert Spencer


A man without a wife is like a vase without flowers.  ~African Proverb


A woman ought to look up to her husband, if only a half-inch.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


A woman who loves her husband is merely paying her bills.  A woman who loves her lover gives alms to the poor.  ~Paul-Jean Toulet


Love requires a willingness to die; marriage, a willingness to live.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Give up all hope of peace so long as your mother-in-law is alive.  ~Juvenal, Satires


We were happily married for eight months.  Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years.  ~Nick Faldo


Men never know how tired they are till their wives sit them down for a nice long talk.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The reason they're called the opposite sex is because every time you think you have your wife fooled - it's just the opposite!  ~Walter Winchell


By the time you're his
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
~Dorothy Parker


Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.  ~Robert Graves


If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.  ~H.L. Mencken


My wife tells me she doesn't care what I do when I'm away, as long as I'm not enjoying it.  ~Lee Trevino


To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
~Ogden Nash


"What's for dinner?" is the only question many husbands ask their wives, and the only one to which they care about the answer.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Most marriages can survive "better or worse."  The tester is all the years of "exactly the same."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.  ~Barry Goldwater


People do not marry people, not real ones anyway; they marry what they think the person is; they marry illusions and images.  The exciting adventure of marriage is finding out who the partner really is.  ~James L. Framo, "Explorations in Marital & Family Therapy"


Men have a much better time of it than women.  For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.  ~H.L. Mencken


I dreamed of a wedding of elaborate elegance,
A church filled with family and friends.
I asked him what kind of a wedding he wished for,
He said one that would make me his wife.
~Author Unknown


No man expects a great deal from marriage.  He is quite satisfied if his wife is a good cook, a good valet, an attentive audience, and a patient nurse.  ~Author Unknown


Think not because you are now wed
That all your courtship's at an end.
~Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza


Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.  ~Arthur Baer


I came from a big family.  As a matter of fact, I never got to sleep alone until I was married.  ~Lewis Grizzard


There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.  ~Martin Luther


Alimony - The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.  ~H.L. Mencken, "Sententiae," A Book of Burlesques, 1920


If marriage were outlawed, only outlaws would have in-laws.  ~Author Unknown


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


I've sometimes thought of marrying, and then I've thought again.  ~Noel Coward, 1956


Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage:  "Ye who enter here leave all hope behind."  ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love


Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded.  Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.  ~Edna Ferber, Show Boat, 1926


"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language.  Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?  ~Author Unknown


Affairs are just as disillusioning as marriage, and much less restful.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness.  ~Virginie des Rieux, Epigrams


Wedlock is a padlock.  ~John Ray, English Proverbs


The marriage of convenience has this to recommend it:  we are better judges of convenience than we are of love.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.  ~Samuel Lichtenberg


The best way to remember your wife's birthday is to forget it once.  ~H.V. Prochnow


Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence.  Without parole.  ~John Mortimer, The Trials of Rumpole


One of the best things about marriage is that it gets young people to bed at a decent hour.  ~M.M. Musselman


Marriage is like a bank account.  You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest.  ~Irwin Corey


If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.  ~Katharine Houghton Hepburn


The total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.  ~Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals


Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State- and church-begotten weed, marriage?  ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love


What we love about love is the fever, which marriage puts to bed and cures.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Between a man and his wife nothing ought to rule but love.  ~William Penn


On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.  ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love


Marriage is a wonderful invention: then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.  ~Billy Connolly


Marriage is nature's way of ensuring that a woman picks up some mothering experience before she has her first child.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Marriage is good for those who are afraid to sleep alone at night.  ~St. Jerome, Attack on Jovinian


[M]y mother once told me that if a married couple puts a penny in a pot for every time they make love in the first year, and takes a penny out every time after that, they'll never get all the pennies out of the pot.  ~Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City, 1978


The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.  ~H.L. Mencken


A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life.  To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.  ~Ellen Key, quoted by Sprading in Liberty and the Great Libertarians


Any married man should forget his mistakes - no use two people remembering the same thing.  ~Duane Dewel


Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage - they've experienced pain and bought jewelry.  ~Rita Rudner


Then marriage may be said to be past in all quietnesse, when the wife is blind, and the husband deafe.  ~Thomas Heywood, "Dialogues"


Come, let's be a comfortable couple and take care of each other!  How glad we shall be, that we have somebody we are fond of always, to talk to and sit with.  ~Charles Dickens


A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.  ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays


Getting married is a lot like getting into a tub of hot water.  After you get used to it, it ain't so hot.  ~Minnie Pearl


Love is grand; divorce a hundred grand.  ~Author Unknown


It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.  ~Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 1829


A single man has not nearly the value he would have in a state of union.  He is an incomplete animal.  He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors.  ~Benjamin Franklin


And when will there be an end of marrying?  I suppose, when there is an end of living!  ~Tertullian


The surest way to be alone is to get married.  ~Gloria Steinem


[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.  ~Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally


It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.  ~Robert Frost


I never even believed in divorce until after I got married.  ~Diane Ford


As a man, I've learned that there is nothing easier in married life than pleasing your wife with your cooking.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply that we don't have as much money.  That was a true but incomplete answer.  In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.  ~Gloria Steinem


Courtship to marriage is as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.  ~William Congreve, The Old Bachelor, 1693


If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books.  ~Alan King


They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.  ~Alexander Pope, The Wife of Bath, 1713


Marriage is like a phone call in the night: first the ring, and then you wake up.  ~Evelyn Hendrickson


When the one man loves the one woman and the one woman loves the one man, the very angels desert heaven and come and sit in that house and sing for joy.  ~The Brahma Sutras


Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.  ~Author Unknown


If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.  ~Anton Chekov


The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.  ~Heinrich Heine


The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing - and then marry him.  ~Cher


If you haven't seen your wife smile at a traffic cop, you haven't seen her smile her prettiest.  ~Kin Hubbard


Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men, 1850


When a man opens the car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.  ~Prince Philip


You should never kiss a girl unless you have enough bucks to buy her a big ring and her own VCR, 'cause she'll want to have videos of the wedding.  ~Jim, age 10


It gives me a headache to think about that stuff.  I'm just a kid.  I don't need that kind of trouble.  ~Kenny, age 7, when asked if it's better to be single or married


Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.  ~Thornton Wilder


No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.  ~H.L. Mencken


Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.  ~Michel de Montaigne


I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage, and guarantee he'd be dead within the year.  ~Bette Davis


Men should keep their eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards.  ~Madeleine de Scudery


Marrying for love may be a bit risky, but it is so honest that God can't help but smile on it.  ~Josh Billings


Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows - marriage does.  ~Groucho Marx


Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits and then complain that he's not the man she married?  ~Barbra Streisand


No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar, a custom which is still continued.  ~Helen Rowland, Reflections of a Bachelor Girl, 1909


He's the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of.  ~Mae West


The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.  ~A.P. Herbert


Never get married in college; it's hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you've already made one mistake.  ~Elbert Hubbard




If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.  ~John Louis von Neumann


Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.  ~Carl Sandburg


Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.  ~Albert Einstein


Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.  ~Albert Einstein


Black holes result from God dividing the universe by zero.  ~Author Unknown


Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs.  ~Isaac Barrow


I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.  ~Calvin Trillin


I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure.  ~Stanislaw J. Lec, More Unkempt Thoughts


If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.  ~Phil Pastoret


[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.  ~Evan Esar, Esar's Comic Dictionary


"Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;"  I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase.  I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:  "Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born."  I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.  ~Charles Babbage, letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, about a couplet in his "The Vision of Sin"


Math is radical!  ~Bumper Sticker


There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web.  They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles.  Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience.  The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.  ~Gregory Benford, Timescape


It is a mathematical fact that fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class.  ~Author Unknown


If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.  ~Author Unknown


Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.  ~Carl Sandburg, "Arithmetic"


Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.  ~Carl Sandburg, "Arithmetic"


If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.  ~Richard Preston


Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.  ~Eric T. Bell, The Development of Mathematics


So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.  ~Francis Bacon, "Of Studies"


The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.  ~S. Gudder


The human mind has never invented a labor-saving machine equal to algebra.  ~Author Unknown


The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.  ~Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire


Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.  ~Dean Schlicter


It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations.  It is the job of bank accountants.  ~Samuil Shchatunovski


Trigonometry is a sine of the times.  ~Author Unknown


Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.  Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.  ~W.S. Anglin


A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~Paul Erdos


Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.  ~Alfred North Whitehead


The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, "refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings," and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to sense tried by the present-day kaleidoscope of events.  ~Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture






Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.  ~Carl Boyer, 1949, calculus textbook


The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think.  This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.  ~Eric Bell, The Search for Truth


Sometimes it is useful to know how large your zero is.  ~Author Unknown


The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.  ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections On The Human Condition



Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.  ~William Thomson Baron Kelvin of Largs


The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.  Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.  ~Bertrand Russell


Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.  ~Gottfried Leibniz


How many times can you subtract 7 from 83, and what is left afterwards?  You can subtract it as many times as you want, and it leaves 76 every time.  ~Author Unknown


To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory.  Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts.  Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas.  ~Ivars Peterson


With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.  ~Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value


But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.  ~Harold Marston Morse


Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.  ~Gregory Bateson


Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.  ~Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love


You may be an engineer if your idea of good interpersonal communication means getting the decimal point in the right place.  ~Author Unknown


The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones.  Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can't even begin to think about in any very definite way.  Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed.  Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions.  ~Ronald L. Graham


We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it.  Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.  ~Mark Twain


Can you do Division?  Divide a loaf by a knife - what's the answer to that?  ~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass


Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.  ~Tobias Dantzig


Although he may not always recognize his bondage, modern man lives under a tyranny of numbers.  ~Nicholas Eberstadt, The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule


The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy.  Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination.  ~Thomas Hill


The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed.  Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days."  Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all.  The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that....  The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation.  Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C).  The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed....  [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving...shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone."  A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C.  We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.  ~From Applied Optics, vol. 11, A14, 1972


I used to love mathematics for its own sake, and I still do, because it allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.... ~Stendhal (Henri Beyle), The Life of Henri Brulard


As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.  ~Albert Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity


God does not care about our mathematical difficulties; He integrates empirically.  ~Albert Einstein


If there is a God, he's a great mathematician.  ~Paul Dirac


To all of us who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology.  ~Hilda Phoebe Hudson


[T]he different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.  ~Lewis Carroll


[G]eometry is not true, it is advantageous.  ~Henri Poincaré


Infinity is a floorless room without walls or ceiling.  ~Author Unknown


Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.  ~Bertrand Russell


God is real, unless declared integer.  ~Author Unknown


If a healthy minded person takes an interest in science, he gets busy with his mathematics and haunts the laboratory.  ~W.S. Franklin


Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.  ~Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World


There was a young man from Trinity,
Who solved the square root of infinity.
While counting the digits,
He was seized by the fidgets,
Dropped science, and took up divinity.
~Author Unknown


One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers...  ~Heinrich Hertz


In the binary system we count on our fists instead of on our fingers.  ~Author Unknown


There are 10 types of people in this world:  those who understand binary and those who don't.  ~Author Unknown


The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.  ~Euclid


In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes.  In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure.  ~Hermann Hankel


Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence.  Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting.  I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.  ~Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky


I know that two and two make four - & should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 & 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron


Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting.  There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.  ~Ernst Mach


Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature.  Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.  ~Percy William Bridgman, The Way Things Are


A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars.  That's subtraction.  ~Mae West


I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own.  A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example.  Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants.  Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation....  ~Paul Auster, The Music of Chance


Why do we believe that in all matters the odd numbers are more powerful?  ~Pliny the Elder, Natural History


Uneven numbers are the gods' delight.  ~Virgil, The Eclogues


One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.  ~Philip J. Davis


Pure mathematics is the world's best game.  It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly.  It's free.  It can be played anywhere - Archimedes did it in a bathtub.  ~Richard J. Trudeau, Dots and Lines


I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because like SuperSocketoza's God, it won't love us in return.  ~Bertrand Russell, 1912


The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.  ~John Kemeny


Although I am almost illiterate mathematically, I grasped very early in life that any one who can count to ten can count upward indefinitely if he is fool enough to do so.  ~Robertson Davies, "Of the Conservation of Youth," The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks


A million thanks to Norm & Andy for submitting some of these quotes!


Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.  ~G.K. Chesterton

We can't quite decide if the world is growing worse, or if the reporters are just working harder.  ~The Houghton Line, November 1965

News is history shot on the wing.  ~Gene Fowler, Skyline

It was while making newspaper deliveries, trying to miss the bushes and hit the porch, that I first learned the importance of accuracy in journalism.  ~Charles Osgood

Newspapers:  dead trees with information smeared on them.  ~Horizon, "Electronic Frontier"

I always turn to the sports section first.  The sports section records people's accomplishments; the front page nothing but man's failures.  ~Earl Warren, quoted in Sports Illustrated, 22 July 1968

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read:  "President Can't Swim."  ~Lyndon B. Johnson

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.  ~Ben Hecht

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.  ~Warren Chappell

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.  ~James G. Watt, quoted in Newsweek, 8 March 1982

Journalists aren't supposed to praise things.  It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.  ~Thomas Jefferson

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.  ~Paul Eldridge

If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event... what kind of film would you use?  ~Author Unknown

There ain't any news in being good.  You might write the doings of all the convents of the world on the back of a postage stamp, and have room to spare.  ~Finley Peter Dunne

Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.  ~Rebecca West

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.  ~Charles Baudelaire

A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.  ~Henry Fielding

Journalism is literature in a hurry.  ~Matthew Arnold

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship

No news is good news.  No journalists is even better.  ~Nicolas Bentley

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.  ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to Nathaniel Macon

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.  ~David Brinkley

Harmony seldom makes a headline.  ~Silas Bent

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.  ~Arthur Miller

We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.  ~Wendell Phillips

The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.  ~Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.  ~Norman Mailer

Journalists cover words and delude themselves into thinking they have committed journalism.  ~Hedrick Smith

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.  ~George Bernard Shaw, 1931

You can crush a man with journalism.  ~William Randolph Hearst

With all the mass media concentrated in a few hands, the ancient faith in the competition of ideas in the free market seems like a hollow echo of a much simpler day.  ~Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Editor:  A person employed on a newspaper whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.  ~Elbert Hubbard

In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time.  It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has.  ~Mark Twain

I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets.  ~Napoleon

You don't realize how little accuracy there is in network TV reporting until they cover a story in your hometown.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If it's called the USA Today, why is all the news from yesterday?  BAM.  Busted!  ~Stephen Colbert

Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.  ~Mark Twain

People everywhere confuse
What they read in newspapers with news.
~A.J. Liebling, The New Yorker, 7 April 1956

I've always said there's a place for the press but they haven't dug it yet.  ~Tommy Docherty, 1980

Every newspaper editor owes tribute to the devil.  ~Jean de la Fontaine

If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.  ~Malcolm X

All newspaper writers have heard that the stuff they compose today has an excellent chance of being used to wrap tomorrow's mackerel.  ~Ira Berkow

When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news.  ~Charles Anderson Dana

The secret of successful journalism is to make your readers so angry they will write half your paper for you.  ~C.E.M. Joad

Journalism is organized gossip.  ~Edward Egglestone

A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did.  These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.  ~Lemony Snicket

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

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayadère of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me."  Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising - only these stand a chance.  ~Henry James

Television has a real problem.  They have no page two.  Consequently every big story gets the same play and comes across to the viewer as a really big, scary one.  ~Art Buchwald, 1969

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed.  If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters.  But TV news can only present the "bare bones" of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.  ~Dave Barry

The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow.  Bigness means weakness.  ~Eric Sevareid, "The Press and the People," television program, 1959

Journalism - a profession whose business it is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.  ~Lord Northcliffe

The American mass media have achieved what American political might could not:  World domination.  ~Akbar S. Ahmed

All of us learn to write by the second grade, then most of us go on to other things.  ~Bobby Knight, on reporters

The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.  ~David Brinkley

That ephemeral sheet,... the newspaper, is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.  ~E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal, July 1858

You should always believe all you read in the newspapers, as this makes them more interesting.  ~Rose Maccaulay

Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.  ~Erwin Knoll

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.  ~Anna Quindlen

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything.  Except what is worth knowing.  Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.  ~William Tecumseh Sherman

Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.  ~Adlai E. Stevenson

Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertiser's won't object to.  ~Helen Swaffer

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.  ~Gandhi



In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men.  ~Cicero


My doctor is nice; every time I see him, I'm ashamed of what I think of doctors in general.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


People pay the doctor for his trouble; for his kindness they still remain in his debt.  ~Seneca


The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.  ~Plato


Body and soul cannot be separated for purposes of treatment, for they are one and indivisible.  Sick minds must be healed as well as sick bodies.  ~C. Jeff Miller


In the sick room, ten cents' worth of human understanding equals ten dollars' worth of medical science.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.  ~William Osler


It is a mathematical fact that fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class.  ~Author Unknown


Restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.  ~Robert Burton


I got the bill for my surgery.  Now I know what those doctors were wearing masks for.  ~James H. Boren


A hospital should also have a recovery room adjoining the cashier's office.  ~Francis O'Walsh


Did God who gave us flowers and trees,
Also provide the allergies?
~E.Y. Harburg, "A Nose Is a Nose Is a Nose," 1965


I learned a long time ago that minor surgery is when they do the operation on someone else, not you.  ~Bill Walton


It is a wise mans part, rather to avoid sickness, than to wishe for medicines.  ~Thomas More, Utopia [sic]


I wondher why ye can always read a doctor's bill an' ye niver can read his purscription.  ~Finley Peter Dunne


You have a cough?  Go home tonight, eat a whole box of Ex-Lax - tomorrow you'll be afraid to cough.  ~Pearl Williams


To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


A doctor whose breath smells has no right to medical opinion.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit - Life!
~Emily Dickinson


It is a good thing for a physician to have prematurely grey hair and itching piles.  The first makes him appear to know more than he does, and the second gives him an expression of concern which the patient interprets as being on his behalf.  ~A. Benson Cannon


A doctor who cannot take a good history and a patient who cannot give one are in danger of giving and receiving bad treatment.  ~Author Unknown


One thousand Americans stop smoking every day - by dying.  ~Author Unknown


A hypochondriac is one who has a pill for everything except what ails him.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.  ~Voltaire


A doctor must work eighteen hours a day and seven days a week.  If you cannot console yourself to this, get out of the profession.  ~Martin H. Fischer


It is sometimes as dangerous to be run into by a microbe as by a trolley car.  ~J.J. Walsh


Every disease is a physician.  ~Irish Proverb


God heales, and the Physitian hath the thankes.  ~George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs


Drugs are not always necessary.  Belief in recovery always is.  ~Norman Cousins


I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


There is no curing a sick man who believes himself to be in health.  ~Henri Amiel


Doctors think a lot of patients are cured who have simply quit in disgust.  ~Don Herold


The only equipment lack in the modern hospital?  Somebody to meet you at the entrance with a handshake!  ~Martin H. Fischer


The worst thing about medicine is that one kind makes another necessary.  ~Elbert Hubbard


When you are called to a sick man, be sure you know what the matter is - if you do not know, nature can do a great deal better than you can guess.  ~Nicholas de Belleville


Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it.  ~William Shakespeare


I recently became a Christian Scientist.  It was the only health plan I could afford.  ~Betsy Salkind






Poisons and medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents.  ~Peter Mere Latham


In the nineteenth century men lost their fear of God and acquired a fear of microbes.  ~Author Unknown


Symptoms, then are in reality nothing but the cry from suffering organs.  ~Jean Martin Charcot, translated from French


I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.  ~Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat


Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice.  ~Martin H. Fischer


The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.  ~Alexander of Tralles


Physicians and politicians resemble one another in this respect, that some defend the constitution and others destroy it.  ~Author Unknown


A smart mother makes often a better diagnosis than a poor doctor.  ~August Bier


When fate arrives the physician becomes a fool.  ~Arabic Proverb


Medicines are not meat to live by.  ~German Proverb


Treat the patient, not the Xray.  ~James M. Hunter


God and the Doctor we alike adore
But only when in danger, not before;
The danger o'er, both are alike requited,
God is forgotten, and the Doctor slighted.
~Robert Owen


Financial ruin from medical bills is almost exclusively an American disease.  ~Roul Turley


The hospital is the only proper College in which to rear a true disciple of Aesculapius.  ~John Abernethy


A man who cannot work without his hypodermic needle is a poor doctor.  The amount of narcotic you use is inversely proportional to your skill.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought,
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught,
The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend.
~John Dryden


Medicine is the only profession that labours incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence.  ~James Bryce, 1914


It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.  ~John Brown


The patient does not care about your science; what he wants to know is, can you cure him?  ~Martin H. Fischer


Medicines heals doubts as well as diseases.  ~Karl Marx


A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world.  ~Harvey Cushing


Medicine sometimes snatches away health, sometimes gives it.  ~Ovid, Tristia


As it takes two to make a quarrel, so it takes two to make a disease, the microbe and its host.  ~Charles V. Chapin


Disease is war with the laws of our being, and all war, as a great general has said, is hell.  ~Lewis G. Janes


Until a physician has killed one or two he is not a physician. ~Kashmiri Proverb


No man is a good doctor who has never been sick himself.  ~Chinese Proverb


Only one rule in medical ethics need concern you - that action on your part which best conserves the interests of your patient.  ~Martin H. Fischer


To me the ideal doctor would be a man endowed with profound knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively divining any suffering or disorder of whatever kind, and restoring peace by his mere presence.  ~Henri Amiel


Medicinal discovery,
It moves in mighty leaps,
It leapt straight past the common cold
And give it us for keeps.
~Pam Ayres


When you no longer know what headache, heartache, or stomachache means without cistern punctures, electrocardiograms and six x-ray plates, you are slipping.  ~Martin H. Fischer


It is easy to get a thousand prescriptions but hard to get one single remedy.  ~Chinese Proverb


Never forget that it is not a pneumonia, but a pneumonic man who is your patient.  ~William Withey Gull


It is said to be the manner of hypochondriacs to change often their physician.  ~William Cullen, Practice of Physic


The road to medical knowledge is through the pathological museum and not through an apothecary's shop.  ~William Withey Gull


A Short History of Medicine
2000 B.C. - "Here, eat this root."
1000 B.C. - "That root is heathen, say this prayer."
1850 A.D. - "That prayer is superstition, drink this potion."
1940 A.D. - "That potion is snake oil, swallow this pill."
1985 A.D. - "That pill is ineffective, take this antibiotic."
2000 A.D. - "That antibiotic is artificial. Here, eat this root."
~Author Unknown


When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it cannot be cured.  ~Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard


Asthma is a disease that has practically the same symptoms as passion except that with asthma it lasts longer.  ~Author Unknown


A half doctor near is better than a whole one far away.  ~German Proverb


No doctor is better than three.  ~German Proverb


I will lift mine eyes unto the pills.  Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-coloured, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one.  It is an age of pills.  ~Malcolm Muggeridge, 1962


Man may be the captain of his fate, but is also the victim of his blood sugar.  ~Wilfrid G. Oakley


Faith and knowledge lean largely upon each other in the practice of medicine.  ~Peter Mere Latham


Each patient ought to feel somewhat the better after the physician's visit, irrespective of the nature of the illness.  ~Warfield Theobald Longcope


Who ever thought up the word "Mammogram?"  Every time I hear it, I think I'm supposed to put my breast in an envelope and send it to someone.  ~Jan King


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


You may know the intractability of a disease by its long list of remedies.  ~Alonzo Clark


Here's good advice for practice:  go into partnership with nature; she does more than half the work and asks none of the fee.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.  ~William Osler


Anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghastly sack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease.  ~Mark Twain


If you are too smart to pay the doctor, you had better be too smart to get ill.  ~African Proverb


When you treat a disease, first treat the mind.  ~Chen Jen


Symptoms are the body's mother tongue; signs are in a foreign language.  ~John Brown


The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.  ~Thomas Edison


Oh the powers of nature.  She knows what we need, and the doctors know nothing.  ~Benvenuto Cellini


So many come to the sickroom thinking of themselves as men of science fighting disease and not as healers with a little knowledge helping nature to get a sick man well.  ~Auckland Geddes, The Practitioner


Where a man feels pain he lays his hand.  ~Dutch Proverb


The doctor is often more to be feared than the disease.  ~French Proverb


Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.  ~Ben Hecht, Miracle of the Fifteen Murderers


The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them.  ~Ecclesiasticus 38:4


A drug is that substance which, when injected into a rat, will produce a scientific report.  ~Author Unknown


Cancer is a word, not a sentence.  ~John Diamond


The medicalization of early diagnosis not only hampers and discourages preventative health-care but it also trains the patient-to-be to function in the meantime as an acolyte to his doctor.  He learns to depend on the physician in sickness and in health.  He turns into a life-long patient.  ~Ivan Illich


Patients may recover in spite of drugs or because of them.  ~J.H. Gaddum


He's the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.  ~Benjamin Franklin


Physiology is the stepchild of medicine.  That is why Cinderella often turns out the queen.  ~Martin H. Fischer


The field of Western medicine has become literally nothing but medicine.  Doctors are on their way out, to be replaced by self-serve pharmaceutical vending machines.  ~Grey Livingston


The fact that your patient gets well does not prove that your diagnosis was correct.  ~Samuel J. Meltzer


Man is a creature composed of countless millions of cells:  a microbe is composed of only one, yet throughout the ages the two have been in ceaseless conflict.  ~A.B. Christie


Our profession is the only one which works unceasingly to annihilate itself.  ~Martin H. Fischer


On J-Day our profession will have a lot to answer for!  We might at least have withheld our hands instead of making them work against God.  ~Martin H. Fischer


The doctor may also learn more about the illness from the way the patient tells the story than from the story itself.  ~James B. Herrick


Don't think of organ donations as giving up part of yourself to keep a total stranger alive.  It's really a total stranger giving up almost all of themselves to keep part of you alive.  ~Author Unknown


Most of those evils we poor mortals know
From doctors and imagination flow.
~Charles Churchill


Men are not going to embrace eugenics.  They are going to embrace the first likely, trim-figured girl with limpid eyes and flashing teeth who comes along, in spite of the fact that her germ plasm is probably reeking with hypertension, cancer, haemophilia, colour blindness, hay fever, epilepsy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.  ~Logan Clendening


Don't take your organs to heaven with you.  Heaven knows we need them here.  ~Author unknown, attributed to both Dan and Barbara Hladio and Thomas Boyadjis, Sr.


'Tis not always in a physician's power to cure the sick; at times the disease is stronger than trained art.  ~Ovid


150 people die every year from being hit by falling coconuts.  Not to worry, drug makers are develping a vaccine.  ~Jim Carrey


And lo, The Hospital, grey, quiet, old, Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet.  ~William Ernest Henley


For the most part, Western medicine doctors are not healers, preventers, listeners, or educators.  But they're damned good at saving a life and the other aspects kick the beam.  It's about time we brought some balance back to the scale.  ~Claire Todae


You have two chances - one of getting the germ and one of not.  And if you get the germ you have two chances - one of getting the disease and one of not.  And if you get the disease you have two chances - one of dying and one of not.  And if you die - well, you still have two chances!  ~Author Unknown


A sweating ovary or a sick prostate explains most history.  ~Martin H. Fischer


The only weapon with which the unconscious patient can immediately retaliate upon the incompetent surgeon is hemorrhage.  ~William Stewart Halsted


The public blabbers about preventative medicine, but will neither appreciate nor pay for it.  You get paid for what you cure.  ~Martin H. Fischer


To save a man's life against his will is the same as killing him.  ~Horace


Nowadays the clinical history too often weighs more than the man.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.  ~Mortimer Collins


One doctor makes work for another.  ~English Proverb


Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too.  ~Anton Chekhov, Ivanov


Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.  ~Giorgio Baglivi


Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.  ~Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 1973






On thy grave the rain shall fall from the eyes of a mighty nation!  ~Thomas William Parsons


Although no sculptured marble should rise to their memory, nor engraved stone bear record of their deeds, yet will their remembrance be as lasting as the land they honored.  ~Daniel Webster


With the tears a Land hath shed
Their graves should ever be green.
~Thomas Bailey Aldrich


Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language?  Are they dead that yet act?  Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?  ~Henry Ward Beecher






Green sods are all their monuments; and yet it tells
A nobler history than pillared piles,
Or the eternal pyramids.
~James Gates Percival






Is't death to fall for Freedom's right?
He's dead alone who lacks her light!
~Thomas Campbell


For love of country they accepted death...  ~James A. Garfield


They fell, but o'er their glorious grave
Floats free the banner of the cause they died to save.
~Francis Marion Crawford


Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.  ~From a headstone in Ireland


Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
~Rupert Brooke






The brave die never, though they sleep in dust:
Their courage nerves a thousand living men.
~Minot J. Savage


The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


And I'm proud to be an American,
where at least I know I'm free.
And I won't forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.
~Lee Greenwood






They are dead; but they live in each Patriot's breast,
And their names are engraven on honor's bright crest.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow






Peace to each manly soul that sleepeth;
Rest to each faithful eye that weepeth...
~Thomas Moore


But the freedom that they fought for, and the country grand they wrought for,
Is their monument to-day, and for aye.
~Thomas Dunn English






And they who for their country die shall fill an honored grave, for glory lights the soldier's tomb, and beauty weeps the brave.  ~Joseph Drake






Perform, then, this one act of remembrance before this Day passes - Remember there is an army of defense and advance that never dies and never surrenders, but is increasingly recruited from the eternal sources of the American spirit and from the generations of American youth.  ~W.J. Cameron


How sleep the brave, who sink to rest,
By all their country's wishes blest!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow'd mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.
By fairy hands their knell is rung,
There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair,
To dwell, a weeping hermit, there.
~William Collins






The patriot's blood is the seed of Freedom's tree.  ~Thomas Campbell


Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays.... The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms.  ~Thomas Bailey Aldrich






Better than honor and glory, and History's iron pen,
Was the thought of duty done and the love of his fellow-men.
~Richard Watson Gilder


We who are left how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?
~Wilfred Wilson Gibson


A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.  ~Joseph Campbell


Who kept the faith and fought the fight;
The glory theirs, the duty ours.
~Wallace Bruce






I have never been able to think of the day as one of mourning; I have never quite been able to feel that half-masted flags were appropriate on Decoration Day.  I have rather felt that the flag should be at the peak, because those whose dying we commemorate rejoiced in seeing it where their valor placed it.  We honor them in a joyous, thankful, triumphant commemoration of what they did.  ~Benjamin Harrison






Cover them over with beautiful flowers,
Deck them with garlands, those brothers of ours,
Lying so silent by night and by day
Sleeping the years of their manhood away.
Give them the meed they have won in the past;
Give them the honors their future forcast;
Give them the chaplets they won in the strife;
Give them the laurels they lost with their life.
~Will Carleton


Life hangs as nothing in the scale against dear Liberty!  ~Lucy Larcom


All we have of freedom, all we use or know -
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.
~Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899


Our battle-fields, safe in the keeping
Of Nature's kind, fostering care,
Are blooming, - our heroes are sleeping, -
And peace broods perennial there.
~John H. Jewett






These heroes are dead.  They died for liberty - they died for us.  They are at rest.  They sleep in the land they made free, under the flag they rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad hemlocks, the tearful willows, and the embracing vines.  They sleep beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of storm, each in the windowless Place of Rest.  Earth may run red with other wars - they are at peace.  In the midst of battle, in the roar of conflict, they found the serenity of death.  I have one sentiment for soldiers living and dead:  cheers for the living; tears for the dead.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


Their silent wounds have speech
More eloquent than men;
Their tones can deeper reach
Than human voice or pen.
~William Woodman


Their own souls rose and cried
Alarum when they heard the sudden wail
Of stricken freedom and along the gale
Saw her eternal banner quivering wide.
~John LeGay Brereton


The dead soldier's silence sings our national anthem.  ~Aaron Kilbourn


Our cheer goes back to them, the valiant dead!
Laurels and roses on their graves to-day,
Lilies and laurels over them we lay,
And violets o'er each unforgotten head.
~Richard Hovey


But fame is theirs - and future days
On pillar'd brass shall tell their praise;
Shall tell - when cold neglect is dead -
"These for their country fought and bled."
~Philip Freneau


Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations, that we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of a free and undivided Republic.  ~John A. Logan


Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


The story of America's quest for freedom is inscribed on her history in the blood of her patriots.  ~Randy Vader


Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Alas, how can we help but mourn
When hero bosoms yield their breath!
A century itself may bear
But once the flower of such a death.
~S. Weir Mitchell


They hover as a cloud of witnesses above this Nation.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


These martyrs of patriotism gave their lives for an idea.  ~Schuyler Colfax


They saw their injured country's woe;
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear, - but left the shield.
~Philip Freneau


For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.  ~William Penn


Ah! never shall the land forget
How gushed the life-blood of her brave -
~William Cullen Bryant


"Dead upon the field of glory,"
Hero fit for song and story.
~John Randolph Thompason






Knights of the spirit; warriors in the cause
Of justice absolute 'twixt man and man.
~Richard Watson Gilder






Fold him in his country's stars.
Roll the drum and fire the volley!
What to him are all our wars,
What but death bemocking folly?
~George Henry Boker


The Flag still floats unblotted with defeat!
But ah the blood that keeps its ripples red,
The starry lives that keep its field alight.
~Rupert Hughes


The hero dead cannot expire:
The dead still play their part.
~Charles Sangster


We come, not to mourn our dead soldiers, but to praise them.  ~Francis A. Walker






How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!  ~Maya Angelou




Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.  ~From the television show The Wonder Years


A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.  ~Edward de Bono


Every man's memory is his private literature.  ~Aldous Huxley


God gave us memories that we might have roses in December.  ~J.M. Barrie, Courage, 1922


Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.  ~Austin O'Malley


Memory is a child walking along a seashore.  You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.  ~Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal


We do not remember days; we remember moments.  ~Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand


There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.  ~Josh Billings


Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.  ~Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest"


It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.  ~P.D. James


And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?  ~Rainer Maria Rilke


The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume.  ~Jean de Boufflers


One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
~Emily Dickinson, "Time and Eternity"


I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future.  ~David Gerrold


A happy childhood can't be cured.  Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.  ~Hortense Calisher, Queenie, 1971


Everybody needs his memories.  They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.  ~Saul Bellow


Memory itself is an internal rumour.  ~George Santayana, The Life of Reason


Recalling days of sadness, memories haunt me.  Recalling days of happiness, I haunt my memories.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it.  It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.  ~Carol Shields


It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us.  A year impairs, a luster obliterates.  There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?  ~Lord Byron


The past is never dead, it is not even past.  ~William Faulkner






The existence of forgetting has never been proved:  We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories.  Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.  ~Thomas Fuller


Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
~T.S. Eliot


What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.  ~Cynthia Ozick


Memory is what tells a man that his wife's birthday was yesterday.  ~Mario Rocco


To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.
~Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground


In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.  ~John Updike


Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.  ~Seneca


The happiest memories are of moments that ended when they should have.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Nothing is more memorable than a smell.  One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town.  Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.  Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once.  A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.  ~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses


I am a miser of my memories of you
And will not spend them.
~Witter Bynner, "Coins"


The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.  ~Author Unknown


The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind.  ~Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season, 1973


The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.  ~Samuel Johnson


The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts.  This we call memory.  ~Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love


Hmmm, how to "can a day?"  You know, those days that seem just perfect you want access to them whenever the need arises.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels:  it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.  ~Salvador Dali


Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.  ~Michel de Montaigne


The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood.  It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected.  ~Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden, 1991


She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.  ~Frank Deford


The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories.  ~From the movie An Affair to Remember


It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.  ~Diane Sawyer


To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.  ~Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender


A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire, women will like him.  ~Mae West

My theory is that men are no more liberated than women.  ~Indira Gandhi

All men are not slimy warthogs.  Some men are silly giraffes, some woebegone puppies, some insecure frogs.  But if one is not careful, those slimy warthogs can ruin it for all the others.  ~Cynthia Heimel

If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.  ~Rita Mae Brown

The rule in the women's colleges was that after 7 p.m. all men were beasts.  Up until 7 p.m. they were all angels, and the girls simply had to learn to live with that routine and practise love in the afternoon.  ~Harry G. Johnson

No man stands so straight as when he stoops to help a boy.  ~Knights of Pythagoras

Can you imagine a world without men?  No crime and lots of happy fat women.  ~Attributed to both Marion Smith and Nicole Hollander

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other.  Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.  ~Katharine Hepburn

If it can't be fixed by duct tape or WD-40, it's a female problem.  ~Jason Love

When a man of forty falls in love with a girl of twenty, it isn't her youth he is seeking but his own.  ~Lenore Coffee

No nice men are good at getting taxis.  ~Katherine Whitehorn, the Observer, 1977

The first time you buy a house you see how pretty the paint is and buy it.  The second time you look to see if the basement has termites.  It's the same with men.  ~Lupe Velez

Women's Liberation is just a lot of foolishness.  It's the men who are discriminated against.  They can't bear children.  And no one's likely to do anything about that.  ~Golda Meir

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself - like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.  ~Jean Kerr, The Snake Has All the Lines, 1960

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.  ~Germaine Greer

All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy.  No man does.  That's his.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

I want a man who's kind and understanding.  Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?  ~Zsa Zsa Gabor

Part of the reason that men seem so much less loving than women is that men's behavior is measured with a feminine ruler.  ~Francesca M. Cancian

A man snatches the first kiss, pleads for the second, demands the third, takes the fourth, accepts the fifth - and endures all the rest.  ~Helen Rowland

When a man talks dirty to a woman, it's sexual harassment.  When a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95 a minute.  ~Author Unknown

Men wake up aroused in the morning.  We can't help it.  We just wake up and we want you.  And the women are thinking, "How can he want me the way I look in the morning?"  It's because we can't see you.  We have no blood anywhere near our optic nerve.  ~Andy Rooney

It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.  ~Helen Rowland

A gentleman is simply a patient wolf.  ~Lana Turner

Women are never disarmed by compliments; men always are.  ~Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1899

When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.  ~Jean Giraudoux

If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties?  How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?  ~Linda Ellerbee

They say women talk too much.  If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.  ~Clare Booth Luce

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.  ~Camille Paglia

It's a man's world, and you men can have it.  ~Katherine Anne Porter

I know many married men, I even know a few happily married men, but I don't know one who wouldn't fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave him a wink.  ~George Jean Nathan

Men were made for war.  Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life.  ~Alice Thomas Ellis

Sometimes I think if there was a third sex men wouldn't get so much as a glance from me.  ~Amanda Vail

He is every other inch a gentleman.  ~Rebecca West

A man's heart may have a secret sanctuary where only one woman may enter, but it is full of little anterooms which are seldom vacant.  ~Helen Rowland

A lot of guys think the larger a woman's breasts are, the less intelligent she is.  I don't think it works like that.  I think it's the opposite.  I think the larger a woman's breasts are, the less intelligent the men become.  ~Anita Wise

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses providing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man as twice its natural size.  ~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929

It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men.  ~Mae West

Macho doesn't prove mucho.  ~Zsa Zsa Gabor

Some men have a den in their home, while others just growl all over the house.  ~Author Unknown

How can a man marry wisely in his twenties?  The girl he's going to wind up wanting hasn't even been born.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Men want the same thing from their underwear that they want from women:  a little bit of support, and a little bit of freedom.  ~Jerry Seinfeld

A man's home may be his castle on the outside; inside, it is more often his nursery.  ~Clare Booth Luce

You [men] are not our protectors.... If you were, who would there be to protect us from?  ~Mary Edwards Walker

Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach flunked geography.  ~Robert Byrne

Well, I will find you twenty lascivious turtles ere one chaste man.  ~William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1601

Men are clinging to football on a level we aren't even aware of.  For centuries, we ruled everything, and now, in the last ten minutes, there are all these incursions by women.  It's our Alamo.  ~Tony Kornheiser

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.  ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard

Some men are so macho they'll get you pregnant just to kill a rabbit.  ~Maureen Murphy

Why do men chase women they have no intention of marrying?  The same urge that makes dogs chase cars they have no intention of driving.  ~Author Unknown

On the one hand, we'll never experience childbirth.  On the other hand, we can open all our own jars.  ~Bruce Willis, on the difference between men and women

God gave us all a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time.  ~Robin Williams

Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.  ~Arthur Helps, Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd, 1835

Few women care what a man looks like, and a good thing too.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

What's the matter with you guys?  The sight of blonde hair knocks you three rungs down on the evolutionary ladder.  ~From the television show Civil Wars

The analysis of man discloses three chemical elements - a job, a meal and a woman.  ~Martin H. Fischer

The only difference between men and boys is the cost of their toys.  ~Author Unknown

A retired husband is often a wife's full-time job.  ~Ella Harris

A man always blames the woman who fools him.  In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.  ~Henry Louis Mencken

Men feel that women somehow drag them down, and women feel that way about men.  It's possible that both are right.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

I like naked women.  I'm a bloke.  I'm supposed to like them.  We're born like that.  We like naked women as soon as we're pulled out of one.... When man invented fire, he didn't say, "Hey, let's cook."  He said, "Great, now we can see naked bottoms in the dark"... The story of male achievement through the ages, feeble though it may have been, has been the story of our struggle to get a better look at your bottoms.  ~Coupling, "Inferno," 2 June 2000, written by Steven Moffat

There are much easier things in life than finding a good man.  Nailing Jell-O to a tree, for instance.  ~Author Unknown

Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near.  ~Helen Rowland

Men are like a fine wine.  They start out like grapes, and it's our job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you'd like to have dinner with.  ~Author Unknown

I can eat a man, but I'm not sure of the fiber content.  ~Jenny Eclair

I make presents to the mother but think of the daughter.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you.  ~Mae West

Women are the right age for just a few years; men, for most of their lives.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Did you hear about the baby born with organs of both sexes?  It had a penis and a brain.  ~Author Unknown

There's nothing wrong with most men's egos that the kowtowing of a headwaiter can't cure.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Women may be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.  ~James Shubert

Men are only as loyal as their options.  ~Bill Maher

Stop?  I'm the guy.  I don't stop!  That's the woman's job.  We're the gas, they're the brakes.  ~Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, EDtv, 1999

Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.  ~Katharine Hepburn

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.  ~Erica Jong

The hardest task in a girl's life is to prove to a man that his intentions are serious.  ~Helen Rowland

I'm a babe magnet... just the wrong end.  ~Author Unknown

Every woman must admit, and every man with as much sense as a woman, that it's very hard to make a home for any man if he's always in it.  ~Winifred Kirkland

I wonder why men get serious at all.  They have this delicate, long thing hanging outside their bodies which goes up and down by its own will.  If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself.  ~Yoko Ono

God made man stronger but not necessarily more intelligent.  He gave women intuition and femininity.  And, used properly, that combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met.  ~Farrah Fawcett

Many a man owes his success to his first wife, and his second wife to his success.  ~Jim Backus

The old theory was "Marry an older man, because they're more mature."  But the new theory is:  "Men don't mature.  Marry a younger one."  ~Rita Rudner

Self-discipline implies some unpleasant things to me, including staying away from chocolate and keeping my hands out of women's pants.  ~Oleg Kiselev

Three wise men - are you serious?  ~Author Unknown

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

What is the difference between men and women?  A woman wants one man to satisfy her every need, and a man wants every woman to satisfy his one need.  ~Author Unknown

When it comes to hiding porn, every man is a CIA agent.  ~S.A. Sachs

Home cooking:  where many a man thinks his wife is.  ~Author Unknown

Imagine what will happen to this nation if large numbers of American women start using the Wonderbra.  It will be catastrophic.  The male half of the population will be nothing but mindless drooling Zombies of Lust.  Granted, this is also true now, but it will be even worse.  ~Dave Barry

If they can put one man on the moon why can't they put them all there?  ~Chocolate Waters

The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby.  ~Natalie Wood

If men had more up top we'd need less up front.  ~Jaci Stephen

Men lose more conquests by their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman.  ~Ninon de Lenclos

Don't accept rides from strange men - and remember that all men are as strange as hell.  ~Robin Morgan

Men can read maps better than women.  'Cause only the male mind could conceive of one inch equaling a hundred miles.  ~Roseanne Barr

A man is two people, himself and his cock.  A man always takes his friend to the party.  Of the two, the friend is the nicer, being more able to show his feelings.  ~Beryl Bainbridge

Men are beasts and even beasts don't behave as they do.  ~Brigitte Bardot

The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.  ~Madame de Staël

'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.  ~William Makepeace Thackeray

Guys are like roses.  You've got to watch out for the pricks.  ~Author Unknown

What's with you men?  Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?  ~Erma Bombeck

A hard man is good to find.  ~Mae West

Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window.  You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.  ~Jean Kerr

A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.  ~Oscar Wilde

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.  ~Ellen Glasgow

The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up.  The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now.  They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they'd never clean anything.  ~Dave Barry

Men want a woman whom they can turn on and off like a light switch.  ~Ian Fleming

The average man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him than he is in a woman with beautiful legs.  ~Marlene Dietrich

There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman.  I won't stand for that.  ~Steve Martin

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.  ~Eric Hoffer

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.  ~Sigmund Freud

All sorts of bodily diseases are produced by half-used minds.  ~George Bernard Shaw

If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The mind is the most capricious of insects - flitting, fluttering.  ~Virginia Woolf

No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recesses of another mind.  ~Arnold Bennett

It's hard to make up your bed while you're still sleeping in it.  Hard to make up your mind for the same reason.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Impressions arriving at the brain make it enter into activity, just as food falling into the stomach excites it to more abundant secretion of gastric juice.  ~Pierre Cabanis, translated from French

That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.  ~Robert T. Pirsig

The mind is like a trunk:  if well-packed, it holds almost every thing; if ill-packed, next to nothing.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Be careful of your thoughts, they may become words at any moment.  ~Iara Gassen

A mental stain can neither be blotted out by the passage of time nor washed away by any waters.  ~Cicero

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.  ~Katherine Mansfield

Men are not prisoners of fate, but prisoners of their own minds.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

[W]ith an unquiet mind, neither exercise, nor diet, nor physick can be of much use.  ~Samuel Johnson

Perhaps God gives us a physical body so that every time we change our mind, we won't be someone else.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain
With ease - and You - beside....
The Brain is just the weight of God -
For - Heft them - Pound for Pound -
And they will differ - if they do -
As Syllable from Sound.
~Emily Dickinson

Few minds are sunlike, sources of light in themselves and to others:  many more are moons that shine with a borrowed radiance.  One may easily distinguish the two:  the former are always full; the latter only now and then, when their suns are shining full upon them.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.  ~Latin Proverb

Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

Creative minds are rarely tidy.  ~John William Gardner, "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society," 1964

When I feel well and in a good humor, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish.  ~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scarring than almost anything else...  ~J.K. Rowling, "The Second War Begins," Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2003

Bodies devoid of mind are as statues in the market place.  ~Euripides

Sometimes it's harder to attain inner silence than outer silence.  The dog stopped barking and the kids have gone to bed, but your mind has a lot to talk about and it knows you can't pretend you're not at home.  ~Linda Solegato

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Pour some water into a tub and stir it up.  Now try as hard as you can to calm the water with your hands; you will succeed in agitating it further.  Let it stand undisturbed a while, and it will calm down by itself.  The human brain works much the same way.  ~Koichi Tohei, Ki in Daily Life

Ever wonder what crime you committed that you are confined to a small enclosure above your sinuses, under permanent skull arrest?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Here in your mind you have complete privacy.  Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.  ~Chuang Tzŭ

Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly.  They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.  ~Washington Irving, The Sketch Book, 1820

Sometimes I suffer from indigestion of the mind.  ~Carrie Latet

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.  ~Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

I've concluded, after many years, that my mind works by process of elimination.  Problem is, it hasn't eliminated anything yet.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours.  You ought to get it out and dance on it.  That would take some of the rigidity out of it.  ~Mark Twain

It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion.  ~Horace



The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, 1927


Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.  ~Sophia Loren


It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.  ~Ornette Coleman


I never make stupid mistakes.  Only very, very clever ones.  ~John Peel


Never say, "oops."  Always say, "Ah, interesting."  ~Author Unknown


If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems.  And that's a big mistake.  ~F. Wikzek


While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.  ~Henry C. Link


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


A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.  ~Alexander Pope, in Swift, Miscellanies


That's not serious; it's just human.  ~Jerry Kopke


The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.  ~John Powell


The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.  ~Edward Phelps


Making mistakes simply means you are learning faster.  ~Weston H. Agor


Doing one fool thing after another is not so terrible when you consider the human proclivity to do several fool things at once.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.  ~Eli Siegel


One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors; for to dwell upon them is to add to the offense.  ~Henry David Thoreau


You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.  ~Colette


Unto those Three Things which the Ancients held impossible, there should be added this Fourth, to find a Book Printed without erratas.  ~Alfonso de Cartagena


As long as the world is turning and ssockning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.  ~Mel Brooks


Our blunders mostly come from letting our wishes interpret our duties.  ~Author Unknown


When we make mistakes they call it evil.  When God makes mistakes they call it Nature!  ~Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick


Things could be worse.  Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player.  ~Author Unknown


Mistakes fail in their mission of helping the person who blames them on the other fellow.  ~Henry S. Haskins


Error is a hardy plant; it flourishes in every soil.  ~Martin F. Tupper


When you realize you've made a mistake, make amends immediately.  It's easier to eat crow while it's still warm.  ~Dan Heist


Making a different mistake every day is not only acceptable, it is the definition of progress.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.  ~Phyllis Theroux, Night Lights


The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself.  It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.  ~Aubrey Menen


If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.  ~Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 1916


A man of genius makes no mistakes.  His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.  ~James Joyce, Ulysses


Just because you make mistakes doesn't mean you are one.  ~Author Unknown


Truth will sooner come out of error than from confusion.  ~Francis Bacon


Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them.  ~Andrew V. Mason


Errors to be dangerous must have a great deal of truth mingled with them.  It is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.  ~Sydney Smith


In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.  ~Bill Vaughan


From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.  ~Syrus


It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit to forgive them for having witnessed your own.  ~Jessamyn West


The safe way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.  ~Frank Hubbard

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.  ~Gloria Steinem

There is a very easy way to return from a casino with a small fortune:  go there with a large one.  ~Jack Yelton

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.  ~Errol Flynn

Car sickness is the feeling you get when the monthly payment is due.  ~Author Unknown

Inflation hasn't ruined everything.  A dime can still be used as a screwdriver.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.  ~Mark Twain

They who are of the opinion that Money will do everything, may very well be suspected to do everything for Money.  ~George Savile, Complete Works, 1912

I cannot afford to waste my time making money.  ~Louis Agassiz

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.  ~Robert Graves

When I have money, I get rid of it quickly, lest it find a way into my heart.  ~John Wesley

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.  ~Franklin Delano Roosevelt

After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world.  ~Pam Shaw

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

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.  ~Cree Indian Proverb

The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.  ~Mad Magazine

I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.  ~Pablo Picasso

No matter how hard you hug your money, it never hugs back.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

There are no pockets in a shroud.  ~Author Unknown

Waste your money and you're only out of money, but waste your time and you've lost a part of your life.  ~Michael Leboeuf

There are people who have money and people who are rich.  ~Coco Chanel

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this:  most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.  ~Douglas Adams

Life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills.  ~Clifford Odets

There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "Life and Human Nature," Afterthoughts, 1931

Mammon, n.:  The god of the world's leading religion.  ~Ambrose Bierce

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.  ~George Horace Lorimer

"Your money, or your life."  We know what to do when a burglar makes this demand of us, but not when God does.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair.  ~Sam Ewing

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it.  ~Bob Hope

Business is the art of extracting money from another man's pocket without resorting to violence.  ~Max Amsterdam

O Gold! I still prefer thee unto paper,
Which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour.
~Lord Byron

Always borrow money from a pessimist, he doesn't expect to be paid back.  ~Author Unknown

If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.  ~Author Unknown

Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America.  If I'm not there, I go to work.  ~Robert Orben

Money is neither my god nor my devil.  It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it's greedy or loving.  ~Dan Millman

My old father used to have a saying:  If you make a bad bargain, hug it all the tighter.  ~Abraham Lincoln

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.  ~Earl Wilson

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.  ~Woody Allen

I don't like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves.  ~Joe Louis

Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions.  ~A.A. Latimer

Money is like manure.  You have to spread it around or it smells.  ~J. Paul Getty

We may see the small value God has for riches, by the people he gives them to.  ~Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1727

Too much money is as demoralizing as too little, and there's no such thing as exactly enough.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.  ~Albert Camus

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.  ~Voltaire

A bank book makes good reading - better than some novels.  ~Harry Lauder

Women prefer men who have something tender about them - especially the legal kind.  ~Kay Ingram

There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we count ourselves among them.  ~Mignon McLaughlin

Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy you the kind of misery you prefer.  ~Author Unknown

Money often costs too much.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

When a fellow says it hain't the money but the principle o' the thing, it's th' money.  ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, Hoss Sense and Nonsense, 1926

The waste of money cures itself, for soon there is no more to waste.  ~M.W. Harrison

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.  ~Kahlil Gibran

I'm so poor I can't even pay attention.  ~Ron Kittle, 1987

If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.  ~Henry Fielding

It frees you from doing things you dislike.  Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.  ~Groucho Marx

Never call an accountant a credit to his profession; a good accountant is a debit to his profession.  ~Charles J.C. Lyall

We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present

We live by the Golden Rule.  Those who have the gold make the rules.  ~Buzzie Bavasi

A man's soul may be buried and perish under a dungheap or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

There are several ways in which to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory.  ~Robert Benchley

Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.  ~H.L. Mencken

...existence has become an unreasoning, wild dance around the golden calf, a mad worship of God Mammon.  In that dance and in that worship man has sacrificed all his finer qualities of the heart and soul - kindness and justice, honor and manhood, compassion and sympathy with his fellowman.  ~Alexander Berkman, What Is Communist Anarchism?

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.  ~Oscar Wilde

The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.  ~Jean-Paul Kauffmann

Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.  ~Carl Sandburg

I am having an out of money experience.  ~Author Unknown

If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.  ~Aristotle Onassis

Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance.  ~Oscar Wilde

Money isn't the most important thing in life, but it's reasonably close to oxygen on the "gotta have it" scale.  ~Zig Ziglar

The little money I have - that is my wealth, but the things I have for which I would not take money, that is my treasure.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us,
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in;
At the devil's booth are all things sold,
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;
For a cap and bells our lives we pay.
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking,
'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
'Tis only God may be had for the asking,
No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.
~James Russell Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848

Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851

Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued.  While there is flesh there is money - or the want of money; but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.  ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912

Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail.  ~Henry Wheeler Shaw

When you let money speak for you, it drowns out anything else you meant to say.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

People are living longer than ever before, a phenomenon undoubtedly made necessary by the 30-year mortgage.  ~Doug Larson

October:  This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in.  The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar for 1894

Few are aware that they want any thing, except pounds schillings and pence.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

I wish I'd said it first, and I don't even know who did:  The only problems that money can solve are money problems.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

He that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends.  ~William Shakespeare

Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.  ~Max Beerbohm, "Hosts and Guests," 1918

If inflation continues to soar, you're going to have to work like a dog just to live like one.  ~George Gobel

I once met an economist who believed that everything was fungible for money, so I suggested he enclose himself in a large bell-jar with as much money as he wanted and see how long he lasted.  ~Amory Lovins

Money does not pay for anything, never has, never will.  It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services.  ~Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943

Money is nothing more than arrogance on paper.  ~Hunter Brinkmeier

I'm tired of Love: I'm still more tired of Rhyme.
But Money gives me pleasure all the time.
~Hilaire Belloc, "Fatigued," Sonnets and Verse, 1923

In the old days a man who saved money was a miser; nowadays he's a wonder.  ~Author Unknown

Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel.  It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness.  ~Henrik Ibsen

How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object!
For this the foolish over-careful fathers
Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care,
Their bones with industry.
~William Shakespeare

[T]hose who live by numbers can also perish by them and it is a terrifying thing to have an adding machine write an epitaph, either way.  ~George J.W. Goodman, The Money Game

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., speech, Boston, 8 January 1897

Inflation is taxation without legislation.  ~Milton Friedman

Those who believe money can do everything are frequently prepared to do everything for money.  ~Author Unknown

I hire tea by the tea bag.  ~Martin Amis, on renting the essentials of life after breaking up with a lover, Money: A Suicide Note (Thanks to bartleby.com for verifying the details of the source.)

 
Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets,
But gold that's put to use more gold begets.
~William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 1593

Lack of money is the root of all evil.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1857

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

We all know how the size of sums of money appears to vary in a remarkable way according as they are being paid in or paid out.  ~Julian Huxley, Essays of a Biologist, 1923

A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to us than the 99 which we had to work for, and the money won at Faro or in the stock market snuggles into our hearts in the same way.  ~Mark Twain

It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

A woman's mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Money doesn't talk, it swears.  ~Bob Dylan, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"

The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash.  ~Author Unknown

A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.  ~Yogi Berra

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

Do not value money for any more nor any less than its worth; it is a good servant but a bad master.  ~Alexandre Dumas fils, Camille, 1852

To suppose as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.  ~George Bernard Shaw

If the nation's economists were laid end to end, they would point in all directions.  ~Arthur H. Motley

Intaxication:  Euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.  ~From a Washington Post word contest 

Empty pockets never held anyone back.  Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.  ~W.C. Fields

He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

By the time I have money to burn, my fire will have burnt out.  ~Author Unknown

That money talks
I'll not deny,
I heard it once:
It said, "Goodbye."
~Richard Armour

Money and women.  They're two of the strongest things in the world.  The things you do for a woman you wouldn't do for anything else.  Same with money.  ~Satchel Paige

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

But tell me:  how did gold get to be the highest value?  Because it is uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle in its brilliance; it always gives itself.  Only as an image of the highest virtue did gold get to be the highest value.  The giver's glance gleams like gold.  A golden brilliance concludes peace between the moon and the sun.  Uncommon is the highest virtue and useless, it is gleaming and gentle in its brilliance:  a gift-giving virtue is the highest virtue.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

We ought to change the legend on our money from "In God We Trust" to "In Money We Trust."  Because, as a nation, we've got far more faith in money these days than we do in God.  ~Arthur Hoppe, 1963

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot.  In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891



Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist


Morality is a private and costly luxury.  ~Henry B. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams


Without doubt half the ethical rules they din into our ears are designed to keep us at work.  ~Llewelyn Powys


Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.  ~Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1875


The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated


Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


We have two kinds of morality side by side:  one which we preach but do not practice and another which we practice but seldom preach.  ~Bertrand Russell


What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.  ~Havelock Ellis


The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.  ~Goethe


There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.  ~Denis Diderot


The Seven Deadly Sins are a litany of victimless crimes, compiled to distract attention from the bloody felonies of the righteous.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


It is with flowers, as with moral qualities:  the bright-coloured are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet-smelling.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.  ~Graham Greene


Why should moral distinction be made between death by the spirochete and death by the streptococcus?  ~Martin H. Fischer


What is morality in any given time or place?  It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.  ~Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues, 30 August 1941


If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.  ~Henny Youngman

Lose an hour in the morning, and you will be all day hunting for it.  ~Richard Whately

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.  ~Jean Kerr, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, 1957

I'd like mornings better if they started later.  ~Author Unknown

For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?  ~Thornton Wilder

Through the blackest night, morning gently tiptoes, feeling its way to dawn.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.  ~Elbert Hubbard

The older generation thought nothing of getting up at five every morning - and the younger generation doesn't think much of it either.  ~John J. Welsh

Morning is when the wick is lit.  A flame ignited, the day delighted with heat and light, we start the fight for something more than before.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters.  ~Author unknown, attributed to Jim Davis

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.  ~Jean Giraudoux

The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours.  No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen.  And the fact that it practically always doesn't, matters not a jot.  The possibility is always there.  ~Monica Baldwin

The sun is but a morning star.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.  ~Author Unknown

There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.  ~Author Unknown

I can see the orange haze on the horizon as the morning exhales a yawn, and seems to be ready to rise.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

You can only come to the morning through the shadows.  ~J.R.R. Tolkien

I have a "carpe diem" mug and, truthfully, at six in the morning the words do not make me want to seize the day.  They make me want to slap a dead poet.  ~Joanne Sherman

There would be a lot more optimists if it weren't for the rise-and-shine requirement.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.  ~Josh Billings

Slow buds the pink dawn like a rose
From out night's gray and cloudy sheath;
Softly and still it grows and grows,
Petal by petal, leaf by leaf.
~Author Unknown

The plans that I made when horizontal are working out now that I'm vertical.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

Luxury is an ancient notion.  There was once a Chinese mandarin who had himself wakened three times every morning simply for the pleasure of being told it was not yet time to get up.  ~Argosy

One key to success is to have lunch at the time of day most people have breakfast.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The day shall not be up so soon as I,
To try the fair adventure of tomorrow.
~William Shakespeare

Find peace in the morning rush and you will have a good day.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.  ~Thomas Jefferson

I'll tell you how the sun rose a ribbon at a time.  ~Emily Dickinson

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Dawn:  When men of reason go to bed.  ~Ambrose Bierce

No human being believes that any other human being has a right to be in bed when he himself is up.  ~Robert Lynd

Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious.  ~William Feather

Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.  ~Ellen Goodman

I used to love night best but the older I get the more treasures and hope and joy I find in mornings.  ~Terri Guillemets

I don't think jogging is healthy, especially morning jogging.  If morning joggers knew how tempting they looked to morning motorists, they would stay home and do sit-ups.  ~Rita Rudner

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.  ~Tenneva Jordan

Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs in my field, since the payment is pure love.  ~Mildred B. Vermont

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.  ~Peter De Vries

The phrase "working mother" is redundant.  ~Jane Sellman

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born.  She never existed before.  The woman existed, but the mother, never.  A mother is something absolutely new.  ~Rajneesh

If the whole world were put into one scale, and my mother in the other, the whole world would kick the beam.  ~Lord Langdale (Henry Bickersteth)

I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me.  They have clung to me all my life.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Some mothers are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together.  ~Pearl S. Buck

If you have a mom, there is nowhere you are likely to go where a prayer has not already been.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.  ~Author Unknown

Sweater, n.:  garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.  ~Ambrose Bierce

Women's Liberation is just a lot of foolishness.  It's the men who are discriminated against.  They can't bear children.  And no one's likely to do anything about that.  ~Golda Meir

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.  ~Honoré de Balzac

All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy.  No man does.  That's his.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
~William Shakespeare

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.  ~Spanish Proverb

She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn't take them along.  ~Margaret Culkin Banning

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts.  A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.  ~Sophia Loren, Women and Beauty

If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?  ~Milton Berle

Motherhood is priced
Of God, at price no man may dare
To lessen or misunderstand.
~Helen Hunt Jackson

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.  ~Aristotle

Women are aristocrats, and it is always the mother who makes us feel that we belong to the better sort.  ~John Lancaster Spalding

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect.  Everything gets reduced to essentials.  ~Meryl Streep

The sweetest sounds to mortals given
Are heard in Mother, Home, and Heaven.
~William Goldsmith Brown

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?  ~Thomas Wentworth Higginson

The formative period for building character for eternity is in the nursery.  The mother is queen of that realm and sways a scepter more potent than that of kings or priests.  ~Author Unknown

Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible.  ~Marion C. Garretty, quoted in A Little Spoonful of Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul

I love my mother as the trees love water and sunshine - she helps me grow, prosper, and reach great heights.  ~Terri Guillemets

[A] mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.  ~Emily Dickinson

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.  ~Washington Irving

Any mother could perform the jobs of several air traffic controllers with ease.  ~Lisa Alther

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.  ~Beverly Jones

That best academy, a mother's knee.  ~James Russell Lowell

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.  ~Victor Hugo

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother.  A child is a child.  They get bigger, older, but grown?  What's that suppose to mean?  In my heart it don't mean a thing.  ~Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987

The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother's Day are the good ones.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

There is an instinct in a woman to love most her own child - and an instinct to make any child who needs her love, her own.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Mommies are just big little girls.  ~Author Unknown

A mom's hug lasts long after she lets go.  ~Author Unknown

Hundreds of dewdrops to greet the dawn,
Hundreds of bees in the purple clover,
Hundreds of butterflies on the lawn,
But only one mother the wide world over.
~George Cooper

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.  ~Honoré de Balzac

A mother's heart is a patchwork of love.  ~Author Unknown

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands.  But a mother's love endures through all.  ~Washington Irving

A mom forgives us all our faults, not to mention one or two we don't even have.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

My mother is a poem
I'll never be able to write,
though everything I write
is a poem to my mother.
~Sharon Doubiago

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool mom.  ~Author Unknown

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.  ~Isadora Duncan

One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters.  ~George Herbert

There's nothing like a mama-hug.  ~Terri Guillemets

Who fed me from her gentle breast
And hushed me in her arms to rest,
And on my cheek sweet kisses prest?
My Mother.
~Anne Taylor

Mother's love is peace.  It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.  ~Erich Fromm

Mother is a verb, not a noun.  ~Proverb

Who ran to help me when I fell,
And would some pretty story tell,
Or kiss the place to make it well?
My mother.
~Ann Taylor

Mother - that was the bank where we deposited all our hurts and worries.  ~T. DeWitt Talmage

Being a mother is learning about strengths you didn't know you had, and dealing with fears you didn't know existed.  ~Linda Wooten

The precursor of the mirror is the mother's face.  ~D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971

The mother of boys work son-up to son-down.  ~Author Unknown

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.  ~William Makepeace Thackeray

A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self.  And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.  ~Victoria Secunda

Mother's love grows by giving.  ~Charles Lamb

I miss thee, my Mother!  Thy image is still
The deepest impressed on my heart.
~Eliza Cook

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated.  ~Washington Irving

A mom reads you like a book, and wherever she goes, people read you like a glowing book review.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I cannot forget my mother.  [S]he is my bridge.  When I needed to get across, she steadied herself long enough for me to run across safely.  ~Renita Weems

A little girl, asked where her home was, replied, "where mother is."  ~Keith L. Brooks

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds.  Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, comrades and friends - but only one mother in the whole world.  ~Kate Douglas Wiggin

If I was damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o' mine, O mother o'mine.
~Rudyard Kipling

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.  ~James Joyce

My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart - a heart so large that everybody's joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.  ~Mark Twain

It's not easy being a mother.  If it were easy, fathers would do it.  ~From the television show The Golden Girls

The mother's heart is the child's school-room.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words.
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Mother, the ribbons of your love are woven around my heart.  ~Author Unknown

How beautifully everything is arranged by Nature; as soon as a child enters the world, it finds a mother ready to take care of it.  ~Jules Michelet

The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.  ~Francis Thompson

My mom is literally a part of me.  You can't say that about many people except relatives, and organ donors.  ~Carrie Latet

Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother.  ~Moorish Proverb

All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother.  ~Abraham Lincoln

No painter's brush, nor poet's pen
In justice to her fame
Has ever reached half high enough
To write a mother's name.
~Author Unknown

Women who miscalculate are called mothers.  ~Abigail Van Buren

A man's work is from sun to sun, but a mother's work is never done.  ~Author Unknown

Mirror, mirror on the wall,
I am my mother after all.
~Author Unknown

One of the very few reasons I had any respect for my mother when I was thirteen was because she would reach into the sink with her bare hands - bare hands - and pick up that lethal gunk and drop it into the garbage.  To top that, I saw her reach into the wet garbage bag and fish around in there looking for a lost teaspoon.  Bare hands - a kind of mad courage.  ~Robert Fulghum

One lamp - thy mother's love - amid the stars
Shall lift its pure flame changeless, and before
The throne of God, burn through eternity -
Holy - as it was lit and lent thee here.
~Nathaniel Parker Willis

No one in the world can take the place of your mother.  Right or wrong, from her viewpoint you are always right.  She may scold you for little things, but never for the big ones.  ~Harry Truman

God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers.  ~Jewish Proverb

Perhaps we are given a mom that we might take into death the memory of a lullaby.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,
Ripe on a plate.
And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you.
~Phyllis McGinley

All mothers are working mothers.  ~Author Unknown

Because I feel that in the heavens above
The angels, whispering one to another,
Can find among their burning tears of love,
None so devotional as that of "Mother,"
Therefore, by that dear name I have long called you,
You who are more than mother unto me.
~Edgar Allan Poe

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.  ~Oprah Winfrey

A man loves his sweetheart the most, his wife the best, but his mother the longest.  ~Irish Proverb



That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.  ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


Most motorcycle problems are caused by the nut that connects the handlebars to the saddle.  ~Author Unknown


Four wheels move the body.  Two wheels move the soul.  ~Author Unknown


Midnight bugs taste best.  ~Author Unknown


You're the guy that'll be sneaking out of your bedroom at three o'clock in the morning to look at your bike.  ~Paul Teutul, Sr., American Chopper, "Billy Joel"


It takes more love to share the saddle than it does to share the bed.  ~Author Unknown


Bikes don't leak oil, they mark their territory.  ~Author Unknown


Keep your bike in good repair:  motorcycle boots are not comfortable for walking.  ~Author Unknown


Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.  ~Hunter Thompson


The best alarm clock is sunshine on chrome.  ~Author Unknown


And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard
Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.
~James Dickey, "Cherrylog Road"


A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.  ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


What do you call a cyclist who doesn't wear a helmet?  An organ donor.  ~David Perry


If you don't ride in the rain, you don't ride.  ~Author Unknown


Whatever it is, it's better in the wind.  ~Author Unknown


Catching a yellow-jacket in your shirt at seventy miles per hour can double your vocabulary.  ~Author Unknown


Life is too short for traffic.  ~Dan Bellack


Work to ride and ride to work.  ~Author Unknown


Burn rubber, not your soul, baby.  ~Craig Fernandez and Reggie Bythewood, Biker Boyz


Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead.  ~Mac McCleary


Remember folks, street lights timed for 35 mph are also timed for 70 mph.  ~Jim Samuels


Only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window.  ~Author Unknown


People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.  ~Author Unknown


Well-trained reflexes are quicker than luck.  ~Author Unknown


Don't argue with an 18-wheeler.  ~Author Unknown





Safety doesn't happen by accident.  ~Author Unknown





Sometimes the best communication happens when you're on separate bikes.  ~Author Unknown


The perfect man?  A poet on a motorcycle.  ~Lucinda Williams


When you're riding lead, don't spit.  ~Author Unknown





Maintenance is as much art as it is science.  ~Author Unknown


Safety is a cheap and effective insurance policy.  ~Author Unknown


Never ride faster than your guardian angel can fly.  ~Author Unknown


I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.  ~Author Unknown





Two-lane blacktop isn't a highway - it's an attitude.  ~Author Unknown





Accidents hurt - safety doesn't.  ~Author Unknown





If you ride like there's no tomorrow, there won't be.  ~Author Unknown


Keep the paint up, and the rubber down!  ~Author Unknown





Everyone crashes.  Some get back on.  Some don't.  Some can't.  ~Author Unknown





Life may begin at 30, but it doesn't get real interesting until about 150.  ~Author Unknown


A painter paints pictures on canvas.  But musicians paint their pictures on silence.  ~Leopold Stokowski

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

All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!  ~Thomas Carlyle

If the King loves music, it is well with the land.  ~Mencius

Without music life would be a mistake.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons.  You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.  ~Gustav Mahler

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?  ~Michael Torke

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done

He who sings scares away his woes.  ~Cervantes

Music was my refuge.  I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.  ~Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

Music is what feelings sound like.  ~Author Unknown

There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
~Lord Byron

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues.  The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg:  I have it in my pocket.  ~Henri Rabaud

Music is the poetry of the air.  ~Richter

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music.  It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.  Sydney Smith

There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is.  ~William P. Merrill

If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.  ~Ludwig van Beethoven

I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours.  But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places.  Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.  ~H.A. Overstreet

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.  ~Edward Elgar

Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom.  If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.  ~Charlie Parker

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.  ~William F. Buckley, Jr.

Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Play the music, not the instrument.  ~Author Unknown

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.  ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence.  ~Robert Fripp

[An intellectual] is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger.  ~John Chesson

Music's the medicine of the mind.  ~John A. Logan

You are the music while the music lasts.  ~T.S. Eliot

Music is the universal language of mankind.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance.  Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.  ~Ezra Pound

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.  ~Robert Browning

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow.  ~Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't got the joke yet.  ~Oliver Herford

What we provide is an atmosphere... of orchestrated pulse which works on people in a subliminal way.  Under its influence I've seen shy debs and severe dowagers kick off their shoes and raise some wholesome hell.  ~Meyer Davis, about his orchestra

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.  ~Victor Hugo

...where music dwells
Lingering - and wandering on as loth to die...
~William Wordsworth, "Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge"

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel.  ~Buffy Sainte-Marie

Music is an outburst of the soul.  ~Frederick Delius

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.  ~Oscar Wilde

In music the passions enjoy themselves.  ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

Music is what life sounds like.  ~Eric Olson

If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term:  organization of sound.  ~John Cage

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.  ~Arnold Bennett

All music is folk music.  I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.  ~Louis Armstrong

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.  ~Alphonse de Lamartine

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
~William Cowper

When words leave off, music begins.  ~Heinrich Heine

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Music is the shorthand of emotion.  ~Leo Tolstoy

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.  ~Anais Nin

There is no truer truth obtainable
By Man than comes of music.
~Robert Browning

Strong lager and some early Zep tunes.  I ask thee, is there a better way to spend an evening?  ~Author Unknown

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living.  But serious music was never meant to be soporific.  ~Aaron Copland

What passion cannot music raise and quell!  ~John Dryden

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.  ~Leonard Bernstein

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.  ~Paul Simon

Music, when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory -
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.  ~Benny Green

The notes I handle no better than many pianists.  But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides!  ~Artur Schnabel

The pause is as important as the note.  ~Truman Fisher

The city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built forever.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven.  ~Lawrence Duncan

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.  ~Confucius

Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country.  ~Edmund G. Brown

Music can noble hints impart,
Engender fury, kindle love,
With unsuspected eloquence can move,
And manage all the man with secret art.
~Joseph Addison

My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front.  If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle.  ~Liberace

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.  ~Ronald Reagan

The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention:  the need for rhythm in life the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril.  ~Richard Baker

Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.  ~John Philip Sousa

Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.  ~Leigh Hunt

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.  ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, Comments of Abe Martin and His Neighbors, 1923

Country music is three chords and the truth.  ~Harlan Howard

An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving as much as they like.  From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him - and we would have fewer mediocre concerts.  ~Kit Coleman, Kit Coleman: Queen of Hearts

I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.  ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?  ~Charles Ives

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously.  Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.  ~Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.  ~Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

Music is love in search of a word.  ~Sidney Lanier

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible.  ~Victor de LaPrade

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life.  ~Jean Paul Richter

All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers, which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes, and you cannot get away from it.  ~Dave Barry

Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker.  ~William Green

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.  ~Simon Rattle

Bach opens a vista to the universe.  After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.  ~Helmut Walcha

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.  ~Lily Tomlin

The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief.  ~S.A. Sachs

 Music is well said to be the speech of angels.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays, "The Opera"

Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.  ~Robert Benchley

The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera.  As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.  ~Dave Barry

No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.  ~W.H. Auden, Time, 29 December 1961



Proper names are poetry in the raw.  Like all poetry they are untranslatable.  ~W.H. Auden


Nicknames stick to people, and the most ridiculous are the most adhesive.  ~Thomas C. Haliburton


The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.  ~Marshall McLuhan


Name is a fence and within it you are nameless.  ~Samuli Paronen


A nickname is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man.  ~Author unknown, quoted by William Hazlitt


Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things?  You'd have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four's name were Albert, things would be hopeless.  ~Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth


You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.  ~Elias Canetti


Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Names are an important key to what a society values.  Anthropologists recognize naming as 'one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception.'  ~David S. Slawson


From our ancestors come our names, but from our virtues our honors.  ~Proverb


Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names..  ~Proverb


What's in a name?  That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
~William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet


Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.  ~Japanese Proverb


Words have meaning and names have power.  ~Author Unknown


If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things.  ~Confucius


Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.  ~William Hazlitt


Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.  ~Salman Rushdie


I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp, gaunt names that never get fat.  ~Stephen Vincent Benet


And we were angry and poor and happy,
And proud of seeing our names in print.
~G.K. Chesterton


People's fates are simplified by their names.  ~Elias Canetti


Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.  ~Mary Daly


I have known a German Prince with more titles than subjects, and a Spanish nobleman with more names than shirts.  ~Oliver Goldsmith


How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!  ~Emily Dickinson, letter to Mrs. J.S. Cooper, 1880

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.  ~John Muir, 1913, in L.M. Wolfe, ed., John Muir, John of the Mountains:  The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!  ~John Muir

Adopt the pace of nature:  her secret is patience.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.  ~George Washington Carver

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.  ~John Muir

God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Martin Luther

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful.  Everything is simply happy.  Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance.  Look at the flowers - for no reason.  It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.  ~Osho

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

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.... People think pleasing God is all God care about.  But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.  ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.  Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.  ~Wendell Berry

And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release - out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?  ~Carl Sandburg, Good Morning America, 1928

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.  ~e.e. cummings

The poetry of the earth is never dead.  ~John Keats

I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees.  The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.  It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day.  It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.  Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.  ~Hamlin Garland, McClure's, February 1899

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.  ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Life, 22 December 1967

After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.  ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man.  ~Author Unknown

Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.  ~Juvenal, Satires

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on 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.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.  ~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964

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

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.  ~Walt Whitman

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.  ~John Muir

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.
~Emily Dickinson

To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.  ~Jane Austen

Good heavens, of what uncostly material is our earthly happiness composed... if we only knew it.  What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.  ~James Russell Lowell

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.  ~Lao Tzu

As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.  ~Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.  This is not done by jostling in the street.  ~William Blake

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.  ~Helen Keller

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?  Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Joy all creatures drink
At nature's bosoms...
~Friedrich von Schiller, "Ode to Joy," 1785, translated from German

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.  ~William Shakespeare

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.  ~Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted, 14 August 1966

I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me.  ~William Hazlitt

To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV

Fieldes have eies and woods have eares.  ~John Heywood, 1565

You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness - perhaps ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things...  ~Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, "Birds - And a Caution"  (Thanks, Corinne)

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day.  No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.  ~Aldo Leopold

Nature hates calculators.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
and closed them beneath the kisses of night.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Sensitive Plant," 1820

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.  ~Alan Hovhaness

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.  ~Thornton Wilder

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.  ~William Shakespeare

Climb up on some hill at sunrise.  Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you'll find it there.  ~Robb Sagendorph

I know the thrill of the grasses when the rain pours over them.
I know the trembling of the leaves when the winds sweep through them.
I know what the white clover felt as it held a drop of dew pressed close in its beauteousness.
I know the quivering of the fragrant petals at the touch of the pollen-legged bees.
I know what the stream said to the dipping willows, and what the moon said to the sweet lavender.
I know what the stars said when they came stealthily down and crept fondly into the tops of the trees.
~Muriel Strode, "Creation Songs"

The woods were made for the hunters of dreams,
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods belong.
~Sam Walter Foss

A rhododendron bud lavender-tipped.  Soon a glory of blooms to clash with the cardinals and gladden the hummingbirds!  ~Dave Beard

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
~Gerard Hopkins

My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms - will it return to my body when they scatter?  ~Kotomichi

The tulip and the butterfly
Appear in gayer coats than I:
Let me be dressed fine as I will,
Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still.
~Isaac Watts

Nature is my medicine.  ~Sara Moss-Wolfe

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.  ~Rachel Carson

Fire is the best of servants; but what a master!  ~Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Book II, chapter 9

I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that.... I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature.  ~Abraham Cowley

You know why there are so many whitefish in the Yellowstone River?  Because the Fish and Game people have never done anything to help them.  ~Russell Chatham, Silent Seasons, 1978

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness?  Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wildness yet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.  ~John Berger, The Sense of Sight, 1980

Happiness flutters in the air whilst we rest among the breaths of nature.  ~Kelly Scheaffer

Adults are always so busy with the dull and dusty affairs of life which have nothing to do with grass, trees, and running streams.  ~The Little Grey Men by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford), 1942

If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere.  ~Vincent Van Gogh

All I want is to stand in a field
and to smell green,
to taste air,
to feel the earth want me,
Without all this concrete
hating me.
~Phillip Pulfrey, from Love, Abstraction and other Speculations, www.originals.net

Nature is man's teacher.  She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.  ~Alfred Billings Street

There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon.  ~Alice Meynell

Watching clouds roll by
on a sunny day
Who needs church?
Nature is divine.
~Carrie Latet

With innovation and technology, seems we have forgotten to cherish the true beauty the world has to offer.  ~A.C. Van Cherub

Nature holds all the answers - go outside and ask some questions - open your heart and listen to the response!  ~Amethyst Wyldfyre, AnswersFromYourAngels.com

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.  ~Alan C. Kay

Let us permit nature to have her way.  She understands her business better than we do.  ~Michel de Montaigne

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.  ~Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991

Nature will not be admired by proxy.  ~Winston Churchill

I am not a lover of lawns.  Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn.  ~W.H. Hudson, The Book of a Naturalist, 1919

The dance of the palm trees, the oceans calling, the first rays of sun and heaven is here.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

I'll tell you how the sun rose a ribbon at a time.  ~Emily Dickinson

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.  ~John Burroughs

A setting sun still whispers a promise for tomorrow.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Any man that walks the mead
In bud, or blade, or bloom, may find
A meaning suited to his mind.
~Alfred Tennyson

What a type of happy family is the family of the sun! with what order, with what harmony, with what blessed peace, do his children the planets move around him, shining with light which they drink in from their parent's in at once upon him and on one another!  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

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.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.  ~George Washington Carver

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.  ~John Lubbock

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks.  Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough to pay attention to the story.  ~Linda Hogan

Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes - every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man.  ~Orison Swett Marden

Nature rejuvenates so quickly, so completely.  Though we often view ourselves otherwise, we are nature.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
~Rupert Brooke

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.  ~e.e. cummings

I walked barefoot - the only way to walk on a muddy road.  ~Laurie Gough, "Light on a Moonless Night"

A wise man can do no better than to turn from the churches and look up through the airy majesty of the wayside trees with exultation, with resignation, at the unconquerable unimplicated sun.  ~Llewelyn Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.  ~Eleonora Duse

Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries.  ~John Muir

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.  ~Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated.  She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.  ~Napoleon Hill

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things.  In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.  ~John Fowles

I've made an odd discovery.  Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility.  Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.  ~Bertrand Russell

Truly it may be said that the outside of a mountain is good for the inside of a man.  ~George Wherry, Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot, 1896

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.  ~Henry David Thoreau, journal, 5 January 1856

The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.  ~William Channing

Once you have heard the lark, known the swish of feet through hill-top grass and smelt the earth made ready for the seed, you are never again going to be fully happy about the cities and towns that man carries like a crippling weight upon his back.  ~Gwyn Thomas

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is Nature's way.  ~Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

A wee child toddling in a wonder world.... I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers.  If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan.  ~Zitkala-Sa

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
~William Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned," 1798

You will find something more in woods than in books.  Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.  ~St. Bernard

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
~William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1599

Nature teaches more than she preaches.  There are no sermons in stones.  It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.  ~John Burroughs

Nature is the art of God.  ~Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1635

The color of the mountains is Buddha's body; the sound of running water is his great speech.  ~Dogen

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Nature never goes out of style.  ~Author Unknown

Nature is a writer's best friend.  ~Agavé Powers

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated.  But if it's like that, then I want out.  ~Steven Weinberg

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.  ~John Burroughs

Acknowledgment:
Thanks to Michael Garofalo of The Spirit of Gardening
for sharing some of these great quotes. After all these
years, I am ever further enraptured by your amazing site!

Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 1859

The only place where housework comes before needlework is in the dictionary.  ~Mary Kurtz

The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path.  ~Mason Cooley

Sewing mends the soul.  ~Author Unknown

Really I don't dislike to cook, but what you cook is eaten so quickly.  When you sew, you have something that will last to show for your efforts.  ~Elizabeth Travis Johnson

She watched and taught the girls that sang at their embroidery frames while the great silk flowers grew from their needles.  ~Louise Jordan Miln, The Feast of Lanterns

Needlepoint:  the delicious art of filling in holes with wool.  ~Carole Berman and Jennifer Lazarus

Knitting is very conducive to thought.  It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.  ~Dorothy Day

I like making a piece of string into something I can wear.  ~Author Unknown

I keep my end tables full of needlework and quilting so I don't have to dust them.  ~Author Unknown

Buttons and patches and the cold wind blowing,
The days pass quickly when I am sewing.
~Author Unknown

May your bobbin always be full!  ~Author Unknown

From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.  ~Honore de Balzac

Stitch your stress away.  ~Author Unknown

Knitting is a boon for those of us who are easily bored.  I take my knitting everywhere to take the edge off of moments that would otherwise drive me stark raving mad.  ~Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End:  Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much

If the knitter is weary the baby will have no new bonnet.  ~Irish Proverb

The priest was on a roll: "Each person you meet is worthy of your compassion!" he prayed loudly. "Sheep, too," the knitter mentally added.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.  ~Charles Simic

In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.  ~Jeff Bezos

A #6 aluminum needle has been known to furnish an excellent emergency shearpin for an outboard motor.  ~Elizabeth Zimmerman

The best thing about doing needlepoint for very small children is that they are so uncritical.  The don't say things like, "I see you've missed some stitches over here on the leg, was that intentional?" or "Was this creature blinded in a fight?"  They will clasp it in their little arms and love it besottedly, inseparably as the thing becomes more and more rancid.  ~Carole Berman and Jennifer Lazarus

All my scattering moments are taken up with my needle.  ~Ellen Birdseye Wheaton, 1851

Asking a seamstress to mend is like asking Michelangelo to paint your garage.  ~Author Unknown

Sewing fills my days, not to mention the living room, bedroom, and closets.  ~Author Unknown

It took me years and years of trial efforts to work out that there is absolutely no knitting triumph I can achieve that my husband will think is worth being woken up for.  ~Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End:  Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much

Sewing: A creative mess is better than tidy idleness.  ~Author Unknown

So much fabric, so little time!  Or, sew much fabric, sew little time!  ~Author Unknown

As ye sew, so shall ye rip.  ~Author Unknown

There is no right way to knit; there is no wrong way to knit.  So if anybody kindly tells you that what you are doing is "wrong," don't take umbrage; they mean well.  Smile submissively, and listen, keeping your disagreement on an entirely mental level.  They may be right, in this particular case, and even if not, they may drop off pieces of information which will come in very handy if you file them away carefully in your brain for future reference.  ~Elizabeth Zimmerman

Veni, Vidi, Velcro.  I came, I saw, I stuck around.  ~Author Unknown

Any day spent sewing, is a good day.  ~Author Unknown

A quilt will warm your body and comfort your soul.  ~Author Unknown

My husband is a human pincushion.  ~Author Unknown

My granddaughter came to spend a few weeks with me, and I decided to teach her to sew.  After I had gone through a lengthy explanation of how to thread the machine, she stepped back, put her hands on her hips, and said in disbelief, "You mean you can do all that, but you can't play my Game Boy?"  ~Author Unknown

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to weave.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Woman has relied heretofore too entirely for her support on the needle - that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.  ~Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Heirloom" is knitting code for "This pattern is so difficult that you would consider death a relief.  ~Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End:  Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much

I got a sewing machine for my husband! Good trade, huh?  ~Author Unknown

When I learned to sew, I forgot how to cook.  ~Author Unknown

When life throws you scraps, make a quilt.  ~Author Unknown

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by.  Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I cannot count my day complete
'Til needle, thread and fabric meet.
~Author Unknown

Apart from yoga, meditation, reading, it has to be one of the most serene things to do (don't lose your needles though, that can create a severe lack of serenity).  ~Carole Berman and Jennifer Lazarus, about needlepoint

Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn't hurt the untroubled spirit, either.  ~Elizabeth Zimmerman

Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don't unravel.  ~Author Unknown

I'd rather be stitchin'
than in the kitchen!
~Author Unknown

If I stitch fast enough, does it count as aerobic exercise?  ~Author Unknown

Her needlework both plain and ornamental was excellent, and she might have put a sewing machine to shame.  ~James Edward Austen-Leigh, about Jane Austen

I'm a material girl - want to see my fabric collection?  ~Author Unknown

I hate a woman who offers herself because she ought to do so, and, cold and dry, thinks of her sewing when she's making love.  ~Ovid

Useful and ornamental needlework, knitting, and netting are capable of being made, not only sources of personal gratification, but of high moral benefit, and the means of developing in surpassing loveliness and grace, some of the highest and noblest feelings of the soul.  ~Author unknown, from The Ladies' Work Table Book, 1845

Needlepoint is a superb way to stop smoking and nibbling, and unlike counted cross stitch also allows the mind to wander.  ~Carole Berman and Jennifer Lazarus

For people allergic to wool, one's heart can only bleed.  ~Elizabeth Zimmerman

I'm itching to be stitching!  ~Author Unknown

Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine.  ~Jack Rhodes and Dick Reynolds (song)

Memories are stitched with love.  ~Author Unknown

Sewing forever, housework whenever.  ~Author Unknown

Don't needle the seamstress.  ~Author Unknown

Quilters never grow old, they just go to pieces.  ~Author Unknown

Chains do not hold a marriage together.  It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.  ~Simone Signoret

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.  ~Ellen Glasgow

Many estates are spent in the getting, since women for tea forsake ssockning and knitting, and men for punch forsake hewing and splitting.  ~Benjamin Franklin

The innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care...
~William Shakespeare

Everybody tells me that they would love to knit, but they don't have time.  I look at people's lives and I can see opportunity and time for knitting all over the place.  The time spent riding the bus each day?  That's a pair of socks over a month.  Waiting in line?  Mittens.  Watching TV?  Buckets of wasted time that could be an exquisite lace shawl.  ~Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End:  Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much

I love sewing and have plenty of material witnesses.  ~Author Unknown

Good friends are like quilts - they age with you yet never lose their warmth.  ~Author Unknown

A family is a patchwork of love.  ~Author Unknown

In the crazy quilt of life, I'm glad you're in my block of friends.  ~Author Unknown

Quilters never cut corners.  ~Author Unknown

I'm in therapy and sewing is cheaper than a psychiatrist.  ~Author Unknown

Love is the thread that binds us.  ~Author Unknown

Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence.  Of course, superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.  ~Elizabeth Zimmerman

Our lives are like quilts - bits and pieces, joy and sorrow, stitched with love.  ~Author Unknown

Those who sleep under a quilt, sleep under a blanket of love.  ~Author Unknown

Quilters know all the angles.  ~Author Unknown

Grandma quilts have love in every stitch.  ~Author Unknown

A bed without a quilt is like a sky without stars.  ~Author Unknown

Quilt 'til you wilt.  ~Author Unknown

Thank you to Ellen for submitting some of these quotes.

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve.  Middle age is when you're forced to.  ~Bill Vaughn

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in.  A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.  ~Bill Vaughan

Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits.  ~Author Unknown

A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.  ~Author Unknown

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.  ~Benjamin Franklin

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.  It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left.  It is the nativity of our common Adam.  ~Charles Lamb

New Year's Day is every man's birthday.  ~Charles Lamb

Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it's twice as onerous a duty.  ~John Selden

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.  ~Hal Borland

The merry year is born
Like the bright berry from the naked thorn.
~Hartley Coleridge

New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.  ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

The Old Year has gone.  Let the dead past bury its own dead.  The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time.  All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months!  ~Edward Payson Powell

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.  ~Oprah Winfrey

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk.  This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Every man should be born again on the first day of January.  Start with a fresh page.  Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

New Year's Day:  Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.  ~Mark Twain

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.  ~George William Curtis

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

Approach the New Year with resolve to find the opportunities hidden in each new day.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.  ~Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath.  Today, we are a pious and exemplary community.  Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.  ~Mark Twain

People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas.  ~Author Unknown

And ye, who have met with Adversity's blast,
And been bow'd to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass'd
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury -
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
~Thomas Hood

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past.  Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.  ~Brooks Atkinson

Each age has deemed the new-born year
The fittest time for festal cheer.
~Walter Scott

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

Glory to God in highest heaven,
Who unto man His Son hath given;
While angels sing with tender mirth,
A glad new year to all the earth.
~Martin Luther

Whether we want them or not, the New Year will bring new challenges; whether we seize them or not, the New Year will bring new opportunities.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

A new oath holds pretty well; but... when it is become old, and frayed out, and damaged by a dozen annual retryings of its remains, it ceases to be serviceable; any little strain will snap it.  ~Mark Twain, speech in New York City, 31 March 1885

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty?  I live according to twenty-year-old habits.  ~Andre Gide

When then is lost, as time is by,
we look upon the yearly wine
to see our substance in the lees.
Did tribe and purse most pleasing leave?
To look for clear and faithful sense,
that gives a bodied stance bouquet,
then see the vat at mirror's face
and find in it, the yearly pace.
~E. Marshall, Vintner Epilogue (Happy Old Year)

Many years ago I resolved never to bother with New Year's resolutions, and I've stuck with it ever since.  ~Dave Beard

I do think New Year's resolutions can't technically be expected to begin on New Year's Day, don't you?  Since, because it's an extension of New Year's Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system.  Also dieting on New Year's Day isn't a good idea as you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover.  I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second.  ~Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary

New Year's Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot.  Unless, of course, those tests come back positive.  ~Jay Leno

We meet today
To thank Thee for the era done,
And Thee for the opening one.
~John Greenleaf Whittier

One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this:  To rise above the little things.  ~John Burroughs

Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.  ~Charles Lamb

A happy New Year! Grant that I
May bring no tear to any eye
When this New Year in time shall end
Let it be said I've played the friend,
Have lived and loved and labored here,
And made of it a happy year.
~Edgar Guest

It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets.  ~William Thomas

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.   Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential.  ~Ellen Goodman

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions.  ~Joey Adams

He who breaks a resolution is a weakling;
He who makes one is a fool.
~F.M. Knowles

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year.  It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.  Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions.  Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.  ~G.K. Chesterton

I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's.  ~Henry Moore

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm 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.  ~Thomas Mann

I made no resolutions for the New Year.  The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.  ~Anaïs Nin

Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time?  I want an interregnum.  The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?  ~John Dos Passos, 1917

New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.  ~Mark Twain

Every man regards his own life as the New Year's Eve of time.  ~Jean Paul Richter

The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel.  Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.  ~W.H. Auden

Night time is really the best time to work.  All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.  ~Catherine O'Hara

There they stand, the innumerable stars, shining in order like a living hymn, written in light.  ~N.P. Willis

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.  ~Vincent Van Gogh

The night walked down the sky with the moon in her hand.  ~Frederick L. Knowles

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.  ~George Carlin, Brain Droppings, 1997

Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber!
~Lord Byron, Childe Harold

Night is a world lit by itself.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Night, the beloved.  Night, when words fade and things come alive.  When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again.  When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

By night, an atheist half believes in God.  ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

O radiant Dark!  O darkly fostered ray!
Thou hast a joy too deep for shallow Day.
~George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy

Moonlight is sculpture.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Metaphor for the night sky: A trillion asterisks and no explanations.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Research is the name given the crystal formed when the night's worry is added to the day's sweat.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Twilight drops her curtain down, and pins it with a star.  ~Lucy Maud Montgomery

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline

What I take from my nights, I add to my days.  ~Leon de Rotrou, "Vencelas," translated

Mine is the night, with all her stars.  ~Edward Young

One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space.  Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages.  Otherwise there was no reminder of human life.  My companion and I were alone with the stars:  the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon.  It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators.  But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will.  ~Rachel Carson

If the Stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!  But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

O wild and wondrous midnight,
There is a might in thee
To make the charmed body
Almost like spirit be,
And give it some faint glimpses
Of immortality.
~James Russell Lowell, Midnight

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.  ~Jorge Luis Borges

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.  ~Joseph Conrad

Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.  ~J.K. Rowling, "The Egg and The Eye," Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000, spoken by the character Mad-Eye Moody

Is there not
A tongue in every star that talks with man,
And wooes him to be wise? nor wooes in vain;
This dead of midnight is the noon of thought,
And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.
~Anna Letitia Barbauld, A Summer Evening's Meditation

Night is the blotting paper for many sorrows.  ~Author Unknown

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.  ~Henry Beston

When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, she does not at once expose herself impudently to the public gaze; but for a time remains veiled in a transparent cloud, till she gradually acquires courage to endure the looks and admiration of beholders.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse.  I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night.  ~Mark Twain

To me at least was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day.
~Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

For the happiest life, rigorously plan your days, leave your nights open to chance.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The day has eyes; the night has ears.  ~David Fergusson

No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky.  ~Llewelyn Powys, quoted in Highs by Alex J. Packer

Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature.  What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

So dear night the half of life is,
And the fairest half indeed.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Night's black Mantle covers all alike.  ~Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

Some praise the Lord for Light,
The living spark;
I thank God for the Night
The healing dark.
~Robert William Service, "Weary"

Dawn seemed to follow midnight with indecent haste.  ~J.K. Rowling

Night has become painful for me.  It brings to light the regrets of the day.  ~Grey Livingston

Look how the pale queen of the silent night
Doth cause the ocean to attend upon her....
~Charles Best, "A Sonnet of the Moon"

The stars are the street lights of eternity.  ~Author Unknown

A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.  ~Edward Plunkett

How like a queen comes forth the lonely Moon
From the slow opening curtains of the clouds
Walking in beauty to her midnight throne!
~George Croly, Diana

To seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night.  ~Paul Simon, "A Poem on the Underground Wall"

Fooey! The porchlight is burnt out, and I can't see whether it's dark outside or not.  ~Dave Beard

How long the night seems to one kept awake by pain.  ~Bernard Joseph Saurin, Blanche et Guiscard, translated

The night is forever. I can't sleep.
The clear moon is so bright, so bright.
I almost think I hear a voice call me,
and to the empty sky say, Yes?
~Zi Ye, translated

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.  ~Samuel Johnson

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.  ~Philip K. Dick

Moon hangs, almost full
pieces of cloud scatter,
glide in soft, summer breeze.
We lay in our meadow
listening to the sound of night....
~Daniel James Burt, "Meadow Again"

It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.  ~Lemony Snicket

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.  ~Vincent Van Gogh

Day hath put on his jacket, and around
His burning bosom buttoned it with stars.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., "Evening"

You can't stand up to the night until you understand what's hiding in its shadows.  ~Charles De Lint

A hand omnipotent, in endless space,
From chaos, formed a world and found a place,
Where, through the countless ages, yet unborn,
A star might shine from dusk to rosy morn....
~Author Unknown, "The Fall of Man"

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing.  It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.  ~Somerset Maugham

Stars are the daisies that begem
The blue fields of the sky.
~D.M. Moir

Every sleepy boy and girl in every bed around the world can hear the stars up in the sky whispering a lullaby.  ~Mary Chapin Carpenter

Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing Night!
Night of south winds!  Night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding Night!  Mad, naked, Summer Night!
~Walt Whitman

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?"  Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."  ~Charles M. Schulz

For the night shows stars and women in a better light.  ~Lord Byron, Don Juan

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done

Tonight's forecast: Dark.  Continued dark tonight turning to partly light in the morning.  ~George Carlin

We spend our midday sweat, our midnight oil;
We tire the night in thought, the day in toil.
~Francis Quarles

Beware thoughts that come in the night.  They aren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources.  ~William Trogdon

Cherries of the night are riper
Than the cherries pluckt at noon...
In the cherry pluckt at night,
With the dew of summer swelling,
There's a juice of pure delight,
Cool, dark, sweet, divinely smelling...
~Robert Graves

By day each soul must walk within its shadow.
Only night can make us whole again...
~Nicholas Gordon, www.poemsforfree.com

How lovely are the portals of the night,
When stars come out to watch the daylight die.
~Thomas Cole, Twilight

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve.
Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time.
~William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

[O]ne moon lights a thousand forevers... ~Meng Chiao

A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises.  Ghosts were created when the first man awoke in the night.  ~J.M. Barrie, Little Minister

Above the tower - a lone, twice-sized moon.
On the cold river passing night-filled homes,
It scatters restless gold across waves...
Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,
Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon
Spreading in my old garden.... All light,
All ten thousand miles at once in its light!
~Tu Fu, "Full Moon," translated by David Hinton

'Tis midnight now.  The bend and broken moon,
Batter'd and black, as from a thousand battles,
Hangs silent on the purple walls of Heaven.
~Joaquin Miller, Ina

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.  ~William Faulkner

We wake in the night, to stereophonic silence.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

That orbed maiden, with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud

Day, like a weary pilgrim, had reached the western gate of heaven, and Evening stooped down to unloose the latchets of his sandal shoon.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion

Midnight! the outpost of advancing day!
The frontier town and citadel of night!
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Two Rivers

Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour
Friendliest to sleep and silence.
~John Milton, Paradise Lost

Thank Heaven, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

The young moon has fed
Her exhausted horn
With the sunset's fire.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

These blessed candles of the night.  ~William Shakespeare, referring to stars, Merchant of Venice

With finger on her solemn lip,
Night hushed the shadowy earth.
~Margaret Deland

It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.  ~Victor Hugo

Acknowledgment:  Thank you very much to John C. Shepard of the GIGA Quotes Home Page for sharing some of the wonderful quotations on this page!



We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.  ~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860


Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson:  you find the present tense, but the past perfect!  ~Owens Lee Pomeroy


If you're yearning for the good old days, just turn off the air conditioning.  ~Griff Niblack


People seem to get nostalgic about a lot of things they weren't so crazy about the first time around.  ~Author Unknown


It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back.  ~Bill Vaughn


The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.  ~Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic


[I]t becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia.  ~Ted Koppel


Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.  ~Doug Larson


Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was.  ~Will Rogers


Nostalgia is a seductive liar.  ~George Wildman Ball


It's curious the way we get nostalgic for some hoped-for thing that never happened, as if something that never happened were in the past.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.  ~Franklin Pierce Adams


True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.  ~Florence King


I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine.  ~Lou Reed


Who wants to live with one foot in hell just for the sake of nostalgia?  Our time is forever now!  ~Alice Childress


Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had....  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Nurses are angels in comfortable shoes.  ~Author Unknown

Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.  ~Dag Hammarskjold

Nurses are the heart of healthcare.  ~Donna Wilk Cardillo

Nursing would be a dream job if there were no doctors.  ~Gerhard Kocher

Nursing is an art:  and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation, as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit?  It is one of the Fine Arts:  I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.  ~Florence Nightingale

Caring is the essence of nursing.  ~Jean Watson

Nurses can take the pressure.  ~Author Unknown

The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.... ~William Osler

Nurses dispense comfort, compassion, and caring without even a prescription.  ~Val Saintsbury

Bound by paperwork, short on hands, sleep, and energy... nurses are rarely short on caring.  ~Sharon Hudacek, "A Daybook for Nurses"

Nurses are I.V. leaguers.  ~Author Unknown

When I think about all the patients and their loved ones that I have worked with over the years, I know most of them don't remember me nor I them.  But I do know that I gave a little piece of myself to each of them and they to me and those threads make up the beautiful tapestry in my mind that is my career in nursing.  ~Donna Wilk Cardillo, A Daybook for Beginning Nurses

After two days in the hospital, I took a turn for the nurse.  ~W.C. Fields

When you're a nurse you know that every day you will touch a life or a life will touch yours.  ~Author Unknown

Panic plays no part in the training of a nurse.  ~Elizabeth Kenny

Nurses are patient people.  ~Author Unknown

You might be a nurse if you firmly believe that "too stupid to live" should be a diagnosis.  ~Author Unknown

You know you're a nurse if... you triage the laundry when at home:  This pile needs immediate attention, the pile can wait, this pile, with a little stain stick will be OK until you get back to it.  ~Donna Wilk Cardillo

Whether a person is a male or female, a nurse is a nurse.  ~Gary Veale

If Christian scientists had more science and doctors more Christianity, it wouldn't make any difference which you called in - if you had a good nurse.  ~Finley Peter Dunne

Nurses - one of the few blessings of being ill.  ~Sara Moss-Wolfe

Nursing is not for everyone.  It takes a very strong, intelligent, and compassionate person to take on the ills of the world with passion and purpose and work to maintain the health and well-being of the planet.  No wonder we're exhausted at the end of the day!  ~Donna Wilk Cardillo

If love can't cure it, nurses can.  ~Author Unknown

A nurse will always give us hope,
an angel with a stethoscope.
~Terri Guillemets

Nurses don't wait until October to celebrate Make a Difference Day - they make a difference every day!  ~Author Unknown

Confucius say:  "Man who want pretty nurse, must be patient."  ~Author Unknown

Nursing care comes in many forms.  Sometimes it is the ability to make someone feel physically comfortable by various means.  Other times it is the ability to improve the body's ability to achieve or maintain health.  But often it is an uncanny yet well honed knack to see beyond the obvious and address, in some way, the deeper needs of the human soul.  ~Donna Wilk Cardillo, A Daybook for Beginning Nurses

Always thank your nurse,
Sometimes the only one between you and a hearse.
~Carrie Latet

Nurses are the hospitality of the hospital.  ~Carrie Latet

We'd all be worse without a nurse.  ~Author Unknown

During my second year of nursing school our professor gave us a quiz.  I breezed through the questions until I read the last one:  "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?"  Surely this was a joke.  I had seen the cleaning woman several times, but how would I know her name?  I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank.  Before the class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our grade.  "Absolutely," the professor said.  "In your careers, you will meet many people.  All are significant.  They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello."  I've never forgotten that lesson.  I also learned her name was Dorothy.  ~Joann C. Jones

Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don't be afraid.  ~Frederick Buechner

College is the best time of your life.  When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?  ~David Wood

Academe, n.:  An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.  Academy, n.:  A modern school where football is taught.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities:  the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.  ~Abbott Lawrence Lowell

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.  ~W.H. Auden

I learned three important things in college - to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes.  ~Agnes DeMille, Dance to the Piper, 1952

There isn't a child who hasn't gone out into the brave new world who eventually doesn't return to the old homestead carrying a bundle of dirty clothes.  ~Art Buchwald

If at first you don't succeed, do it like your mother told you.  ~Author Unknown

Where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Homesick in Heaven

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.  ~Aristotle

How did it get so late so soon?
It's night before it's afternoon.
December is here before it's June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?
~Dr. Seuss

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

A college education shows a man how little other people know.  ~Thomas Chandler Haliburton

College is a place to keep warm between high school and an early marriage.  ~George Gobel

The purpose of primary education is the development of your weak characteristics; the purpose of university education, the development of your strong.  ~Nevin Fenneman

A university is a college with a stadium seating over 40,000.  ~Leonard L. Levinson

If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.  ~Robert Goheen, Time, 23 June 1961

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.  ~Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin

Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

Don't live down to expectations.  Go out there and do something remarkable.  ~Wendy Wasserstein

Excellence is not a skill.  It is an attitude.  ~Ralph Marston

Hitch your wagon to a star.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in schools.  ~Author Unknown

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
You're on your own.
And you know what you know.
You are the guy who'll decide where to go.
~Dr. Seuss

Don't aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.  ~David Frost

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.  ~John Dewey

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.  ~Henry S. Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street, 1940, commonly misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

The important thing is not to stop questioning.  ~Albert Einstein

The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own arm.  ~Fred Dehner

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

Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.  ~Les Brown

You learn something every day if you pay attention.  ~Ray LeBlond

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.  ~Milton Berle

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.  ~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," 1890

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.  ~Chinese Proverb

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.  ~Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625

What we are is God's gift to us.  What we become is our gift to God.  ~Eleanor Powell

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.  ~Albert Einstein

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later.  ~Dana Stewart Scott

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.  ~Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley

When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

You've got a lot of choices.  If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.  ~Steven D. Woodhull (U.S. geologist, 1976-)

Whether you think you can or think you can't - you are right.  ~Henry Ford

Always hold your head up, but be careful to keep your nose at a friendly level.  ~Max L. Forman

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.  ~Thomas Edison

Don't find fault.  Find a remedy.  ~Henry Ford

There is no telling how many miles you will have to run while chasing a dream.  ~Author Unknown



Jumping at several small opportunities may get us there more quickly than waiting for one big one to come along.  ~Hugh Allen


When I look back now over my life and call to mind what I might have had simply for taking and did not take, my heart is like to break.  ~William Hale White


Opportunity is often difficult to recognize; we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards.  ~William Arthur Ward


Opportunity is a bird that never perches.  ~Claude McDonald


Opportunity is as scarce as oxygen; men fairly breathe it and do not know it.  ~Doc Sane


Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them.  ~Maltbie Babcock


Nothing is so often irretrievably missed as a daily opportunity.  ~Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach


It is often hard to distinguish between the hard knocks in life and those of opportunity.  ~Frederick Phillips


Seize the opportunity by the beard, for it is bald behind.  ~Bulgarian Proverb


I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.  ~Mark Twain


Seize every opportunity along the way, for how sad it would be if the road you chose became the road not taken.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Ability is of little account without opportunity.  ~Napoleon


The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.  ~Milton Berle


A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.  ~Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625


Opportunities are never lost; someone will take the one you miss.  ~Author Unknown


Opportunity is a parade.  Even as one chance passes, the next is a fife and drum echoing in the distance.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.  ~Harry Truman


Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities.  It also holds pitfalls.  The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.  ~Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates," Side Effects, 1980


[I]f one wants to get a boat ride, one must be near the river.  ~Anchee Min, Becoming Madame Mao


As you seek new opportunity, keep in mind that the sun does not usually reappear on the horizon where last seen.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I held a moment in my hand, brilliant as a star, fragile as a flower, a tiny sliver of one hour.  I dripped it carelessly, Ah!  I didn't know, I held opportunity.  ~Hazel Lee


Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending.  ~Author Unknown


The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.  ~Helen Rowland


All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.  ~Sidney Lumet


When written in Chinese the word "crisis" is composed of two characters - one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.  ~John F. Kennedy, address, 12 April 1959


Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.  ~Hugh Miller, Snow on the Wind


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


Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.  ~Thomas Edison


Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.  ~Jerome K. Jerome, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1889


If I were Opportunity, I wouldn't just knock, you'd have to sign.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Grasp your opportunities, no matter how poor your health; nothing is worse for your health than boredom.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead.  ~Robert Brault

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society.  The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.  ~Gil Stern

A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note-Book, 1927

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.  ~George F. Will, The Leveling Wind

A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all - he's walking on them.  ~Leonard Louis Levinson

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in.  A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.  ~Bill Vaughan

An optimist is the human personification of spring.  ~Susan J. Bissonette

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.  ~Harry Truman

An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day.  ~Irv Kupcinet

Optimist: someone who figures that taking a step backward after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it's a cha-cha.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Being an optimist after you've got everything you want doesn't count.  ~Kin Hubbard

Optimists are nostalgic about the future.  ~Chicago Tribune

Optimism is the foundation of courage.  ~Nicholas Murray Butler

An optimist is someone who figures that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's the bluebird of happiness.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Of course I look at the glass half full.  The only time I would look at it half empty is when I think about how good the first half tasted.  ~Drew Deyoung

I am one of those people who just can't help getting a kick out of life - even when it's a kick in the teeth.  ~Polly Adler

Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it.  ~Douglas Jerrold, "Meeting Troubles Half-Way," 1859

In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.  ~Daniel L. Reardon

It doesn't hurt to be optimistic.  You can always cry later.  ~Lucimar Santos de Lima

It's still possible to be a cockeyed optimist these days - you just have to be a little more cockeyed.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.  ~James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion, 1926

Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant - the digitalis of failure.  ~Elbert Hubbard

An optimist is merely an ex-pessimist with his pockets full of money, his digestion in good condition, and his wife in the country.  ~Helen Rowland

How do you tell an optimist that he or she has lived a happy life by mistake?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A pessimist's blood type is always B-negative.  ~Author Unknown

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

A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad.  An optimist is a man who hopes they are.  ~Chauncey Mitchell Depew

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.  ~Mark Twain

The realist sees reality as concrete.  The optimist sees reality as clay.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.  ~Walt Disney

If an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say, in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well, this isn't too bad.  I don't have my left arm anymore, but at least nobody will ever ask me whether I am right-handed or left-handed," but most of us would say something more along the lines of "Aaaaah! My arm! My arm!"  ~Lemony Snicket

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.  ~Oscar Wilde

How many pessimists end up by desiring the things they fear, in order to prove that they are right?  ~Robert Mallett, Apostilles, 1972

an optimist is a guy
that has never had
much experience.
~Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel, 1927

It can be said of optimism that while sometimes mistaken, it is never sadly mistaken.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.  ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923

Always borrow money from a pessimist, he doesn't expect to be paid back.  ~Author Unknown

After 5000 years of recorded human history, you wonder, What part of 2,000,000 sunrises doesn't a pessimist understand?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

After all, what is your host's purpose in having a party?  Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"  ~Robin Williams

Cocktail party:  A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time.  The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.  ~Fred Allen

Never be the first to arrive at a party or the last to go home, and never, ever be both.  ~David Brown, quoted in Reader's Digest "Quotable Quotes," April 2004

At every party there are two kinds of people - those who want to go home and those who don't.  The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.  ~Ann Landers

[N]o party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.  ~Desiderius Erasmus

The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.  ~Carol Matthau

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
~George Gordon Byron, Childe Harolds Pilgrimage

I am thankful for the mess to clean after a party because it means I have been surrounded by friends.  ~Nancie J. Carmody

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk.  When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.  ~George Gordon Byron

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie,
Love the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
~Dorothy Parker

A holiday cocktail party is where some stranger will learn more about you in an hour than your spouse has learned in a lifetime.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

No man does right by a woman at a party.  ~Harry Golden

What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.  ~Phyllis Diller

She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.  ~Evelyn Waugh

The Life and Soul, the man who will never go home while there is one man, woman or glass of anything not yet drunk.  ~Katherine Whitehorn

I suppose it's possible that the Sundance Kid didn't like to make much of his birthdays - they may have struck him as just another reminder that his draw was getting slower by the year - but what if he truly liked a major celebration?  What if he looked forward every year to marking the day of his birth with what they used to call in the West "a real wingding, with pink balloons and a few survivors?"  ~Calvin Trillin, Travels with Alice

You know, we've got to do it someday... throw away all the guns and invite all the jokers from the North and the South in here to a cocktail party... last man standing on his feet at the end wins the war.  ~M*A*S*H, Hawkeye, "Pilot Episode," 1972



After all, what is your host's purpose in having a party?  Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.  ~P.J. O'Rourke


Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"  ~Robin Williams


Cocktail party:  A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time.  The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.  ~Fred Allen


The goal of all civilization, all religious thought, and all that sort of thing is simply to have a good time.  But man gets so solemn over the process that he forgets the end.  ~Don Marquis


Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance till you drop.
~W.H. Auden


Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer.  Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.  ~Dave Barry


At every party there are two kinds of people - those who want to go home and those who don't.  The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.  ~Ann Landers


We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.  ~Japanese Proverb


The man who doesn't relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.  ~Elbert Hubbard


When the wine goes in, strange things come out.  ~Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, The Piccolomini, 1799


[N]o party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.  ~Desiderius Erasmus


On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
~Lord Byron, Childe Harolds Pilgrimage


She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.  ~Evelyn Waugh


There is precious little hope to be got out of whatever keeps us industrious, but there is a chance for us whenever we cease work and become stargazers.  ~H.M. Tomlinson


Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk.  When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron


Stay busy, get plenty of exercise, and don't drink too much.  Then again, don't drink too little.  ~Herman "Jackrabbit" Smith-Johannsen


Drink, and dance and laugh and lie,
Love the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
~Dorothy Parker


Spend the afternoon.  You can't take it with you.  ~Annie Dillard


I am thankful for the mess to clean after a party because it means I have been surrounded by friends.  ~Nancie J. Carmody


If four or five guys tell you that you're drunk, even though you know you haven't had a thing to drink, the least you can do is to lie down a little while.  ~Joseph Schenck


There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.  ~George Santayana, "War Shrines," Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922


Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.  ~Henry Fielding, "Love in Several Masques"


Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed.  Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams.  If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered.  Then I say to myself, it is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.  ~Jack Handey


There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes


Remember:  "I" before "E," except in Budweiser.  ~Author Unknown


And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done


I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it.  I want to have lived the width of it as well.  ~Diane Ackerman


To alcohol, the cause and solution to all of life's problems.  ~Homer Simpson


Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.  ~George Santayana


Health - what my friends are always drinking to before they fall down.  ~Phyllis Diller


Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop to look around once in a while you could miss it.  ~From the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off


We welcome passion, for the mind is briefly let off duty.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Love is often gentle, desire always a rage.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.  ~Benjamin Franklin

It is with our passions as it is with fire and water; they are good servants, but bad masters.  ~Roger L'Estrange, Aesop's Fables, 1692

Passion and prejudice govern the world, only under the name of reason.  ~John Wesley

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Passion makes the world go round.  Love just makes it a safer place.  ~Ice T, The Ice Opinion, quoted in Reader's Digest, "Quotable Quotes," February 2002

Chase down your passion like it's the last bus of the night.  ~Terri Guillemets

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!  Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Follow your passion, and success will follow you.  ~Terri Guillemets

Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive.  And then go and do that.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.  ~Attributed to Howard Thurman

When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.  ~Abraham Lincoln

The most beautiful make-up of a woman is passion.  But cosmetics are easier to buy.  ~Yves Saint Laurent

The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.  ~Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal, 17 December 1856

You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough.  You must want it with an exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.  ~Sheila Graham

But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.  ~Christian Nestell Bovee

Oh how the passions, insolent and strong,
Bear our weak minds their rapid course along;
Make us the madness of their will obey;
Then die and leave us to our griefs as prey!
~George Crabbe

Passion is universal humanity.  Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.  ~Honoré de Balzac

In music the passions enjoy themselves.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

For passion has come to the verge and leaps headlong to the blind abyss, yet gathers thereby the strength of deeps, and eddies a moment and swirls and sweeps till peril is one with bliss!  ~Harriet L. Childe Pemberton

Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.  ~George Santayana

You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion.  ~Garrison Keillor

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.  ~Aldous Huxley

A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.  ~André Maurois

The past is not a package one can lay away.  ~Emily Dickinson

Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird.  ~Paul Eldridge

The past is strapped to our backs.  We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.  ~Lesley P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The past is our definition.  We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.  ~Wendell Berry

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.  ~Virginia Woolf

Look not at the days gone by with a forlorn heart.  They were simply the dots we can now connect with our present, to help us draw the outline of a beautiful tomorrow.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

The obstacles of your past can become the gateways that lead to new beginnings.  ~Ralph Blum

I find in old age that it's possible to revisit the past, the one requirement being that you come as you are.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Bring the past only if you are going to build from it.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada


A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.  ~Dutch Proverb


How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?  ~Paul Sweeney


Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead.  ~Mac McCleary


Patience is the ability to count down before you blast off.  ~Author Unknown


Beware the fury of a patient man.  ~John Dryden, Absolam and Achitophel, 1680


Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.  ~Lord Chesterfield


Patience:  A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.  ~Ambrose Bierce


You can learn many things from children.  How much patience you have, for instance.  ~Franklin P. Jones


Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.  ~George-Louis de Buffon


Adopt the pace of nature:  her secret is patience.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.  ~John Quincy Adams


Patience is the companion of wisdom.  ~St. Augustine


Patience is also a form of action.  ~Auguste Rodin


How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
~William Shakespeare, Othello, 1604


One moment of patience may ward off great disaster.  One moment of impatience may ruin a whole life.  ~Chinese Proverb


Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience.  Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.  ~Michel de Montaigne




We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.  ~Kenji Miyazawa


The stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation; the great peaks of honour we had forgotten - duty and patriotism, clad in glittering white; the great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to heaven.  ~David Lloyd George


With the tears a Land hath shed
Their graves should ever be green.
~Thomas Bailey Aldrich


Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.  ~Author Unknown


The brave die never, though they sleep in dust:
Their courage nerves a thousand living men.
~Minot J. Savage


Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance.  It is also owed to justice and to humanity.  Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.  ~James Bryce


I think there is one higher office than president and I would call that patriot.  ~Gary Hart


God gave burdens, also shoulders.  ~Yiddish Proverb


Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.  ~Rabindranath Tagore


All of us have wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.  ~Charles Dickens


I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.  ~Kurt Vonnegut


Giving up doesn't always mean you are weak; sometimes it means that you are strong enough to let go.  ~Author Unknown


Sadness flies away on the wings of time.  ~Jean de La Fontaine


Weave in faith and God will find the thread.  ~Author Unknown


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.  ~James K. Feibleman


Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.  ~Ambrose Redmoon


The hero dead cannot expire:
The dead still play their part.
~Charles Sangster


God understands our prayers even when we can't find the words to say them.  ~Author Unknown


The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.  ~Eric Hoffer


Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.  ~The Wonder Years


Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.  ~Dan Rather


There are things that we don't want to happen but have to accept, things we don't want to know but have to learn, and people we can't live without but have to let go.  ~Author Unknown


In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.  ~Robert Ingersoll


While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil.  ~John Taylor


Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him.  ~Albert Schweitzer


God is closest to those with broken hearts.  ~Jewish Saying


When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you're slamming the door in the face of God.  ~Charles L. Allen


Some see a hopeless end, while others see an endless hope.  ~Author Unknown


The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs.  The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it; between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past; between those who open their arms and those who are determined to clench their fists.  ~William J. Clinton, 1997


We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power.  Then will our world know the blessings of peace.  ~William Ewart Gladstone


If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.  ~Mother Teresa


Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.  ~Alfred North Whitehead


Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.  ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius


...a final comfort that is small, but not cold:  The heart is the only broken instrument that works.  ~T.E. Kalem


I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet.  [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.  ~Ronald Reagan, 1985


Every evening I turn my worries over to God.  He's going to be up all night anyway.  ~Mary C. Crowley


The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.  ~Mignon McLaughlin


When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily.  It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke


All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.  ~François Fénelon




I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives.  I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.  ~Abraham Lincoln


The love of one's country is a splendid thing.  But why should love stop at the border?  ~Pablo Casals


Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance.  It is also owed to justice and to humanity.  Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.  ~James Bryce


It is sweet to serve one's country by deeds, and it is not absurd to serve her by words.  ~Sallust


Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!  ~Albert Einstein


Our hearts where they rocked our cradle,
Our love where we spent our toil,
And our faith, and our hope, and our honor,
We pledge to our native soil.
God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all.
~Rudyard Kipling


To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.  ~George Santayana


It is the love of country that has lighted and that keeps glowing the holy fire of patriotism.  ~J. Horace McFarland


[P]atriotism... is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.  ~Adlai Stevenson


The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.  ~William Shenstone


If you are ashamed to stand by your colors, you had better seek another flag.  ~Author Unknown


Love your country.  Your country is the land where your parents sleep, where is spoken that language in which the chosen of your heart, blushing, whispered the first word of love; it is the home that God has given you that by striving to perfect yourselves therein you may prepare to ascend to him.  ~Giuseppe Mazzini


My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.  ~Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889


He loves his country best who strives to make it best.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.  ~Bertrand Russell


Men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own.  ~Seneca


Do not... regard the critics as questionable patriots.  What were Washington and Jefferson and Adams but profound critics of the colonial status quo?  ~Adlai Stevenson


Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.  ~S.I. Hayakawa


A private man, however successful in his own dealing, if his country perish is involved in her destruction; but if he be an unprosperous citizen of a prosperous city, he is much more likely to recover.  Seeing, then, that States can bear the misfortunes of individuals, but individuals cannot bear the misfortunes of States, let us all stand by our country.  ~Thucydides


Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.  ~George Jean Nathan


Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.  You cannot shirk this and be a man.  To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.  ~Mark Twain






Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.  ~George Bernard Shaw


A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.  ~William R. Inge


He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick


Nationalism is an infantile disease.  It is the measles of mankind.  ~Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, 1934


To him in whom love dwells, the whole world is but one family.  ~Buddha


I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family.  ~Rosika Schwimmer


You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.  ~George Bernard Shaw


It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.  ~Arthur C. Clarke


Patriotism is easy to understand in America - it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.  ~Calvin Coolidge


What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?  ~Lin Yutang


Patriotism knows neither latitude nor longitude.  It is not climatic.  ~E.A. Storrs


A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.  ~George William Curtis


If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident.  ~Montesquieu


I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world.  ~Socrates


The stench of the trail of Ego in our History.  It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.  ~George Meredith, Beauchamp's Career


I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet.  [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.  ~Ronald Reagan, 1985


Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.
~Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959


The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.  ~Earl Warren


Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.  ~Richard Aldington


We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us..... The old "manifest destiny" idea ought to be modified so that each nation has the manifest destiny to do the best it can - and that without cant, without the assumption of self-righteousness and with a desire to learn to the uttermost from other nations.  ~Francis John McConnell


Patriotism, the virtue of the vicious.  ~Oscar Wilde


I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.  ~Eugene V. Debs


Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind.  We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands.  The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race.  Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.  ~William Lloyd Garrison, Declaration of Sentiments, Boston Peace Conference, 1838


If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace.  ~Hamilton Fish


Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.  ~Guy de Maupassant


Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.  ~Charles de Gaulle


Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?  ~Blaise Pascal, quoted by Tolstoy in Bethink Yourselves


It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.  ~Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary


It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world.  The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.  ~Baha'u'llah


We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power.  Then will our world know the blessings of peace.  ~William Ewart Gladstone

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.  ~Mother Teresa

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

One must look hard through history to find when a clear understanding of the truth moved anyone to fire the first shot.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte

The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.  ~Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with me.
~Seymour Miller & Jill Jackson, "Let There Be Peace on Earth," 1955

I take it that what all men are really after is some form of, perhaps only some formula of, peace.  ~James Conrad

The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs.  The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it; between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past; between those who open their arms and those who are determined to clench their fists.  ~William J. Clinton, 1997

The pacifist's task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war.  ~Vera Brittain, 1964

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.  ~Attributed to both Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi

Peace hath higher tests of manhood
Than battle ever knew.
~John Greenleaf Whittier

Five great enemies to peace inhabit with us:  avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride.  If those enemies were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.  ~Francesco Petrarch

Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war.  ~John Andrew Holmes, Wisdom in Small Doses

If in this present age we were to go back to the old time of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," there would be very few hon. gentlemen in this House who would not, metaphorically speaking, be blind and toothless.  ~Mr. Graham, 1914, Canadian House of Parliament member, commonly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi as "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

There is one armor that the world of men and women, as a world, has never yet put on.  The churches have long bungled with its fastenings, but the world has gone unfended, and few have been those in whose hands the mystical sword of the spirit has shone with daily use.  This armor, waiting to be worn, is the armor of brotherhood and sacrifice, the world of unselfishness, a conquering sword, with the power, where used, to unite the world in love.  And there are none who may not put it on.  ~M.A. DeWolfe Howe

If you go, go in Peace it makes the flowers sweeter along the path.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.  ~Dwight Eisenhower

Lord, bid war's trumpet cease;
Fold the whole earth in peace.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

We have all taken risks in the making of war.  Isn't it time that we should take risks to secure peace?  ~J. Ramsay MacDonald

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Right is more precious than peace.  ~Woodrow Wilson

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon.  A happiness weapon.  A beauty bomb.  And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one.  It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air.  Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas.  And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight.  Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in.  With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest.  And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.  ~Robert Fulghum

In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame
~Nikki Giovanni

Let us love the world to peace.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

A warless world will come as men develop warless hearts.  ~Charles Wesley Burns

We shall never be able to effect physical disarmament until we have succeeded in effecting moral disarmament.  ~J. Ramsay MacDonald

The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Who is wise?  He that learns from everyone.  Who is powerful?  He that governs his passions.  Who is rich?  He that is content.  Who is that?  Nobody.  ~Benjamin Franklin

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.  ~Susan Sontag

You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.  ~Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.  ~Winston Churchill

A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.  ~Arthur Miller

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease.  The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world.  ~Walter Savage Landor

I'm the strayest dog you'll ever meet.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.  ~Winston Churchill

I don't know that there are haunted houses.  I know that there are dark staircases and haunted people.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch.  ~Walt Whitman

If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.  ~Francois duc de la Rochefoucauld

A hundred men together are the hundredth part of a man.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent.  I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.  ~Plato

Freaks are the much needed escape from the humdrum.  They are poetry.  ~Albert Perry

A man never knows how to say goodbye; a woman never knows when to say it.  ~Helen Rowland

In general, of course, a stranger who tries to get you into an automobile is anything but noble, and in general a person who quotes great American novelists is anything but treacherous, and in general a man who says you needn't worry about money, or a man who smokes cigarettes, is somewhere in between.  ~Lemony Snicket

His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.  ~Dorothy Parker

I'm Black.   God knew my people would go through struggles so he gave us a lifetime supply of cool to compensate.  ~Scrubs, "His Story III"

Groups of people are like a massive Rock, Paper, Scissors war.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles:  the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.  ~Alexander Pope

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.  ~Abba Eban

Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood?  Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?  ~Walt Whitman



Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.  ~Harriet Braiker


Certain flaws are necessary for the whole.  It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks.  ~Goethe


No one is perfect... that's why pencils have erasers.  ~Author Unknown


Nothing that is complete breathes.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.  ~John Henry Newman


Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen


To escape criticism - do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.  ~William Safire


Sometimes... when you hold out for everything, you walk away with nothing.  ~From the television show Ally McBeal


Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.  ~Henry van Dyke


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.  ~Carl Schurz, address, Faneuil Hall, Boston, 1859


Gold cannot be pure, and people cannot be perfect.  ~Chinese Proverb


Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.  ~Confucius, Analects


The most difficult part of attaining perfection is finding something to do for an encore.  ~Author Unknown


When you aim for perfection, you discover it's a moving target.  ~George Fisher


Once you accept the fact that you're not perfect, then you develop some confidence.  ~Rosalynn Carter


There are no perfect men in this world, only perfect intentions.  ~Pen Densham, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves


The imperfections of a man, his frailties, his faults, are just as important as his virtues.  You can't separate them.  They're wedded.  ~Henry Miller


Does "anal-retentive" have a hyphen?  ~Alison Bechdel, 1990 Dykes to Watch Out For calendar  (Thanks, Chelsea)


The human story does not always unfold like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four.  Sometimes in life they make five or minus three; and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye.  ~Winston Churchill


The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.  ~Stanley J. Randall


They say that nobody is perfect.  Then they tell you practice makes perfect.  I wish they'd make up their minds.  ~Wilt Chamberlain






Always live up to your standards - by lowering them, if necessary.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.  ~Charles Lamb


Even the best needles are not sharp at both ends.  ~Chinese Proverb


Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect.  ~Nicholas Chamfort


The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.  ~Matthew Arnold


I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Player Piano


Unless I accept my faults I will most certainly doubt my virtues.  ~Hugh Prather


Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


Striving to better, oft we mar what's well.  ~William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1605


Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.  ~Salvador Dali


All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.  ~William Faulkner


A good garden may have some weeds.  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732


Perfection is not attainable.  But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.  ~Vince Lombardi


I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.  ~Anatole France (Jacques Anatole François Thibault), The Garden of Epicurus, 1894


Congratulations!  You're not perfect!  It's ridiculous to want to be perfect anyway.  But then, everybody's ridiculous sometimes, except perfect people.  You know what perfect is?  Perfect is not eating or drinking or talking or moving a muscle or making even the teensiest mistake.  Perfect is never doing anything wrong - which means never doing anything at all.  Perfect is boring!  So you're not perfect!  Wonderful!  Have fun!  Eat things that give you bad breath!  Trip over your own shoelaces!  Laugh!  Let somebody else laugh at you!  Perfect people never do any of those things.  All they do is sit around and sip weak tea and think about how perfect they are.  But they're really not one-hundred-percent perfect anyway.  You should see them when they get the hiccups!  Phooey!  Who needs 'em?  You can drink pickle juice and imitate gorillas and do silly dances and sing stupid songs and wear funny hats and be as imperfect as you please and still be a good person.  Good people are hard to find nowadays.  And they're a lot more fun than perfect people any day of the week.  ~Stephen Manes, Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days!


He that will have a perfect brother must resign himself to remain brotherless.  ~Italian Proverb


You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.  ~Martha Graham


One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort.  A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club


When nobody around you seems to measure up, it's time to check your yardstick.  ~Bill Lemley


Living up to ideals is like doing everyday work with your Sunday clothes on.  ~Ed Howe


Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness.  We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.  ~Samuel McChord Crothers




The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places.  ~Author Unknown


When the world says, "Give up,"
Hope whispers, "Try it one more time."
~Author Unknown


Don't be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs.  Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger.  If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.  ~Dale Carnegie


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.  ~Author Unknown


When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt


Consider the postage stamp:  its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.  ~Josh Billings


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


Fall seven times, stand up eight.  ~Japanese Proverb


Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.  ~Newt Gingrich


If one dream should fall and break into a thousand pieces, never be afraid to pick one of those pieces up and begin again.  ~Flavia Weedn, Flavia and the Dream Maker, © Flavia.com


He conquers who endures.  ~Persius


Stubbornly persist, and you will find that the limits of your stubbornness go well beyond the stubbornness of your limits.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


You can't go through life quitting everything.  If you're going to achieve anything, you've got to stick with something.  ~From the television show Family Matters


I frequently-regularly-often trip while reaching for my high ideals.  Then I giggle, or cry, and get back up.  ~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com


The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep on running.  ~Author unknown, in reference to Ecclesiastes 9:11, "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."


It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.  ~Albert Einstein


Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.  ~Walter Elliott, The Spiritual Life


People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.  I don't believe in circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.  ~G.B. Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession, 1893


There is no telling how many miles you will have to run while chasing a dream.  ~Author Unknown


Perseverance... keeps honor bright:  to have done, is to hang quite out of fashion, like a rusty nail in monumental mockery.  ~William Shakespeare


The drops of rain make a hole in the stone not by violence but by oft falling.  ~Lucretius


But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.






Don't be discouraged.  It's often the last key in the bunch that opens the lock.  ~Author Unknown


The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Saints are sinners who kept on going.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson


If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.  ~Buddhist Saying


Life is not about how fast you run or how high you climb but how well you bounce.  ~Vivian Komori


You learn you can do your best even when it's hard, even when you're tired and maybe hurting a little bit.  It feels good to show some courage.  ~Joe Namath


The dreams of the broken are mightier than the wishes of the dead.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com


I may not be there yet, but I'm closer than I was yesterday.  ~Author Unknown


Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it.  I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.  ~Charles F. Kettering


One may go a long way after one is tired.  ~French Proverb


Never think that God's delays are God's denials.  Hold on; hold fast; hold out.  Patience is genius.  ~Georges-Louis Leclerc


Pull yourself together and use what you have.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.  ~Robert Schuller


Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable.  ~Thomas Foxwell Buxton


As a means to success, determination has this advantage over talent - that it does not have to be recognized by others.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


When your dreams turn to dust, vacuum.  ~Author Unknown


Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.  ~William James


...I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
"Yes."...
~© Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation, www.oriahmountaindreamer.com


Difficult things take a long time, impossible things a little longer.  ~André A. Jackson


Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it.  The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.  ~Earl Nightingale


A door opens to me.  I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


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


Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.  ~Christopher Morley


Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.  Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.  ~Jacob A. Riis


[A] grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak.  ~James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics, 1848

I know what I have given you.  I do not know what you have received.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

If a dream is realistic, it's not really a dream.  It's a to-do.  ~Kim & Jason Kotecki, kimandjason.com

The judicial mind is too commonly characterized by a regard for a fourth decimal as the equal of a whole number.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Eventually you realize that not all opposing viewpoints come from people who oppose you.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The enemy of your enemy is your friend.  ~Proverb

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.  ~Philip W. Anderson, "More Is Different," Science Magazine

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves.  The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.  ~Carl Jung

If a man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.  ~Benjamin Franklin

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.  ~Seneca

What's frustrating about being disliked is that it's invariably for the wrong reason.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

An exhibitionist is nothing without a voyeur.  ~S.A. Sachs

The same fence that shuts others out shuts you in.  ~Bill Copeland

The pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.  ~D.H. Lawrence

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.  ~Marcel Proust

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.  ~John Lubbock

An unattempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.  ~Michel de Montaigne

How, child, do I know where you're headed?  Because I'm there, and I can see you coming.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.  ~Thomas Carlyle

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Conscience gets a lot of credit that belongs to cold feet.  ~Author Unknown

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but you still have to mow it.  ~Author Unknown

And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.  ~Rupert Brooke 

For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.  ~Robert Benchley, Benchley - or Else!

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.  ~William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1600

Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.  ~Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, Witches and other Night Fears, 1823

Destiny has two ways of crushing us - by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.  ~Henri Frederic Amiel

The reverse side also has a reverse side.  ~Japanese Proverb

'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
~Thomas Campbell, Pleasures of Hope

At high tide the fish eat ants; at low tide the ants eat fish.  ~Thai Proverb

It takes a while, but eventually we appreciate that the people who were always there for the special occasions of our youth had other things to do.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.  ~Anatole France

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.  ~William Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays, 1839

The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.  ~Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Each moment is a place you've never been.  ~Mark Strand 

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.  ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting?  If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing.  If you see him coming through a window - that is at once interesting.  ~Billy Wilder

Finish last in your league and they call you idiot.  Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor.  ~Abe Lemons

A hole is nothing at all, but you can still break your neck in it.  ~Author Unknown

Everything's got a moral if only you can find it.  ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

To really enjoy the better things in life, one must first have experienced the things they are better than.  ~Oscar Holmolka

Perhaps there should be one day a week when you tackle your "Things I Gotta Undo" list.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When those waiters ask me if I want some fresh ground pepper, I ask if they have any aged pepper.  ~Andy Rooney

If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues?  ~John Churton Collins, Aphorisms in the English Review, 1914

We have them just where they want us.  ~James T. Kirk

Some men see things as they are and ask why.  Others dream things that never were and ask why not.  ~George Bernard Shaw

I never complained of the vicissitudes of fortune, nor suffered my face to be overcast at the revolution of the heavens, except once, when my feet were bare, and I had not the means of obtaining shoes.  I came to the chief of Kfah in a state of much dejection, and saw there a man who had no feet.  I returned thanks to God and acknowledged his mercies, and endured my want of shoes with patience, and exclaimed,
Roast fowl to him that's sated will seem less
Upon the board than leaves of garden cress.
While, in the sight of helpless poverty,
Boiled turnip will a roasted pullet be.
~Sa'dī, translated

Everybody is a genius.  But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.  ~Albert Einstein

Chaperons don't enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet.  ~Judith Martin

Never is a long, long word, but it's less frustrating than "God knows when."  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Winning is overrated.  The only time it is really important is in surgery and war.  ~Al McGuire

A woman who sells herself to buy bread for her aged mother or her child, stands upon a higher moral plane than the blushing maiden who marries a money bag, in order to gratify her frivolous appetite for parties and travel.  Of two men, he is the less deceived, the more logical and rational, who pays his companion of an hour in cash, each time, than he who gets a companion for life by the marriage contract, whose society was purchased as much as in the former case.  Every alliance between man and woman in which either one is influenced by the substantial or selfish advantage to be gained by it, is prostitution.  ~Max Nordau, Conventional Lies of Our Civilization

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.  ~James Baldwin

There's such a thin line between winning and losing.  ~John R. Tunis

There are always three sides to every story:  your side, the other side, and the truth.  ~Author Unknown

In the life we might have lived, the years never pass. On the person we might have been, time never leaves its mark. How different would seem our might-have-beens if we could picture them as would-be-nows.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.  ~Friederich Nietzsche

It isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the grain of sand in your shoe.  ~Author Unknown

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

In the strict scientific sense we all feed on death - even vegetarians.  ~Spock from Star Trek, "Wolf in the Fold"

Emotion has taught mankind to reason.  ~Marquis de Vauvenargues

It is not easy, the choice between God and the devil, for it is presented to us as a choice between forgiveness and understanding.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.  ~Kevin Smith

I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent.  A person, yes.  ~Robert A. Heinlein

How many merits one sees in those one likes! how many faults in those one dislikes!  Yet people fancy they see with their eyes.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners.  ~Mason Cooley

If anyone were to be willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?  ~Samuel Wilberforce

What is a promiscuous person?  It is usually someone who is getting more sex than you are.  ~Victor Lownes, Playboy, 1985

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1836

A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.  A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.  ~Wendy Kaminer

I always thought a yard was three feet, then I started mowing the lawn.  ~C.E. Cowman

When you are one of the pieces, it doesn't seem like a game.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at the bottom.  Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.  Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance and the other in a dusky and lurid glow.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is not the man who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor.  ~Seneca

Where there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.  ~Dorthea Lange

It is easier for me to see everything as one thing than to see one thing as one thing.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

We're all hookers.  What matters is dignity.  ~Mike Farren

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.  ~Samuel Butler

There is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it.  ~Chinese Proverb

A sodomite got very excited looking at a zoology text.  Does this make it pornography?  ~Stanislaw J. Lec

When a guy goes to a hooker, he's not paying her for sex, he's paying her to leave.  ~Author Unknown

They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.  ~Creighton W. Abrams

Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.  ~Tom Stoppard

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.  ~Gloria Steinem

There are truths on this side of the Pyranees, which are falsehoods on the other.  ~Blaise Pascal

If you do not raise your eyes you will think that you are the highest point.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.  ~Robert Green Ingersoll

Advice to children crossing the street:  damn the lights.  Watch the cars.  The lights ain't never killed nobody.  ~Moms Mabley

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.  ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.  ~Charles Simic 

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.  ~Ivy Baker Priest

Won't you come into the garden?  I would like my roses to see you.  ~Richard Brinsley Sheridan

People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped.  ~Author Unknown 

I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

No object is mysterious.  The mystery is your eye.  ~Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris, 1935

Sin is geographical.  ~Bertrand Russell

I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years'.  ~Henry Moore

Set out from any point.  They are all alike.  They all lead to a point of departure.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Someone said, "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did."  Precisely, and they are that which we know.  ~T.S. Eliot 

Immorality:  The morality of those who are having a better time.  ~H.L. Mencken

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.  ~Bill Vaughan

In order for something to become clean, something else must become dirty.  ~Imbesi's Conservation of Filth Law

If you're being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it look like a parade.  ~Author Unknown

Do not call any work menial until you have watched a proud person do it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.  ~George Santayana

We judge others by their behavior.  We judge ourselves by our intentions.  ~Ian Percy

The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.  ~Henry Miller

All honor's wounds are self-inflicted.  ~Andrew Carnegie

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.  ~Joseph Heller, Catch-22

There's no such thing as bragging.  You're either lying or telling the truth.  ~Al Oliver

A penny will hide the biggest star in the Universe if you hold it close enough to your eye.  ~Samuel Grafton

Is the glass half empty, half full, or twice as large as it needs to be?  ~Author Unknown

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.  ~Abraham Maslow

Don't think of organ donations as giving up part of yourself to keep a total stranger alive.  It's really a total stranger giving up almost all of themselves to keep part of you alive.  ~Author Unknown

Be careful how you interpret the world:  It is like that.  ~Erich Heller

Astronomers always work in the past; because light takes time to move from one place to another, they see things as they were, not as they are.  ~Neale E. Howard, The Telescope Handbook and Star Atlas, 1967

Each act is virgin, even the repeated ones.  ~René Char

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.  ~Anaïs Nin

The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.  ~Joseph Joubert, Pensées, 1842

The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a pirate.  ~Bern Williams

No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have but a bit of ground that he can call his own.  However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.  ~Charles Dudley Warner

The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot.  The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.  ~Sid Caesar

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute.  But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute - and it's longer than any hour.  That's relativity.  ~Albert Einstein

Feast, n.  A festival.  A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer, "Studies in Pessimism," Psychological Observations, 1851

Efficiency is intelligent laziness.  ~David Dunham

It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall.  ~Mexican Proverb

If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.  ~Carl Sagan

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.  ~Alexander Pope, in Swift, Miscellanies

Hay is more acceptable to an ass than gold.  ~Latin Proverb

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.  ~Kahlil Gibran

If you want total security, go to prison.  There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on.  The only thing lacking... is freedom.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every man regards his own life as the New Year's Eve of time.  ~Jean Paul Richter

All the suns labor to kindle your flame and a microbe puts it out.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

There is no burnt rice to a hungry person.  ~Philippine Proverb

If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote?  ~Bertrand Russell

Dare to turn life on its end, and you may find that topsy-turvy is a truer perspective than turvy-topsy.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Nothing is further than Earth from Heaven: nothing is nearer than Heaven to Earth.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

As far as the Moon is concerned, he is always full.  ~Terri Guillemets

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.  ~Howard Nemerov

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.  ~Thornton Wilder, The Matchmaker, 1955

A statistician made a few calculations and discovered that since the birth of our nation more lives had been lost in celebrating independence than in winning it.  ~Curtis Billings

If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model.  Kate Moss?  Well, she would have been the paintbrush.  ~Dawn French

Flowers often grow more beautifully on dung-hills than in gardens that look beautifully kept.  ~Saint Francis de Sales

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.
~William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence," 1810

It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms one would not part.  ~Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, Remembrance of Things Past, 1925

There will be a time when you believe everything is finished.  That will be the beginning.  ~Louis L'Amour

The rich would have to eat money if the poor did not provide food.  ~Russian Proverb

My play was a complete success.  The audience was a failure.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant

The tyrant is nothing but a slave turned inside out.  ~Herbert Spencer

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Expectant of greater things,
We try climbing -
Higher
And Higher;
An effort that costs us much,
Leaving us short of breath
To find only
The ground below is much prettier.
~Phillip Pulfrey, "Mountains" Love, Abstraction and other Speculations, www.originals.net

There are those whose sole claim to profundity is the discovery of exceptions to the rules.  ~Paul Eldridge

There's an alternative.  There's always a third way, and it's not a combination of the other two ways.  It's a different way.  ~David Carradine

The violence we do to ourselves in order to remain faithful to the one we love is hardly better than an act of infidelity.  ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665

The chains that bind us most closely are the ones we have broken.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

If you see the world in black and white, you're missing important grey matter.  ~Jack Fyock

A boil is no big deal.  On someone else's neck.  ~Jewish Saying

I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed.  ~Matthew Henry

A kind soul knows impoliteness is just preoccupied with distraction.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people.  ~Brooks Atkinson

Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn't mean he lacks vision.  ~Stevie Wonder

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world.  ~Socrates

A "fraternity" is the antithesis of fraternity.  The first... is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.  ~E.B. White, One Man's Meat, 1944

If we would see others as they see themselves, our shyness would soon become compassion.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Retreat, hell!  We're just advancing in another direction.  ~Oliver Prince Smith

Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.  ~Saint Thomas Aquinas

An abridgement may be a bridge: it may help us over the water: but it keeps us from drinking.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

An apology for the Devil:  It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case.  God has written all the books.  ~Samuel Butler, Note-Books

All religions issue bibles against him, and say most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side.  ~Mark Twain, about the Devil

The shadows:  some hide, others reveal.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

No one knows what they'll do in a moment of crisis and hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.  ~Joan Baez, "What Would You Do If....?"

Daughter am I in my mother's house;
But mistress in my own.
~Rudyard Kipling, "Our Lady of the Snows," 1898

What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunlight.  ~Joseph Joubert

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.  ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, "Notebook L," Aphorisms

A light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning have often made a hero of the same man who by indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning, would have proved a coward.  ~Earl of Chesterfield

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.
~Sylvia Plath, "Mad Girl's Love Song"

I went to a cafe that advertised breakfast anytime, so I ordered French Toast during the Rennaisance.  ~Steven Wright

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it?  It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.  ~H.L. Mencken

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.  ~Walt Whitman

I can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.  ~Daniel Boone

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.  ~William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Saint, n.  A dead sinner revised and edited.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.  ~Mark Twain

I have scarcely touched the sky and I am made of it.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

It isn't that they can't see the solution.  It is that they can't see the problem.  ~G.K. Chesterton

There is no possible line of conduct which has at some time and place been condemned, and which has not at some other time and place been enjoined as a duty.  ~William Lecky

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.  ~Norman Cousins

I'm right-handed, whereas the fellow in my mirror is left-handed.  I start shaving from the left; he starts from the right.  Differences only in perception, but religious wars have been fought over such.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The things which are most important don't always scream the loudest.  ~Bob Hawke

While his eyes saw the sky, his soul saw Heaven.  ~K. Smith

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful.  Planets, lives...  But up close a world's all dirt and rocks.  And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.  ~Ursula K. Le Guin

The tyrant dies and his rule ends, the martyr dies and his rule begins.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work.
~William Shakespeare, Henry IV

A gifted small girl has explained that pins are a great means of saving life, "by not swallowing them."  ~Charles Edward Montague, Dramatic Values

[E]very saint has a past and every sinner has a future.  ~Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, 1893

Addictions do come in handy sometimes:  at least you have to get out of bed for them.  ~Martin Amis

If a fanatic is willing to give his life for a cause, he's probably willing to give yours as well.  ~David Gerrold

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.  ~Andy Warhol

The activities you spent your time on yesterday were the things that were important to you.  Calendars don't lie.  ~Scott Ginsberg, hellomynameisscott.com

The highest virtue here may be least in another world.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Don't confuse fun with fulfillment, or pleasure with happiness.  ~Michael Josephson, whatwillmatter.com

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.  ~James Baldwin

I never ask God to give me anything; I only ask him to put me where things are.  ~Mexican Proverb

Distance is inspiration's best hearting.  ~E. Marshall

If you cry "Forward," you must make plain in what direction to go.  ~Anton Chekov

A full heart has room for everything and an empty heart has room for nothing.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The best rose-bush, after all, is not that which has the fewest thorns, but that which bears the finest roses.  ~Henry Van Dyke

All men have a reason, but not all men can give a reason.  ~John Henry Cardinal Newman

Presence is more than just being there.  ~Malcolm S. Forbes, The Further Sayings of Chairman Malcolm

Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

Injury, when it is slight, upsets me; when it is strong it calms me.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place.  A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse below and dreams of home.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Complete possession is proved only by giving.  All you are unable to give possesses you.  ~Andre Gide

An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.   ~William Bernbach

'Tis not the meat, but 'tis the appetite makes eating a delight.  ~John Suckling, Sonnet, c.1638

When you look
into a mirror
it is not
yourself you see,
but a kind
of apish error
posed in fearful
symmetry
kool uoy nehW
rorrim a otni
ton si ti
˛ees uoy flesruoy
dnik a tub
rorre hsipa fo
lufraef ni desop
yrtemmys

~John Updike, "Mirror,"
Telephone Poles and Other Poems

[A] grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak.  ~James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics, 1848

I know what I have given you.  I do not know what you have received.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

If a dream is realistic, it's not really a dream.  It's a to-do.  ~Kim & Jason Kotecki, kimandjason.com

The judicial mind is too commonly characterized by a regard for a fourth decimal as the equal of a whole number.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Eventually you realize that not all opposing viewpoints come from people who oppose you.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The enemy of your enemy is your friend.  ~Proverb

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.  ~Philip W. Anderson, "More Is Different," Science Magazine

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves.  The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.  ~Carl Jung

If a man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.  ~Benjamin Franklin

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.  ~Seneca

What's frustrating about being disliked is that it's invariably for the wrong reason.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

An exhibitionist is nothing without a voyeur.  ~S.A. Sachs

The same fence that shuts others out shuts you in.  ~Bill Copeland

The pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.  ~D.H. Lawrence

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.  ~Marcel Proust

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.  ~John Lubbock

An unattempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.  ~Michel de Montaigne

How, child, do I know where you're headed?  Because I'm there, and I can see you coming.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.  ~Thomas Carlyle

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Conscience gets a lot of credit that belongs to cold feet.  ~Author Unknown

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but you still have to mow it.  ~Author Unknown

And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.  ~Rupert Brooke 

For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.  ~Robert Benchley, Benchley - or Else!

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.  ~William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1600

Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.  ~Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, Witches and other Night Fears, 1823

Destiny has two ways of crushing us - by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.  ~Henri Frederic Amiel

The reverse side also has a reverse side.  ~Japanese Proverb

'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
~Thomas Campbell, Pleasures of Hope

At high tide the fish eat ants; at low tide the ants eat fish.  ~Thai Proverb

It takes a while, but eventually we appreciate that the people who were always there for the special occasions of our youth had other things to do.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.  ~Anatole France

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.  ~William Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays, 1839

The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.  ~Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Each moment is a place you've never been.  ~Mark Strand 

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.  ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting?  If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing.  If you see him coming through a window - that is at once interesting.  ~Billy Wilder

Finish last in your league and they call you idiot.  Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor.  ~Abe Lemons

A hole is nothing at all, but you can still break your neck in it.  ~Author Unknown

Everything's got a moral if only you can find it.  ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

To really enjoy the better things in life, one must first have experienced the things they are better than.  ~Oscar Holmolka

Perhaps there should be one day a week when you tackle your "Things I Gotta Undo" list.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When those waiters ask me if I want some fresh ground pepper, I ask if they have any aged pepper.  ~Andy Rooney

If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues?  ~John Churton Collins, Aphorisms in the English Review, 1914

We have them just where they want us.  ~James T. Kirk

Some men see things as they are and ask why.  Others dream things that never were and ask why not.  ~George Bernard Shaw

I never complained of the vicissitudes of fortune, nor suffered my face to be overcast at the revolution of the heavens, except once, when my feet were bare, and I had not the means of obtaining shoes.  I came to the chief of Kfah in a state of much dejection, and saw there a man who had no feet.  I returned thanks to God and acknowledged his mercies, and endured my want of shoes with patience, and exclaimed,
Roast fowl to him that's sated will seem less
Upon the board than leaves of garden cress.
While, in the sight of helpless poverty,
Boiled turnip will a roasted pullet be.
~Sa'dī, translated

Everybody is a genius.  But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.  ~Albert Einstein

Chaperons don't enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet.  ~Judith Martin

Never is a long, long word, but it's less frustrating than "God knows when."  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Winning is overrated.  The only time it is really important is in surgery and war.  ~Al McGuire

A woman who sells herself to buy bread for her aged mother or her child, stands upon a higher moral plane than the blushing maiden who marries a money bag, in order to gratify her frivolous appetite for parties and travel.  Of two men, he is the less deceived, the more logical and rational, who pays his companion of an hour in cash, each time, than he who gets a companion for life by the marriage contract, whose society was purchased as much as in the former case.  Every alliance between man and woman in which either one is influenced by the substantial or selfish advantage to be gained by it, is prostitution.  ~Max Nordau, Conventional Lies of Our Civilization

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.  ~James Baldwin

There's such a thin line between winning and losing.  ~John R. Tunis

There are always three sides to every story:  your side, the other side, and the truth.  ~Author Unknown

In the life we might have lived, the years never pass. On the person we might have been, time never leaves its mark. How different would seem our might-have-beens if we could picture them as would-be-nows.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.  ~Friederich Nietzsche

It isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the grain of sand in your shoe.  ~Author Unknown

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

In the strict scientific sense we all feed on death - even vegetarians.  ~Spock from Star Trek, "Wolf in the Fold"

Emotion has taught mankind to reason.  ~Marquis de Vauvenargues

It is not easy, the choice between God and the devil, for it is presented to us as a choice between forgiveness and understanding.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.  ~Kevin Smith

I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent.  A person, yes.  ~Robert A. Heinlein

How many merits one sees in those one likes! how many faults in those one dislikes!  Yet people fancy they see with their eyes.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners.  ~Mason Cooley

If anyone were to be willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?  ~Samuel Wilberforce

What is a promiscuous person?  It is usually someone who is getting more sex than you are.  ~Victor Lownes, Playboy, 1985

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1836

A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.  A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.  ~Wendy Kaminer

I always thought a yard was three feet, then I started mowing the lawn.  ~C.E. Cowman

When you are one of the pieces, it doesn't seem like a game.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at the bottom.  Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.  Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance and the other in a dusky and lurid glow.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is not the man who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor.  ~Seneca

Where there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.  ~Dorthea Lange

It is easier for me to see everything as one thing than to see one thing as one thing.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

We're all hookers.  What matters is dignity.  ~Mike Farren

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.  ~Samuel Butler

There is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it.  ~Chinese Proverb

A sodomite got very excited looking at a zoology text.  Does this make it pornography?  ~Stanislaw J. Lec

When a guy goes to a hooker, he's not paying her for sex, he's paying her to leave.  ~Author Unknown

They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.  ~Creighton W. Abrams

Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.  ~Tom Stoppard

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.  ~Gloria Steinem

Page Information:

www.quotegarden.com/perspective.html

Last modified 2012 Mar 18 Sun 15:36 PDT

We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation.  ~Francois De La Rochefoucauld

A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.  ~Lee Segall

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.  ~Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

Believe those who are seeking the truth.  Doubt those who find it.  ~Andre Gide

Beware lest you lose the substance by grassockg at the shadow.  ~Aesop

Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.  ~Baba Ram Dass

I am a part of all that I have met.  ~Alfred Lord Tennyson

There's more to the truth than just the facts.  ~Author Unknown

The obscure we see eventually.  The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.  ~Edward R. Murrow

Even a clock that does not work is right twice a day.  ~Polish Proverb

Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.  ~Ludwig Börne

If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?  ~Stanislaw J. Lec

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again.  There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.  ~Albert Szent-Györgyi

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.  ~Edward Albee

When the student is ready, the master appears.  ~Buddhist Proverb

A gun gives you the body, not the bird.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Before enlightenment - chop wood, carry water.  After enlightenment - chop wood, carry water.  ~Zen Buddhist Proverb

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.  The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying.  Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying.  ~Charles C. Finn

Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!  ~Thomas Carlyle

Knock on the sky and listen to the sound.  ~Zen Saying

The fish trap exists because of the fish.  Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap.  The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit.  Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare.  Words exist because of meaning.  Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.  Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?  ~Chuang Tzu 

By daily dying I have come to be.  ~Theodore Roethke

There are some remedies worse than the disease.  ~Publilius Syrus

You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough.  ~William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

It requires a great deal of faith for a man to be cured by his own placebos.  ~John L. McClenahan

What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book II, chapter 1

Philosophy is life's dry-nurse, who can take care of us - but not suckle us.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science.  ~Henry David Thoreau

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

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.  ~Ram Dass

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.  ~G.C. Lichtenberg

Don't miss the donut by looking through the hole.  ~Author Unknown

You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.  ~Navajo Proverb

Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death.  ~Heraclitus, Eustathius ad Iliad

To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.  ~John Burroughs

Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount.  The exact amount is no use to me.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Alice came to a fork in the road.  "Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.  ~John Lancaster Spalding

The map is not the territory.  ~Alfred Korzybski

No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.  ~Terry Josephson

Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I was once a skeptic but was converted by the two missionaries on either side of my nose.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

He who has seen present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from all eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all things are of one kin and of one form.  ~Marcus Aurelius

If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.  ~Russian Proverb

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.  ~Bertrand Russell 

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.  ~Roger Miller

The obstacle is the path.  ~Zen Proverb

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.  ~James Thurber

It is easy to stand a pain, but difficult to stand an itch.  ~Chang Ch'ao

You cannot step into the same river twice.  ~Heraclitus, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives

You are fastened to them and cannot understand how, because they are not fastened to you.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Only in the early morning light of day, and of life, can we see the world without its shadows.  Truth requires new beginnings.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full.  And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?"  So I drank the water.  No more problem.  ~Alexander Jodorowsky

Among creatures born into chaos, a majority will imagine an order, a minority will question the order, and the rest will be pronounced insane.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Child Harold's Pilgrimage

Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases.  ~Hippocrates, Aphorisms

Seeking is not always the way to find.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

It takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place.  ~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1872

We waste a lot of time running after people we could have caught by just standing still.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

There is no tomorrow.  There is only a planet turning on its axis, and a creature given to optimistic fancies.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.  ~Author Unknown

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.  ~Aleister Crowley, Book of Lies

Tomorrow always comes, and today is never yesterday.  ~S.A. Sachs

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.  ~Thomas Carlyle

You can see a lot by just looking.  ~Yogi Berra, also often quoted as "You can observe a lot by just looking." (original wording as yet unverified)

Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers.  The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.  ~Leo Rosten

The unreal is more powerful than the real.... Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last.  Stone crumbles.  Wood rots.  People, well, they die.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

Reason and faith are both banks of the same river.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada

Man is the only animal who enjoys the consolation of believing in a next life; all other animals enjoy the consolation of not worrying about it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.  ~Dr Seuss

The winds of earth are old and sane
But tell me, tell me when you know -
What happens to a hurricane
That hasn't any place to go?
~David Hertz (screenplay) from 1947 movie Daisy Kenyon, based on 1945 novel by Elizabeth Janeway; the quote is a poem written by character Peter Lapham (verse form and punctuation unconfirmed; screenplay was also contributed to by Margaret Buell Wilder, Ted Sills, and Ring Lardner, Jr)

Who depends on another man's table often dines late.  ~John Ray

[T]hings are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.  ~Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

You become responsible forever for what you've tamed.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French by Richard Howard

When the pain is great enough, we will let anyone be doctor.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

A thousand men can't undress a naked man.  ~Greek Proverb

May your passion be the kernel of corn stuck between your molars, always reminding you there's something to tend to.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

I stop wanting what I am looking for, looking for it.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

There's no fun in playing safe or by the rules, but it's not fun being hit by a semi-truck either.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

We often repent the good we have done as well as the ill.  ~William Hazlitt, Characteristics, 1823

When I die, I will not see myself die, for the first time.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.  ~Evelyn Waugh

It's very strange when the life you never had flashes before your eyes.  ~Terri Minsky, Sex and the City, "The Baby Shower

It's always Now.  ~Eckhart Tolle

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.  ~Buddha

We become aware of the void as we fill it.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

If you understand compound interest, you basically understand the universe.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
~W.B. Yeats

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.  ~Santayana, Essays

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.  But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.  ~Niels Bohr

How often one sees people looking far and wide for what they are holding in their hands? Why! I am doing it myself at this very moment.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness.  The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.  ~Eric Hoffer, Passionate State of Mind, 1955

Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?  ~Maurice Freehill

Yearning for sun and starlight, roses and winter, together.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.  ~Henry David Thoreau, "Solitude," Walden, 1854

You have to do it by yourself,
And you can't do it alone.
~Martin Rutte

Because they know the name of what I am looking for, they think they know what I am looking for!  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

There are things I have wanted so long that I would only consent to have them if I could keep wanting them.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Eggs cannot be unscrambled.  ~American Proverb

Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.  ~Norman Cousins

A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The road was new to me, as roads always are going back.  ~Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country Road of Pointed Firs, 1896

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.  ~George Sand

I am not certain of the hereafter. Frankly, I'm not all that certain of the here.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two.  We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about "and."  ~Arthur Stanley Eddington

To know the hight [sic] of a mountain, one must climb it.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.  ~Zen

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.  ~Eric Berne

Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses.  ~Jean Baptiste Molière, Le Malade Imaginaire

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.  ~Aldous Huxley

Will localizes us; thought universalizes us.  ~Henri Frederic Amiel

I've observed that there are more lines formed than things worth waiting for.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong.  They are conflicts between two rights.  ~Georg Hegel

When I break any of the chains that bind me I feel that I make myself smaller.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

We are spirits clad in veils.  ~Christopher P. Cranch

If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am?  ~John Lancaster Spalding

Before I travelled my road I was my road.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.  ~Francis Bacon

To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.  ~Stanislaus I of Poland

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite.  They are nothing of the sort.  What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.  ~H.L. Mencken

The future influences the present just as much as the past.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

When a watch goes ill, it is not enough to move the hands; you must set the regulator.  When a man does ill, it is not enough to alter his handiwork, you must regulate his heart.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.  ~John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911

One does what one is; one becomes what one does.  ~Robert von Musil, Kleine Prosa

In this, the late afternoon of my life, I wonder: am I casting a longer shadow or is my shadow casting a shorter me?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

You can't fall off the floor.  ~Author Unknown

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

In a mist the heights can for the most part see each other; but the valleys cannot.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.  ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.  ~Robert M. Pirsig

A stumble may prevent a fall.  ~English Proverb

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.  ~Friedrich Nietzche

What you discover in a democracy is that it is difficult to build a house when each nail has an opinion.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise.  Seek what they sought.  ~Matsuo Basho

When I study philosophical works I feel I am swallowing something which I don't have in my mouth.  ~Albert Einstein

Philosophy is nothing but common sense in a dress suit.  ~Author Unknown

Get married, in any case.  If you happen to get a good mate, you will be happy; if a bad one, you will become philosophical, which is a fine thing in itself.  ~Socrates, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.  ~Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.  ~Martin L. Gross, A Call for Revolution, 1993

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.  ~Bertrand Russell

Leisure is the mother of Philosophy.  ~Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

Philosophy is just a hobby.  You can't open a philosophy factory.  ~Dewey Selmon

The natural philosophers are mostly gone.  We modern scientists are adding too many decimals.  ~Martin H. Fischer

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.  Take which you please - you can never have both.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.  ~Louisa May Alcott, in Life, Letters, and Journals, ed. E.D. Cheney, 1889

Philosophy begins in wonder.  And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera.  ~John Rich

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.  ~Ambrose Bierce, Epigrams

Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves.  That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see.  ~George Berkeley

To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle.  Leaving out the third case:  one must be both - a philosopher.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

And this activity alone would seem to be loved for its own sake; for nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart from the action.  And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.  ~Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, "Book X: Pleasure and Happiness," translated by W.D. Ross

Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution.  ~Robert Zend

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.  ~Immanuel Kant

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.  ~Aldous Huxley, Themes and Variations, 1950

Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.  ~Nicolas Chamfort, Maximes et penseés

Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected.  Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars.  Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.  ~Bertrand Russell

To teach how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.  ~Bertrand Russell

If you've never met a student from the University of Chicago, I'll describe him to you.  If you give him a glass of water, he says, "This is a glass of water.  But is it a glass of water?  And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?" And eventually he dies of thirst.  ~Shelley Berman

What is the first business of philosophy?  To part with self-conceit.  For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn what he thinks that he already knows.  ~Epictetus, Discourses

Philosophy is a state of fermentation, a process without final outcome.  ~Esa Saarinen

To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

We come late, if at all, to wine and philosophy:  whiskey and action are easier.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
Unweave a rainbow.
~John Keats, "Lamia," 1819

Religion is a man using a divining rod.  Philosophy is a man using a pick and shovel.  ~Author Unknown

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy.  ~Woody Allen

I also realized that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them.  So I chose another guide and said, Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits.  ~Jean Jacques Rousseau

The only difference between graffiti and philosophy is the word "fuck."  ~Author Unknown

Learning Zen is a phenomenon of gold and dung.  Before you understand it, it's like gold; after you understand it, it's like dung.  ~Zen Saying

Philosophy cannot raise the commonalty up to her level: so, if she is to become popular, she must sink to theirs.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.  ~La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1678

Philosophy:  A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary

You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person.  ~Alec Waugh

Some places speak distinctly.  Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

How hard it is to escape from places.  However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - like rags and shreds of your very life.  ~Katherine Mansfield

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872

New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer.  ~Henry Miller

California's a wonderful place to live - if you happen to be an orange.  ~Author Unknown

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.  ~Truman Capote

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.  ~Mark Twain, attributed

New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!  ~E.B. White

California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America.  ~Hinton R. Helper

I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.  ~James Agate

Vehement silhouettes of Manhattan - that vertical city with unimaginable diamonds.  ~Le Corbusier

They turned the country up on its side, and everything loose fell into California.  ~Author Unknown

France is France and a grand place for Frenchman.  ~Harry Truman, letter to Bess Wallace, 5 May 1918

It isn't like the rest of the country - it is like a nation itself - more tolerant than the rest in a curious way.  Littleness gets swallowed up here.  All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.  ~John Steinbeck

Nobody can tell about this California climate.  One minute its hot and the next minute its cold, so a person never knows what to hock.  ~Anita Loos

I moved to New York City for my health. I'm paranoid and New York was the only place where my fears were justified.  ~Anita Weiss

Las Vegas:  all the amenities of modern society in a habitat unfit to grow a tomato.  ~Jason Love

You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York.  ~William Loyn Phelps

But I do like churches.  The way it feels inside.  It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, expect there's still this sound you can't hear.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.  ~J.B. Priestley

I think my favorite sport in the Olympics is the one in which you make your way through the snow, you stop, you shoot a gun, and then you continue on.  In most of the world, it is known as the biathlon, except in New York City, where it is known as winter.  ~Michael Ventre, L.A. Daily News

[T]his is California.  Blondes are like the state flower or something.  ~From the television show Beverly Hills 90210, spoken by the character Steve Sanders

The tracks of the L Train are the manly stubble on the ruggedly handsome face of Chicago.  ~Jason Sweeney

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.  ~Christopher Morley, Shore Leave

It is the land of perpetual pubescence, where cultural lag is mistaken for renaissance.  ~Ashley Montagu, about California

This school was on top of a hill so that God could see everything that went on.  It looked like a cross between a prison and a church and it was.  ~Quentin Crisp

Disneyland is the only people trap operated by a mouse.  ~Author Unknown

When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles.  When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72.  However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and 72 in Los Angeles.  ~Neil Simon

California is a queer place - in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific.... It's sort of crazy-sensible.  Just the moment:  hardly as far ahead as carpe diem.  ~D.H. Lawrence

The final story, the final chapter of western man, I believe, lies in Los Angeles.  ~Phil Ochs

Men may scoff, and men may pray, but they pay every pleasure with a pain.  ~William Henley

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome.  Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.  ~Thomas Carlyle

Human beings need pleasure the way they need vitamins.  ~Lionel Tiger

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.  ~Rebecca West

There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.  ~Max Eastman

Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume.  ~Jean de Boufflers

In everything satiety closely follows the greatest pleasures.  ~Cicero

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.  ~Honore de Balzac

We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure.  ~Sydney J. Harris

Pleasure is the bait of sin.  ~Plato

Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations.  ~Jane Austen

No pleasure endures unseasoned by variety.  ~Publilius Syrus

For some, pleasure is a fever they can't shake.  For others, it's a disease they cannot seem to catch.  ~Terri Guillemets

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.  ~Germaine Greer

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.  ~William Burroughs

There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.  ~Ovid, Metamorphoses

Poetry is just the evidence of life.  If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.  ~Leonard Cohen

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.  ~Robert Graves, 1962 interview on BBC-TV, based on a very similar statement he overheard around 1955

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.  ~Robert Frost

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.  ~Marianne Moore's definition of poetry, "Poetry," Collected Poems, 1951

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.  ~Paul Valéry

"Most poems are never finished," (I was defensive).  He sighed: "No, most poems are never started."  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.  ~George Sand, 1851

Always be a poet, even in prose.  ~Charles Baudelaire, "My Heart Laid Bare," Intimate Journals, 1864

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.  ~Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.  Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.  Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.  ~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.  ~Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.  ~Plato, Ion

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.  ~W.B. Yeats

Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.  Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.  ~Aristotle, On Poetics

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.  ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.  ~John Keats

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.  ~Oscar Wilde

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."  ~Robert Penn Warren, "The Themes of Robert Frost," Hopwood Lecture, 1947

A poem begins with a lump in the throat.  ~Robert Frost

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter....
~Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr., "kidnap poem"

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  ~Percy Byshe Shelley

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet.  So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.  ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man's Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else" The Dame School of Experience, 1920

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.  ~James Branch Cabell

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him:  "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul."  ~Soren Kierkegaard

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.  ~André Gide

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.  ~Richard Rosen

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.  ~Stephen Mallarme

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.  ~W.B. Yeats

If the author had said "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem.  ~Author Unknown

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.  ~Novalis

The smell of ink is intoxicating to me - others may have wine, but I have poetry.  ~Terri Guillemets

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.  ~John Cage

Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.  ~William Bolitho

Who can tell the dancer from the dance?  ~William Butler Yeats

Most painters have painted themselves.  So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously.  Some have done nothing else.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.  ~Christopher Fry

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.  ~Thomas Hardy

The poet doesn't invent.  He listens.  ~Jean Cocteau

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that.  Poetry is as precise as geometry.  ~Gustave Flaubert

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.  ~Charles Simic

I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don't have to write anymore.  ~Tukaram

The only problem
with Haiku is that you just
get started and then
~Roger McGough

To have great poets there must be great audiences too.  ~Walt Whitman

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out.... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.  ~A.E. Housman

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.  ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.  ~Salvatore Quasimodo

You can't write poetry on the computer.  ~Quentin Tarantino

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.  ~Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littéraires, 1862

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.  ~Allen Tate

Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rythymbound in poets' minds, defying time and age.  ~Dave Beard

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.  ~Joseph Joubert

God is the perfect poet.  ~Robert Browning

Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.  ~Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.  ~Carl Sandburg

The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.  ~Jean Cocteau, Le Rappel á l'ordre, 1926

Poetry is life distilled.  ~Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.  ~Thomas Gray

He lives the poetry that he cannot write.  The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.  ~Oscar Wilde

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.  ~Robert Frost

You don't have to suffer to be a poet.  Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.  ~John Ciardi, Simmons Review, Fall 1962

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.  ~William Hazlitt

Poetry is the tunnel at the end of the light.  ~J. Patrick Lewis, www.jpatricklewis.com

A poet's autobiography is his poetry.  Anything else is just a footnote.  ~Yevgeny Yentushenko, The Sole Survivor, 1982

If it doesn't work horizontally as prose...
it
probably
won't
work
any
better
vertically
pretending
to
be
poetry.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A poem is true if it hangs together.  Information points to something else.  A poem points to nothing but itself.  ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.  ~T.S. Eliot, Dante, 1920

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.  ~Edmund Burke

Poets are like baseball pitchers.  Both have their moments.  The intervals are the tough things.  ~Robert Frost

Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything.  ~William Blissett

The poet sees things as they look.  Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree.  ~Terri Guillemets

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.  ~Robert Frost

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.  ~Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 1957

Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.  ~J. Patrick Lewis, www.jpatricklewis.com

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.  ~James Tate

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.  We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.  And the human race is filled with passion.  And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.  But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.  Dead Poet's Society

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.  But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.  ~T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.  ~Alfred de Musset, Le Poète déchu, 1839

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power.  Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.  ~Paul Engle, New York Times, 17 February 1957

I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.  ~Edith Södergran

There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Mr Witwould:  "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters?  I find I must keep copies."
Mrs Millamant:  "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose."
~William Congreve, The Way of the World

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.  ~Robert Frost, 1935

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.  ~Edmond de Goncourt

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.  ~Robinson Jeffers

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.  ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.  ~Edgar Allan Poe

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.  ~James Dickey

Poetry is perfect verbs hunting for elusive nouns.  ~J. Patrick Lewis, www.jpatricklewis.com

The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.  And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life.  ~Robert Penn Warren, Saturday Review, 22 March 1958

A poem should not mean
But be.
~Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica, 1926

Your prayer can be poetry, and poetry can be your prayer.  ~Terri Guillemets

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.  ~W.H. Auden

Breathe-in experience,
breathe-out poetry.
~Muriel Rukeyser, quoted in Highs by Alex J. Packer

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.  ~Pablo Neruda, quoted in Wall Street Journal,, 14 November 1985

Invariably pure and austere, poets mostly
starve to death embracing empty mountains,
and when white clouds have no master,
they just drift off, idle thoughts carefree.
~Meng Chiao

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.  ~Maxwell Bodenheim

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words.  The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.  ~Dylan Thomas, Poetic Manifesto, 1961

Poets aren't very useful
Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.
~Ogden Nash

If you got to talking to most cowboys, they'd admit they write 'em.  I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry.  ~Ross Knox

What is a Professor of Poetry?  How can poetry be professed?  ~W.H. Auden

Poetry is not an expression of the party line.  It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.  ~Allen Ginsberg

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.  ~Jean Cocteau

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.  ~Stephen Spender, about Rainer Maria Rilke

Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart.  ~Thomas Hill

The crown of literature is poetry.  It is its end and aim.  It is the sublimest activity of the human mind.  It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy.  The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

A true poet does not bother to be poetical.  Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.  ~Jean Cocteau

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.  ~Rene Char

[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom.  ~Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes," Collected Poems of Robert Frost, 1939

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.  ~Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.  He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never.  School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.  ~Robert Frost

Like butterflies in Spring
Poetry awakens the Spirit,
stirs the imagination and explores
the possibilities with each stroke of its rhythmic wings.
~Jamie Lynn Morris

[P]oets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.  ~Sigmund Freud, quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations by Alan L. Mackay, 1991

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.  ~Edgar Allan Poe

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.  ~Robert Frost

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.  ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.  ~Samuel Johnson

Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.  ~Carl Sandburg

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.  ~Jean Cocteau

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.  ~Don Marquis

Come voyeur my poems
Feel free, I feel free.
~Carrie Latet

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.  ~Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires

The poetry of the earth is never dead.  ~John Keats

Poetry is frosted fire.  ~J. Patrick Lewis, www.jpatricklewis.com

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.  ~Derek Walcott

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.  A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.  ~E.B. White

The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.  ~Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 1950

If you've got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow.  ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.  ~Rita Dove

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.  ~G.K. Chesterton

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.  ~Salman Rushdie

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.  ~Dennis Gabor



The guy who invented poker was bright, but the guy who invented the chip was a genius.  ~Julius "Big Julie" Weintraub


If, after the first twenty minutes, you don't know who the sucker at the table is, it's you.  ~David Levien and Brian Koppelman, Rounders





Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards.  I got a full house and four people died.  ~Steven Wright





Is it a reasonable thing, I ask you, for a grown man to run about and hit a ball?  Poker's the only game fit for a grown man.  Then, your hand is against every man's, and every man's is against yours.  Teamwork?  Who ever made a fortune by teamwork?  There's only one way to make a fortune, and that's to down the fellow who's up against you.  ~W. Somerset Maugham


[Poker] exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great.  ~Walter Matthau


Your best chance to get a Royal Flush in a casino is in the bathroom.  ~V.P. Pappy


There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker.  The upper class knows very little about it.  Now and then you find ambassadors who have sort of a general knowledge of the game, but the ignorance of the people is fearful.  Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a "flush."  It is enough to make one ashamed of the species.  ~Mark Twain


The commonest mistake in history is underestimating your opponent; it happens at the poker table all the time.  ~David Shoup


I must complain the cards are ill shuffled till I have a good hand.  ~Jonathan Swift


"How long does it take to learn poker, Dad?"
"All your life, son."
~Michael Pertwee


Poker:  the art of civilized bushwhacking.  ~Nick Dandalos, attributed


Poker is the game closest to the western conception of life, where life and thought are recognized as intimately combined, where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or of chance, where men are considered moral agents and where - at least in the short run - the important thing is not what happens but what people think happens.  ~John Luckacs


Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.  ~Charles Lamb


In a game of poker, I can put the players' souls in my pocket.  ~Beausourire


I believe in poker the way I believe in the American Dream.   Poker is good for you.   It enriches the soul, sharpens the intellect, heals the spirit, and - when played well, nourishes the wallet.  ~Lou Krieger


Poker, n.  A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this lexicographer unknown.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Poker is... a fascinating, wonderful, intricate adventure on the high seas of human nature.  ~David A. Daniel


Poker's a day to learn and a lifetime to master.  ~Robert Williamson III


Whether he likes it or not, a mans character is stripped at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame.  Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life.  ~Anthony Holden






With spots quadrangular of diamond form,
Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife,
And spades, the emblems of untimely graves.
~William Cowper


The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.  ~David Mamet


Poker is a microcosm of all we admire and disdain about capitalism and democracy.  It can be rough-hewn or polished, warm or cold, charitable and caring, or hard and impersonal, fickle and elusive, but ultimately it is fair, and right, and just.  ~Lou Krieger


Baseball is like a poker game.  Nobody wants to quit when he's losing; nobody wants you to quit when you're ahead.  ~Jackie Robinson


Poker is to cards and games what jazz is to music.  It's this great American thing, born and bred here.  We dig it because everybody can play.  ~Steve Lipscomb


God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e., everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.  ~Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, 1991


Hold'em - like life itself - has its defining moment.  It's the flop.  When you see the flop, you're looking at 71 percent of your hand, and the cost is only a single round of betting.  ~Lou Krieger


[Poker is] as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find outside an advertising agency.  ~Raymond Chandler


You have it in your power to turn a bad-beat around simply by realizing this simple truth:  The more bad beats you encounter, the luckier you are.  It's a sign that you are playing against opponents who continually take the worst of it, and if you can't beat someone who always takes the worst of it, you can't beat anyone.  ~Lou Krieger


Old card players never die, they just shuffle away.  ~Author Unknown


Industry executives and analysts often mistakenly talk about strategy as if it were some kind of chess match.  But in chess, you have just two opponents, each with identical resources, and with luck playing a minimal role.  The real world is much more like a poker game, with multiple players trying to make the best of whatever hand fortune has dealt them.  In our industry, Bill Gates owns the table until someone proves otherwise.  ~David Moschella


Most of the money you'll win at poker comes not from the brilliance of your own play, but from the ineptitude of your opponents.  ~Lou Krieger


In life's poker game, the optimist sees the pessimist's night and raises him the sunrise.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I've often thought, if I got really hungry for a good milk shake, how much would I pay for one?  People will pay a hundred dollars for a bottle of wine; to me that's not worth it.   But I'm not going to say it is foolish or wrong to spend that kind of money, if that's what you want.  So if a guy wants to bet twenty or thirty thousand dollars in a poker game, that is his privilege.  ~Jack Binion


There's opportunity in poker.... If Horace Greeley were alive today, his advice wouldn't be "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country."  Instead, he'd point to that deck of cards on table and say, "Shuffle up and deal.  ~Lou Krieger


Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.  ~Richard Armour

Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason.  ~José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, translated from Portuguese

Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.  ~W.C. Fields

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.  ~Martin L. Gross, A Call for Revolution, 1993

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.  ~Alexis de Tocqueville

We'd all like to vote for the best man, but he's never a candidate.  ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard

All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.  ~Albert Einstein

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.  ~H.L. Mencken, 1956

What is conservatism?  Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?  ~Abraham Lincoln

I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts.  After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough.  ~Clarie Sargent, Arizona senatorial candidate

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.  ~Leonard Bernstein, The New York Times, 30 October 1988

Take our politicians:  they're a bunch of yo-yos.  The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.  ~Saul Bellow

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.  ~Charles de Gaulle

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.  ~Plato

Politicians are the same all over.  They promise to build a bridge even where they is no river.  ~Nikita Khrushchev

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence.  Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.  ~William E. Gladstone, 1866

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.  ~Clarence Darrow

George Washington is the only president who didn't blame the previous administration for his troubles.  ~Author Unknown

Truth is not determined by majority vote.  ~Doug Gwyn

An election is coming.  Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.  ~George Eliot, Felix Holt, Chapter 5  (Thanks Julie!)

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.  ~Ernest Benn

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.  ~Stewart Udall

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio speech, 26 October 1939

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.  ~John Quinton

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.  ~Leo Rosten

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn.  The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Conservative, n:  A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.  ~Alfred E. Wiggam

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.  ~Robertson Davies

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent.  One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith, New York Times, 8 October 1989

Don't vote, it only encourages them.  ~Author Unknown

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is... the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.  ~Adlai Stevenson, speech, Democratic National Convention, 18 August 1956

The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.  ~Adlai E. Stevenson

I offer my opponents a bargain:  if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.  ~Adlai Stevenson, campaign speech, 1952

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.  ~Charles Krauthammer

Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.  ~Doug Larson

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.  ~Gore Vidal

The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.  ~Maureen Murphy

I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns, and women join the unqualified men in running our government.  ~Cissy Farenthold

There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.  ~Author Unknown

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.  ~Oscar Ameringer

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?  ~Robert Orben

Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.  ~Author Unknown

Conservatism is the policy of make no change and consult your grandmother when in doubt.  ~Woodrow Wilson

I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.  ~Charles de Gaulle

Politicians say they're beefing up our economy.  Most don't know beef from pork.  ~Harold Lowman

He didn't say that.  He was reading what was given to him in a speech.  ~Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, explaining why President Bush wasn't following up on his campaign pledge that there would be no loss of wetlands

Mankind will never see an end of trouble until... lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power... become lovers of wisdom.  ~Plato, The Republic

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.  ~Henry Cate, VII

The best thing about this group of candidates is that only one of them can win.  ~Will Rogers

Members of Congress should be compelled to wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers, so we could identify their corporate sponsors.  ~Caroline Baum

There are far too many men in politics and not enough elsewhere.  ~Hermione Gingold

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.  ~Jay Leno

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.  ~Winston Churchill

If God had been a Liberal there wouldn't have been Ten Commandments, there would have been Ten Suggestions.  ~Malcolm Bradbury, After Dinner Game, 1982

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind:  the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.  ~Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.  ~Groucho Marx

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery.  They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire.  I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy.  The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.  ~Dave Barry

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.  ~H.L. Mencken

History is gossip but scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.  ~Oscar Wilde

The politicians were talking themselves red, white and blue in the face.  ~Clare Boothe Luce

Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession.  I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.  ~Ronald Reagan

If the person you are trying to diagnose politically is some sort of intellectual, the chances are two to one he is a Democrat.  ~Vance Packard

A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.  ~Texas Guinan 

Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.  The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary,1911

Politics, n:  [Poly "many" + tics "blood-sucking parasites"]  ~Larry Hardiman

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.  ~Emma Goldman

If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven.  ~Will Rogers

How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?  ~Author Unknown

A man that'd expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels by an iliction is called a rayformer an' remains at large.  ~Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley's Philosophy, 1900

There ought to be one day - just one - when there is open season on senators.  ~Will Rogers

Overheard in a Washington D.C. church confessional: "Bless me Father, for sins have been committed."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Midas, they say, possessed the art of old
Of turning whatsoe'er he touch'd to gold;
This modern statesmen can reverse with ease -
Touch them with gold, they'll turn to what you please.
~John Wolcot

We have plenty of Confidence in this country, but we are a little short of good men to place our Confidence in.  ~Will Rogers

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.  ~Aesop

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age.  ~Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

A political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life's problems without asking its question.  ~André Malraux

Politics - I don't know why, but they seem to have a tendency to separate us, to keep us from one another, while nature is always and ever making efforts to bring us together.  ~Sean O'Casey

A politician should have three hats.  One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected.  ~Carl Sandburg

The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.  If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.  You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.  Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.  One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time, one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase - some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse - into the dustbin where it belongs.  ~George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," Shooting an Elephant, 1950

He's not a Republican, he's a Republican't.  ~Author Unknown

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.  ~Thomas Jefferson

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected.  The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.  ~George E. MacDonald

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.  ~Murray Kempton

They say women talk too much.  If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.  ~Clare Booth Luce

If the World Series runs until election day, the networks will run the first one-half inning and project the winner.  ~Lindsey Nelson

Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.  ~Walter Lippmann

A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.  ~Woodrow Wilson

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.  ~John Stuard Mill

The qualities that get a man into power are not those that lead him, once established, to use power wisely.  ~Lyman Bryson

During a campaign the air is full of speeches - and vice versa.  ~Author Unknown

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.  ~Meg Greenfield

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.  ~George Jean Nathan

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.  ~Robert Byrne

The Christian Right is neither.  ~Author Unknown

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.  ~James Harvey Robinson, The Human Comedy, 1937

A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation.  ~James Freeman Clarke, Sermon

I'm not a leftist; I'm where the righteous ought to be.  ~M.M. Coady

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous.  In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.  ~Winston Churchill

In golf, you keep your head down and follow through.  In the vice presidency, you keep your head up and follow through.  It's a big difference.  ~Dan Quayle

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.  ~George Will

Nobody believes a rumor here in Washington until it's officially denied.  ~Edward Cheyfitz

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.  ~John Gardner

Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.  ~Mao Zedong

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



If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.  ~Charles Darwin


My poverty is not complete:  it lacks me.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Society comprises two classes:  those who have more food than appetite, and those who have more appetite than food.  ~Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort, Maximes


Empty pockets never held anyone back.  Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.  ~Norman Vincent Peale


Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood.  ~Heinrich Heine


We have grown literally afraid to be poor.  We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life.  If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.  ~William James


You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.  ~P.J. O'Rourke, A Parliament of Whores


The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other.  It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.  Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash.  The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.  ~John Berger


Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit.  ~Eli Khamarov, Lives of the Cognoscenti


The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.  ~William James


Seldom do people discern
Eloquence under a threadbare cloak.
~Juvenal


It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.  ~Bill Vaughan


Every man has a right to be poor.  ~Richard Jefferies


Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving.  ~O. Henry, Heart of the West, 1907


You can't quit poverty.  ~Two and a Half Men, "I Can't Afford Hyenas," written by Eddie Gorodetsky and Jeff Abugov, original airdate 2 February 2004, spoken by the character Alan Harper


We didn't starve, but we didn't eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was.  ~Bernard Malamud


A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.  ~W.C. Fields


Affluence creates poverty.  ~Marshall McLuhan


The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.  ~Willem de Kooning


Poverty is the mother of crime.  ~Marcus Aurelius


The poor are poor because the rich are rich.  ~Author Unknown


Hunger makes a thief of any man.  ~Pearl S. Buck


To a man with an empty stomach food is God.  ~Gandhi


Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all.  ~Eva Perón


Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.  ~Sydney Smith, His Wit and Wisdom, 1900


There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.  ~John Gardner


However mean your life is, meet it and live it:  do not shun it and call it hard names.  Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.  Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.  Things do not change, we change.  Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.  ~Henry David Thoreau


One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.  ~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929


Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.  ~William Shakespeare


I pray on the principle that wine knocks the cork out of a bottle.  There is an inward fermentation, and there must be a vent.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

God punishes us mildly by ignoring our prayers and severely by answering them.  ~Richard J. Needham

When we pray to God we must be seeking nothing - nothing.  ~Saint Francis of Assisi

"Give us this day our daily bread" is probably the most perfectly constructed and useful sentence ever set down in the English language.  ~P.J. Wingate

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.  ~Søren Kierkegaard

No one is a firmer believer in the power of prayer than the devil; not that he practices it, but he suffers from it.  ~Guy H. King

Trouble and perplexity drive me to prayer and prayer drives away perplexity and trouble.  ~Philip Melanchthen

Don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.  ~Satchel Paige, 1974

The value of consistent prayer is not that He will hear us, but that we will hear Him.  ~William McGill

Prayer may not change things for you, but it for sure changes you for things.  ~Samuel M. Shoemaker

Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.  ~Author Unknown

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.  ~Author Unknown

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.  ~Frederick Douglass, escaped slave

Practical prayer is harder on the soles of your shoes than on the knees of your trousers.  ~Austin O'Malley

As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in schools.  ~Author Unknown

When we talk to God, we're praying.  When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic.  ~Jane Wagner, In Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1985, performed by Lily Tomlin

We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties.  ~Oswald Chambers

When at night you cannot sleep, talk to the Shepherd and stop counting sheep.  ~Author Unknown

When a man is at his wits' end it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.  ~Oswald Chambers

Many people pray as if God were a big aspirin pill; they come only when they hurt.  ~B. Graham Dienert

Some have been to the mountain.  I have been to my knees by the side of my bed.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Prayer is when you talk to God; meditation is when you listen to God.  ~Author Unknown

Prayer is not merely an occasional impulse to which we respond when we are in trouble:  prayer is a life attitude.  ~Walter A. Mueller

The Lord's Prayer may be committed to memory quickly, but it is slowly learnt by heart.  ~Frederick Denison Maurice

Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it.  You can't pray a lie - I found that out.  ~Mark Twain

It is good for us to keep some account of our prayers, that we may not unsay them in our practice.  ~Matthew Henry

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets.  I do not mean his maker, but himself.  ~William Inge

Grow flowers of gratitude in the soil of prayer.  ~Terri Guillemets

If we could all hear one another's prayers, God might be relieved of some of his burdens.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant

Prayers not felt by us are seldom heard by God.  ~Philip Henry

The trouble with our praying is, we just do it as a means of last resort.  ~Will Rogers

When you pray, rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart.  ~John Bunyan

And help us, this and every day, to live more nearly as we pray.  ~John Keble

I believe in prayer.  It's the best way we have to draw strength from heaven.  ~Josephine Baker

Prayer must never be answered:  if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.  ~Oscar Wilde

Prayer is the soul's sincere desire,
Uttered or unexpressed;
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast.
~James Montgomery, What is Prayer?

Prayer is communication with the Divine.  It can be whispered or chanted or written or expressed in the work you do.  However it is expressed, it is never in vain.  ~Donna Wilk Cardillo

It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Certain thoughts are prayers.  There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.  ~Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862

Complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives and the sincerest part of our devotion.  ~Jonathan Swift

I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.  ~Abraham Lincoln

God can pick sense out of a confused prayer.  ~Richard Sibbes

Pray, v.  To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

I often pray, though I'm not really sure Anyone's listening; and I phrase it carefully, just in case He's literary.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Prayer requires more of the heart than of the tongue.  ~Adam Clarke

God answers first the prayers we should have prayed.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

My father prayed because he had a good Friend with whom to share the problems of the day.  ~Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

God always answers our prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.  ~Author Unknown

God speaks in the silence of the heart.  Listening is the beginning of prayer.  ~Mother Teresa

There come times when I have nothing more to tell God.  If I were to continue to pray in words, I would have to repeat what I have already said.  At such times it is wonderful to say to God, "May I be in Thy presence, Lord?  I have nothing more to say to Thee, but I do love to be in Thy presence."  ~O. Hallesby

When you bow deeply to the universe, it bows back; when you call out the name of God, it echoes inside you.  ~Morihei Ueshiba

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle.  Every prayer reduces itself to this:  "Great God, grant that twice two be not four."  ~Ivan Turgenev

Most people do not pray; they only beg.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Prayer draws us near to our own souls.  ~Herman Melville, Mardi and A Voyage Thither, 1849

To give thanks in solitude is enough.  Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go.  Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.  ~Victor Hugo

What we usually pray to God is not that His will be done, but that He approve ours.  ~Helga Bergold Gross

We must move from asking God to take care of the things that are breaking our hearts, to praying about the things that are breaking His heart.  ~Margaret Gibb

We cannot ask in behalf of Christ what Christ would not ask Himself if He were praying.  ~A.B. Simpson

Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.  ~Socrates

Just pray for a tough hide and a tender heart.  ~Ruth Graham

God tells us to burden him with whatever burdens us.  ~Author Unknown

You know I ain't never prayed before
'Cause it always seemed to me
That prayin's the same as beggin' Lord,
I don't take no charity.
~Steve Earle, "Tom Ames' Prayer," 1994

Before we can pray, "Lord, Thy Kingdom come," we must be willing to pray, "My Kingdom go."  ~Alan Redpath

Some people think that prayer just means asking for things, and if they fail to receive exactly what they asked for, they think the whole thing is a fraud.  ~Gerald Vann

Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.  ~George Meredith

God has editing rights over our prayers.  He will... edit them, correct them, bring them in line with His will and then hand them back to us to be resubmitted.  ~Stephen Crotts

Be thankful that God's answers are wiser than your answers.  ~William Culbertson

Prayer is the language of a man burdened with a sense of need.  ~E.M. Bounds

Prayer is exhaling the spirit of man and inhaling the spirit of God.  ~Edwin Keith

When you are unwell, you must cough, sneeze, and ache prayer.  ~Terri Guillemets

Prayer is the spirit speaking truth to Truth.  ~Philip James Bailey

The Lord longs to hear all of our concerns - any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.  ~Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.  ~Indian Proverb



If nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternatively, there would never be more than three in a family.  ~Lawrence Housman


If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.  ~Nora Ephron, Heartburn, 1983


I realize why women die in childbirth - it's preferable.  ~Sherry Glaser


A period is just the beginning of a lifelong sentence.  ~Cathy Crimmins


Life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.  ~Rita Rudner


Think of stretch marks as pregnancy service stripes.  ~Joyce Armor


There are three reasons for breast-feeding:  the milk is always at the right temperature; it comes in attractive containers; and the cat can't get it.  ~Irena Chalmers


A ship under sail and a big-bellied woman,
Are the handsomest two things that can be seen common.
~Benjamin Franklin


You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.  ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child.  She must be found and stopped.  ~Sam Levenson


Love and pregnancy and riding on a camel cannot be hid.  ~Arabic Proverb


People are giving birth underwater now.  They say it's less traumatic for the baby because it's in water. But certainly more traumatic for the other people in the pool.  ~Elayne Boosler


God's interest in the human race is nowhere better evinced than in obstetrics.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Pregnancy is a disease from which you recover in 18 years and 9 months.  ~Carrie Latet


By far the most common craving of pregnant women is not to be pregnant.  ~Phyllis Diller


Love is all fun and games until someone loses an eye or gets pregnant.  ~Jim Cole


It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.  ~Voltaire


Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.  ~Erma Bombeck


Some men are so macho they'll get you pregnant just to kill a rabbit.  ~Maureen Murphy


If men were equally at risk from this condition - if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains - then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.  ~Barbara Ehrenreich




We are each burdened with prejudice; against the poor or the rich, the smart or the slow, the gaunt or the obese.  It is natural to develop prejudices.  It is noble to rise above them.  ~Author Unknown


Preconceived notions are the locks on the door to wisdom.  ~Merry Browne


The test of courage comes when we are in the minority.  The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.  ~Ralph W. Sockman


What is tolerance?  It is the consequence of humanity.  We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.  ~Voltaire


Judge me all you want, just keep the verdict to yourself.  ~From a Winston advertisement


Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.  ~Oscar Wilde


Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.  ~Wayne W. Dyer


Our thoughts are unseen hands shaping the people we meet.  Whatever we truly think them to be, that's what they'll become for us.  ~Richard Cowper


Prejudices are the chains forged by ignorance to keep men apart.  ~Countess of Blessington


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


Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences.  No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.  ~Edward Roscoe Murrow, 31 December 1955


It is never too late to give up our prejudices.  ~Henry David Thoreau


One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.  ~Franklin Thomas


In overcoming prejudice, working together is even more effective than talking together.  ~Ralph W. Sockman


Prejudice is all in your head.  ~As seen on a button at evolvefish.com


A minority group has "arrived" only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it.  ~Carl T. Rowan


Do not judge and you will never be mistaken.  ~Jean Jacques Rousseau


If only closed minds came with closed mouths.  ~As seen on a button at evolvefish.com


Our prejudices are like physical infirmities - we cannot do what they prevent us from doing.  ~John Lancaster Spalding


Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.  ~Albert Einstein


Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.  ~Nelson DeMille


Prejudice is the child of ignorance.  ~William Hazlitt


You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.  ~Attributed to both Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi


Prejudices subsist in people's imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience.  ~Ernest Dimnet


I am an invisible man.... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.  ~Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man, 1952


I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices.  All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.  ~Mark Twain


I think there's just one kind of folks.  Folks.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird


If you judge people you have no time to love them.  ~Mother Teresa


No man has ever been born a Negro hater, a Jew hater, or any other kind of hater.  Nature refuses to be involved in such suicidal practices.  ~Harry Bridges


O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.  ~William Penn


Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity; and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion.  ~John Comenius, 17th century philosopher


QUOTATIONS ABOUT ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Not in vain has Lincoln lived, for he has helped to make this republic an example of justice, with no caste but the caste of humanity.  ~George Bancroft

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

He is one of those giant figures, of whom there are very few in history, who lose their nationality in death.  ~David Lloyd George

Oh, wise physician of a wasted land!  ~Hermann Hagedorn

Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all.  ~Vachel Lindsay

Mute though his lips be, yet they still speak.  Hushed is his voice, but its echoes of liberty are ringing through the world, and the sons of bondage listen with joy.  ~Matthew Simpson

The important thing today is not what we say of Lincoln but what Lincoln would say of us if he were here in this hour and could note the drift and tendency in American life and American politics.  ~Stephen Samuel Wise

Abraham Lincoln needs no marble shaft to perpetuate his name; his words are the most enduring monument, and will forever live in the hearts of the people.  ~Osborn H. Oldroyd

If you look at his portraits they always give you an indelible impression of his great height.  So does his life.  Height of purpose, height of ideal, height of character, height of intelligence.  ~David Lloyd George

Lincoln was not a type.  He stands alone - no ancestors, no fellows, no successors.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

His grave a nation's heart shall be,
His monument a people free!
~Caroline Atherton Mason

A faith like Lincoln's would transform the world!  ~James Oppenheim

He showed that fame may be won and what services be rendered by a plain son of the people unaided by any gifts of fortune.  ~James Bryce

In him was vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real greatness.  ~Phillips Brooks

Humble birth did not retard his genius, nor high place corrupt his soul.  ~Cass Gilbert

He was one of the few great rulers whose wisdom increased with his power, and whose spirit grew gentler and tenderer as his triumphs were multiplied.  ~James A. Garfield

God and Nature together shaped him to lead in the van,
In the stress of her wildest weather when the Nation needed a Man.
~Margaret E. Sangster

His heart and his brain were utterly foreign to all vindictiveness or personal bitterness.  He declared himself hotly and strongly against wrong causes, but never against men.  ~London Spectator

His was the nation's sacrifice,
And ours the priceless gain.
~John Greenleaf Whittier

A statesman of the school of sound common sense, and a philanthropist of the most practical type, a patriot without a superior - his monument is a country preserved.  ~C.S. Harrington

Lincoln had faith in time, and time has justified his faith.  ~Benjamin Harrison

Nor all America can claim him now:
Forevermore he is Mankind's and God's.
~Reginald Wright Kauffman

He raised his hands, not to strike, but in benediction.  Lincoln was the grandest figure of the fiercest civil war.  He is the gentlest memory of our world.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Look on this cast, and know the hand
That bore a nation in its hold;
From this mute witness understand
What Lincoln was - how large of mould.
~E.C. Stedman

He was a common man expanded into giant proportions; well acquainted with the people, he placed his hand on the beating pulse of the nation, judged of its disease and was ready with a remedy.  ~Joshua Speed

One fire was on his spirit, one resolve -
To send the keen axe to the root of wrong,
Clearing a free way to the feet of God,
The eyes of conscience testing every stroke.
~Edwin Markham

His love shone as impartial as the sun.  ~Maurice Thompson

Abraham Lincoln is not dead.  Emancipated from the thraldom of time, he has stepped beyond the trammels of birth, and race, and state.  He lives in an epic all his own; in ever widening spiritual leadership; in the splendor of realized ideals; in inspiration to good citizenship and in multiplying memorials in literature and art, in progress and reform, in patriotism and philanthropy, in education and humanitarianism.  ~John Wesley Hill

A martyr to the cause of man,
His blood is freedom's eucharist,
And in the world's great hero list
His name shall lead the van.
~Charles G. Halpin

To him was given the duty and responsibility of making that great classic of liberty, the Declaration of Independence, no longer an empty promise, but a glorious fulfillment.  ~William McKinley

A type that nature wills to plan
But once in all a people's years.
~E.C. Stedman

Abraham Lincoln - the spirit incarnate of those who won victory in the Civil War - was the true representative of this people, not only for his own generation, but for all time, because he was a man among men.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

It was a very lonely spirit that looked out from underneath those shaggy brows and comprehended men without fully communing with them, as if in spite of all its genial efforts at comradeship, it dwelt apart, saw its visions of duty where no man looked on.  ~Woodrow Wilson

Hail, Lincoln! As the swift years lengthen
Still more majestic grows thy fame.
~Nathan Haskell Dole

This statesman was no conqueror, but his superiority consisted in his moral conquest; this President vanquished no foreign people, and his superiority lay in his self-constraint; this excellent judge of human nature cast a spell over nobody, yet is more fascinating than the shining victors of history.  ~Emil Ludwig

The qualities which caused him to be acclaimed the leader, he possessed when he was teaching school, and splitting rails, and reading law in a judge's musty office.  From the beginning he was a man among men who always upheld the right, advocated justice for the oppressed, and a square deal for all.  ~Frank Dorrance Hopley

Meseems I feel his presence.  Is he dead?
Death is a word.  He lives and grander grows.
~Maurice Thompson

QUOTATIONS ABOUT GEORGE WASHINGTON

Let him who looks for a monument to Washington look around the United States.  Your freedom, your independence, your national power, your prosperity, and your prodigious growth are a monument to him.  ~Louis Kossuth

If I were to characterize George Washington's feelings toward his country, I should be less inclined than most people to stress what is called Washington's love of his country.  What impresses me as far more important is what I should call Washington's respect for his country.  ~Randolph G. Adams

Then honor to the day that gave him birth,
For it is also Freedom's natal day.
~Arthur J. Burdick

George Washington is one of the beacons placed at intervals along the highroad of history.  ~Orestes Ferrara

More than all, and above all, Washington was master of himself.  ~Charles Francis Adams

His life was a hymn in praise of honor, uprightness, and patriotism.  ~Orestes Ferrara

Washington's is the mightiest name of earth - long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation.  On that name no eulogy is expected.  It cannot be.  To add brightness to the sun, or glory to the name of Washington, is alike impossible.  Let none attempt it.  In solemn awe pronounce the name, and in its naked deathless splendor leave it shining on.  ~Abraham Lincoln

The prevailin' weakness of most public men is to Slop Over!.... G. Washington never slopt over.  ~Artemus Ward

He shaped and molded that office to the contours of his own heroic stature.  ~W.J. Cameron

Eternity alone can reveal to the human race its debt of gratitude to the peerless and immortal name of Washington.  ~James A. Garfield

Blot out from the page of history the names of all the great actors of his time in the drama of nations, and preserve the name of Washington, and the century would be renowned.  ~Chauncey M. Depew

This was the man God gave us when the hour
Proclaimed the dawn of Liberty begun.
~John Hall Ingham

Washington's appointments, when president, were made with a view to gather all the talent of the country in support of the national government; and he bore many things which were personally disagreeable in an endeavor to do this.  ~Paul Leicester Ford

Well hath he been called one of the architects of civilization.  ~Newell Dwight Hillis

The flower imperishable of this valiant age, -
A true American!
~Clinton Scollard

George Washington is the only president who didn't blame the previous administration for his troubles.  ~Author Unknown

He guided the passions of others, because he was master of his own.  ~Ebenezer Grant Marsh

One of the greatest captains of the age.  ~Benjamin Franklin

Great knightly soul who came in time to serve his country's need.  ~Margaret E. Sangster

I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him "father."  ~Will Rogers

Posterity will talk of Washington as the founder of a great empire, when my name shall be lost in the vortex of revolution.  ~Napoleon I

The great citizen, the first-born son of the New World.  ~Simón Bolívar

May it please Heaven that his example shall continue to serve as a beacon to our Republics in their darkest moments of doubt and adversity.  ~Jorge Ubico

QUOTATIONS BY U.S. PRESIDENTS
and their anonymous speechwriters

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.  ~George Washington

In executing the duties of my present important station, I can promise nothing but purity of intentions, and, in carrying these into effect, fidelity and diligence.  ~George Washington

I had rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world.  ~George Washington

My movements to the chair of government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.  ~George Washington, letter, 1789

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.  ~Thomas Jefferson

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.  ~Thomas Jefferson

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.  ~Thomas Jefferson

It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can stand by itself.  ~Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.  ~Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.  ~Thomas Jefferson

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.  ~Thomas Jefferson

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.  ~Thomas Jefferson

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.  ~Thomas Jefferson

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.  ~Thomas Jefferson

We never repent of having eaten too little.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.  ~Thomas Jefferson

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.  ~James Madison, speech, Virginia Convention, 1788

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  ~James Madison

The public history of all countries, and all ages, is but a sort of mask, richly colored.  The interior working of the machinery must be foul.  ~John Quincy Adams

If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.  ~James Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln, 1861

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.  It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems.  And not only so.  It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the unsolved ones.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Discourage litigation.  Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can.  Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time.  As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man.  There will still be business enough.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.  My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.  Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.  Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.  ~Abraham Lincoln

There are no accidents in my philosophy.  Every effect must have its cause.  The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future.  All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.  ~Abraham Lincoln

We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies.  Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.  The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.  ~Abraham Lincoln

What is conservatism?  Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?  ~Abraham Lincoln

Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.  ~Abraham Lincoln

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.  ~Ulysses S. Grant

Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.  ~Ulysses S. Grant

The lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves.  ~James A. Garfield

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.  The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.  ~Grover Cleveland, 1905

It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation's need of trees will become serious. We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.  ~Theodore Roosevelt, 1907 Arbor Day Message

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.  ~Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

The best leader is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.  ~Woodrow Wilson

The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights.  It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life.  It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history.  ~Woodrow Wilson

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.  ~Woodrow Wilson

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.  ~Woodrow Wilson

A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.  ~Woodrow Wilson

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests.  An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.  ~Woodrow Wilson

Golf is a game in which one endeavors to control a ball with implements ill adapted for the purpose.  ~Woodrow Wilson

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.  ~Calvin Coolidge

Patriotism is easy to understand in America - it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.  ~Calvin Coolidge

If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.  ~Calvin Coolidge

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.  ~Calvin Coolidge

Older men declare war.  But it is the youth that must fight and die.  ~Herbert Hoover

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.  ~Herbert Hoover, attributed

When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio speech, 26 October 1939

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.  ~Harry Truman

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Leadership:  the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, address, Columbia University, 31 May 1954

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

You do not lead by hitting people over the head.  That's assault, not leadership.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, first inaugural address, 20 January 1953

If you want total security, go to prison.  There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on.  The only thing lacking... is freedom.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.  ~John F. Kennedy, 1961

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.  ~John F. Kennedy

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.  ~John F. Kennedy

When written in Chinese the word "crisis" is composed of two characters - one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.  ~John F. Kennedy, address, 12 April 1959

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.  ~John F. Kennedy

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.  ~John F. Kennedy

Conformity is that jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.  ~John F. Kennedy

We are inclined that if we watch a football game or baseball game, we have taken part in it.  ~John F. Kennedy, 1961

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.  ~John F. Kennedy

Modern cynics and skeptics... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.  ~John F. Kennedy

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.  ~John F. Kennedy

Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.  ~John F. Kennedy

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy.  First, let her think she's having her own way.  And second, let her have it.  ~Lyndon B. Johnson

Freedom is not enough.  ~Lyndon B. Johnson

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read:  "President Can't Swim."  ~Lyndon B. Johnson

I know I am getting better at golf because I'm hitting fewer spectators.  ~Gerald Ford

I would like to deny all allegations by Bob Hope that during my last game of golf, I hit an eagle, a birdie, an elk and a moose.  ~Gerald Ford

America did not invent human rights.  In a very real sense... human rights invented America.  ~Jimmy Carter

I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet.  [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.  ~Ronald Reagan, 1985

The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take
the civil service examination.  ~Ronald Reagan

The days a man spends fishing or spends hunting should not be deducted from the time that he's on earth.  In other words, if I fish today, that should be added to the amount of time I get to live.  That's the way I look at recreation.  That's why I'll be a big conservation, environmental President, because I plan to fish and hunt as much as I possibly can.  ~George Bush, quoted in Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1988

We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores.  When our kids come home from school do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos?  Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learns between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.  ~George Bush

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.  ~William J. Clinton

The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs.  The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it; between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past; between those who open their arms and those who are determined to clench their fists.  ~William J. Clinton, 1997

QUOTATIONS ABOUT THE U.S. PRESIDENCY

George Washington is the only president who didn't blame the previous administration for his troubles.  ~Author Unknown

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.  ~John F. Kennedy, to his Nobel Prize-winning guests

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.  ~Thomas Jefferson, letter, 1796

Leadership is action, not position.  ~Donald H. McGannon

A leader leads by example, whether he intends to or not.  ~Author Unknown

Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.  ~Robert Jarvik

Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.  ~Thomas J. Watson

A leader is a dealer in hope.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte

Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.  ~Tom Peters 

I suppose that leadership at one time meant muscle; but today it means getting along with people.  ~Indira Gandhi

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft.  Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.  ~Will Rogers

As President, I have no eyes but constitutional eyes; I cannot see you.  ~Abraham Lincoln

The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.  ~Saul Bellow

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.  ~Clarence Darrow

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is... the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.  ~Adlai Stevenson, speech, Democratic National Convention, 18 August 1956

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.  ~Gore Vidal

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.  ~William James

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.  ~Don Marquis

Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday.  ~Author Unknown

Every duty which is bidden to wait returns with seven fresh duties at its back.  ~Charles Kingsley

The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up.  ~Author Unknown

If it weren't for the last minute, I wouldn't get anything done.  ~Author Unknown

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

There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.  ~Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.  ~Earl of Chesterfield

The two rules of procrastination:  1) Do it today.  2) Tomorrow will be today tomorrow.  ~Author Unknown

One of the greatest labor-saving inventions of today is tomorrow.  ~Vincent T. Foss

You may delay, but time will not.  ~Benjamin Franklin

Someday is not a day of the week.  ~Author Unknown

To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.  ~Eva Young

Don't fool yourself that important things can be put off till tomorrow; they can be put off forever, or not at all.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.  ~C. Northcote Parkinson, 1958

Procrastination is opportunity's assassin.  ~Victor Kiam

If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.  ~Olin Miller

What may be done at any time will be done at no time.  ~Scottish Proverb

There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.  ~Joe Ryan

Procrastination is something best put off until tomorrow.  ~Gerald Vaughan

I've been looking over the list of spring chores I made up last fall, and darned if they aren't fall chores, after all.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The best way to get something done is to begin.  ~Author Unknown

You know you are getting old when it takes too much effort to procrastinate.  ~Author Unknown

I do my work at the same time each day - the last minute.  ~Author Unknown

Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.  ~Spanish Proverb

The time to begin most things is ten years ago.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Eventually, time takes care of everything.  The trouble with procrastination is that people give up on it too soon.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Putting off an easy thing makes it hard.  Putting off a hard thing makes it impossible.  ~George Claude Lorimer

Tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fools reform.  ~Edward Young

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.  ~Mark Twain

Tomorrow is the only day in the year that appeals to a lazy man.  ~Jimmy Lyons

A year from now you may wish you had started today.  ~Karen Lamb

Procrastination is like masturbation.  At first it feels good, but in the end you're only screwing yourself.  ~Author unknown, possibly from Monty Python?

One of these days is none of these days.  ~Attributed to both Henri Tubach and H.G. Bohn

Procrastination is the thief of time.  ~Edward Young

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations.... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them "operators" or "programmers."  ~Peter F. Drucker

Programmer - an organism that turns coffee into software.  ~Author Unknown

Programming is like sex.  One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.  ~Michael Sinz

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.  ~Author Unknown

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.  ~Martin Golding

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place.  So if you are as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?  ~Brian Kernighan

Sometimes it pays to stay in bed in Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code.  ~Dan Salomon

[A]nd then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.  They are, in short, a perfect match.  ~Bill Bryson

Another effective technique is to explain your code to someone else.  This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself.  Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong.  Sorry to bother you."  This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners.  One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk.  Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.  ~Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, about debugging

A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.  ~Doug Linder

All programmers are optimists.  Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers.  Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal.  Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists.  ~Frederick Brooks, Jr.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand.  Good programmers write code that humans can understand.  ~Martin Fowler

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.  ~Rich Kulawiec

Beta.  Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released.  Beta is Latin for "still doesn't work."  ~Author Unknown

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.  ~Brian Kernighan

Don't argue with people who write with digital ink and pay by the kilowatt-hour.  ~Don Rittner

From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.  ~Peter Williams

At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly equivalent to herding cats.  ~The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June 1985

It's not a bug - it's an undocumented feature.  ~Author Unknown

Version 1 of any software is full of bugs.  Version 2 fixes all the bugs and is great.  Version 3 adds all the things users ask for, but hides all the great stuff in Version 2.  ~Fred Blechman

Writing the first 90 percent of a computer program takes 90 percent of the time.  The remaining ten percent also takes 90 percent of the time and the final touches also take 90 percent of the time.  ~N.J. Rubenking

Good code is its own best documentation.  As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?"  ~Steve McConnell

Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty.  If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.  I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way.  It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names.  ~Paul Graham, "Hackers and Painters," 2003

I really hate this darn machine;
I wish that they would sell it.
It won't do what I want it to,
but only what I tell it.
~Author Unknown

One man's crappy software is another man's full time job.  ~Jessica Gaston

He who hasn't hacked assembly language as a youth has no heart.  He who does so as an adult has no brain.  ~John Moore

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.  ~Edsger Dijkstra

If you cannot grok the overall structure of a program while taking a shower, e.g., with no external memory aids, you are not ready to code it.  ~Richard Pattis

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure.  Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.  ~Nathaniel S. Borenstein

It's easy to cry "bug" when the truth is that you've got a complex system and sometimes it takes a while to get all the components to co-exist peacefully.  ~Doug Vargas

It's okay to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code.  You should be able to read it.  ~Steve McConnell

It's the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist.  There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking.  On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.  ~Andy Hertzfeld, about programming

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time:  premature optimization is the root of all evil.  ~C.A.R. Hoare, quoted by Donald Knuth

Programming is like sex.  One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.  ~Michael Sinz

Programming is similar to a game of golf.  The point is not getting the ball in the hole but how many strokes it takes.  ~Harlan Mills

Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.  ~Author Unknown

Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only two sizes:  too big and too small.  ~Richard Pattis

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots.  So far, the Universe is winning.  ~Rich Cook

Programs for sale:  fast, reliable, cheap - choose two.  ~Author Unknown

Ready, fire, aim:  the fast approach to software development.  Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim:  the slow approach to software development.  ~Author Unknown

Reusing pieces of code is like picking off sentences from other people's stories and trying to make a magazine article.  ~Bob Frankston

Program, n.  A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages; v. tr. To engage in a pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.  ~Author Unknown

Should array indices start at 0 or 1?  My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.  ~Stan Kelly-Bootle

The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state.  ~J. Osterhout

The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time.  One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too.  If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work.  Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it.  Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.  ~Frederick Brooks

The only way for errors to occur in a program is by being put there by the author.  No other mechanisms are known.  Programs can't acquire bugs by sitting around with other buggy programs.  ~Harlan Mills

Errors have occurred.
We won't tell you where or why.
Lazy programmers.
~Charlie Gibbs,  1998, honorable mention in the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.  ~Alan J. Perlis

One man's constant is another man's variable.  ~Alan J. Perlis

There does not now, nor will there ever exist, a programming language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs.  ~Lawrence Flon

We don't manage our time as well as we manage our space.  There's an overhead of starting and an overhead of stopping a project because you kind of lose your momentum.  And you've got to bracket and put aside all the things you're already doing.  So you need reasonably large blocks of uninterrupted time if you're going to be successful at doing some of these things.  That's why hackers tend to stay up late.  If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop.  Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour.  If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future.  So it's much less efficient.  Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.  ~Bill Joy

When a programming language is created that allows programmers to program in simple English, it will be discovered that programmers cannot speak English.  ~Author Unknown

When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.  ~Richard Pattis

When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs.  Compound bugs are two separate bugs that interact:  you trip going downstairs, and when you reach for the handrail it comes off in your hand.  ~Paul Graham, "The Other Road Ahead," 2001

You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.  ~C.A.R. Hoare

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.  ~Alan J. Perlis

The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system.  "But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."  Matthew 5:37  ~Author Unknown

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.  That forces you to sort it out in your own mind.  And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas.  And that's really the essence of programming.  By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself.  ~Douglas Adams

More great quotes:
SoftwareQuotes.com
Quotations from the World of Programming
by Hkon gstsson



Promises are like babies:  easy to make, hard to deliver.  ~Author Unknown


Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.  ~Hannah Arendt


Half the promises people say were never kept, were never made.  ~Edgar Watson Howe


We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.  ~Francois duc de la Rochefoucauld


Oaths are but words, and words but wind.  ~Samuel Butler


To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.  ~Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876


It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.  ~Aeschylus


The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte


When a man takes an oath... he's holding his own self in his own hands.  Like water.  And if he opens his fingers then - he needn't hope to find himself again.  ~Robert Bolt


Never take a solemn oath.  People think you mean it.  ~Norman Douglas


Not the maker of plans and promises, but rather the one who offers faithful service in small matters.  This is the person who is most likely to achieve what is good and lasting.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


All promise outruns performance.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Thou ought to be nice, even to superstition, in keeping thy promises, and therefore equally cautious in making them.  ~Thomas Fuller


Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out at once.  ~Norman Vincent Peale


He loses his thanks who promises and delays.  ~Proverb


Promise is most given when the least is said.  ~George Chapman


Eggs and oaths are easily broken.  ~Danish Proverb


Nothing weights lighter than a promise.  ~German Proverb


A promise made is a debt unpaid.  ~Robert Service


Promises and pie crusts are made to be broken.  ~Jonathan Swift


An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.  ~William Dean Howells


Losers make promises they often break.  Winners make commitments they always keep.  ~Denis Waitley


We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot.  ~Abraham Lincoln


For every promise, there is price to pay.  ~Jim Rohn


The promises of yesterday are the taxes of today.  ~William Lyon MacKenzie


Promises are like the full moon, if they are not kept at once they diminish day by day.  ~German Proverb


One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises that one makes.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Better break your word than do worse in keeping it.  ~Thomas Fuller


Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them.  ~William Hazlitt


The promise given was a necessity of the past:  the word broken is a necessity of the present.  ~Niccolo Machiavelli


Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.  ~Edmund Burke


Oaths are the fossils of piety.  ~George Santayana


Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing.  ~Bernard M. Baruch


Let God's promises shine on your problems.  ~Corrie Ten Boom


Promises make debt, and debt makes promises.  ~Dutch Proverb


A promise is a comfort for a fool.  ~Proverb


He was ever precise in promise-keeping.  ~William Shakespeare






When a man repeats a promise again and again, he means to fail you.  ~Proverb


A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is rain.  ~Arabian Proverb


I thought he was a young man of promise; but it appears he was a young man of promises.  ~Author Unknown


It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he is in love, drunk, or running for office.  ~Shirley MacLaine


And be these juggling friends no more believ'd,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear
And break it to our hope.
~William Shakespeare


Promise little and do much.  ~Hebrew Proverb


Promise only what you can deliver.  Then deliver more than you promise.  ~Author Unknown


This is the first convention of the space age - where a candidate can promise the moon and mean it.  ~Author Unknown


The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.  ~Carl Jung


A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.  ~Niccolo Machiavelli


Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.  ~Sydney J. Harris


Life didn't promise to be wonderful.  ~Teddy Pendergrass


Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform.  ~William Penn


Breach of promise is a base surrender of truth.  ~Mohandas Gandhi


A promise is a debt.  ~Proverb


A liar is always lavish of oaths.  ~Pierre Corneille


Everyone's a millionaire where promises are concerned.  ~Author Unknown


In the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything.  In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter.  ~Chinese Proverb


Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.  ~Jean Jacques Rousseau


Between today and tomorrow are graves, and between promising and fulfilling are chasms.  ~Author Unknown


No pillow so soft as God's promise.  ~Author Unknown


One promises much, to avoid giving little.  ~Marquis de Vauvenargues


Go for it now.  The future is promised to no one.  ~Wayne Dyer


God's promises are like the stars; the darker the night the brighter they shine.  ~David Nicholas


Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.  ~Peter F. Drucker


Being of no power to make his wishes good:
His promises fly so beyond his state
That what he speaks is all in debt; he owes
For every word.
~William Shakespeare


Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits.  ~William Shakespeare


It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises but only performance is reality.  ~Harold Geneen


Each morning I gaze at the eastern horizon, and if the sun keeps its promise, I keep mine.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Promises may fit the friends, but non-performance will turn them into enemies.  ~Benjamin Franklin


Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.  ~Benjamin Franklin


For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.  ~John Burroughs


A politician is known by the promises he keeps.  ~Author Unknown


The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.  ~Bill Cosby


When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?  ~Chuck Palahniuk


If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven.  ~Will Rogers


But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep...
~Robert Frost


April is a promise that May is bound to keep.  ~Hal Borland


Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.  ~Karl Popper


But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail.  ~Fareed Zakaria


Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.  ~Marcel Proust


Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.  ~Simone Weil


Politicians are the same all over.  They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers.  ~Nikita Khrushchev


Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.  ~Samuel Johnson


In executing the duties of my present important station, I can promise nothing but purity of intentions, and, in carrying these into effect, fidelity and diligence.  ~George Washington




No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own.  However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.  ~Charles Dudley Warner


As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.  ~Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations


Property is organized robbery.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Few rich men own their property; the property owns them.  ~Robert Ingersoll, speech, New York, 29 October 1896


What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Thieves respect property.  They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.  ~G.K. Chesterton


Property has its duties as well as its rights.  ~Thomas Drummond


Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being.  It is part of the earth man walks on.  It is not man.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.


The right to private property meant at the same time the right and duty to be personally concerned about your own well-being, to be personally concerned about your family's income, to be personally concerned about your future.  This is hard work.  ~Mikhail Khodorkovsky


Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine were taken away.  ~Anaxagoras


It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.  ~Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction, 1917


Private property was the original source of freedom.  It still is its main bulwark.  ~Walter Lippmann


The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one.  Property does not have rights.  People have rights.  ~Potter Stewart


If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.  ~Ludwig von Mises


Every man has a property in his own person.  This nobody has a right to, but himself.  ~John Locke


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


[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.  It has led Individualism entirely astray.  It has made gain, not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism


Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.  ~Maria Edgeworth


Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws.  On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.  ~Frederic Bastiat


Property is the pivot of civilization.  ~Leon Samson


Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends - the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.  ~Andrew Carnegie


The slogan of the National Association of Landlords is the commaless "We Shelter You America."  The truth of the matter is, however, that landlords shelter no one, while in fact the law shelters them... from the immediate expropriation that would occur if there were not force of gun and jail to back up this phoney, abusive, so-called property right.  ~Fred Woodworth, Rent: An Injustice


The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.  ~John Locke


Don't you know that if people could bottle the air they would?  Don't you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association?  And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air?  I am not blaming anybody.  I am just telling how it is.  ~Robert Ingersoll, A Lay Sermon


As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


So long as the great majority of men are not deprived of either property or honor, they are satisfied.  ~Niccolo Machiavelli






It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit.  In order to live he must sell - "voluntarily" sell - himself every day and hour to the "beast of property."  ~Johann Most, The Beast of Property


Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.  ~Ayn Rand


My body and spirit are the only things that truly belong to me.  ~Carrie Latet


The things you own end up owning you.  It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.  ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk


"Whatever is not nailed down is mine."  This is the motto of the exploiter.  "Whatever can be pried loose is not nailed down."  This is the second maxim in a country where people are rich, caring little in their present prosperity what shall become of the future.  ~David Starr Jordan, 1910


As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.  ~James Madison


Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail.  ~Abraham Lincoln


An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.  ~Herbert Spencer


No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.  ~Author Unknown


So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community.  ~William Blackstone


By abolishing private property one takes away the human love of aggression.  ~Sigmund Freud


Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails.  ~Emma Goldman


Individual possession is the great entering wedge, which has split society into eight hundred million fragments.... It virtually, practically, and theoretically denies the brotherhood of man.  ~Hiram Stafford, The Liberator, 8 September 1844


I am what is mine.  Personality is the original personal property.  ~Norman Brown


Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.  ~Bill Gates


Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.  ~Henry David Thoreau


By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives.  He knows Nature but as a robber.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.  ~Aristotle


The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.  ~Leo Tolstoy


Property, n.  Any material thing, having no particular value, that may be held by A against the cupidity of B.  Whatever gratifies the passion for possession in one and disappoints it in all others.  The object of man's brief rapacity and long indifference.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Justice is the insurance which we have on our lives and property.  Obedience is the premium which we pay for it.  ~William Penn


I told my mother-in-law that my house was her house, and she said, "Get the hell off my property."  ~Joan Rivers


If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable.  In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.  ~Oscar Wilde


The love of property and consciousness of right and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often makes a man's course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle.  ~Abraham Lincoln


Labor:  One of the processes by which A acquires property of B.  ~Ambrose Bierce


The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country.  ~John Adams


The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.  From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."  ~Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality




The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity.  But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.  ~Alan Gregg


What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.  ~Friedrich Holderlin


Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.  ~Aldous Huxley, Island


Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.  ~Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires


Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes, and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.  ~Francis Bacon


Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.  ~Don Marquis


We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.  ~Adam Clayton Powell, Keep the Faith, Baby!, 1967


Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.  ~Charles Wagner


So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.  ~Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879


Men can bear all things except good days.  ~Dutch Proverb


If living conditions don't stop improving in this country, we're going to run out of humble beginnings for our great men.  ~Russell P. Askue


How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?  ~Paul Sweeney


Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.  ~Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950


Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.  ~Bill Vaughan


When prosperity comes, do not use all of it.  ~Confucius


Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.  ~Goethe


Luxury:  The lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.  ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923


Pearls around the neck - stones upon the heart.  ~Hanan J. Ayalti, Yiddish Proverbs, 1949


It is an ironic fact that while half the world's population is dying as a result of diseases of poverty (largely starvation and infection) the other half is succumbing to diseases of affluence.  ~Malcolm Carruthers


We cannot get grace from gadgets.  In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can.  Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.  ~J.B. Priestley


The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.  ~Irving Babbitt


Luxury... corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.  ~Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762


We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.  ~Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949


If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.  ~Frank Lloyd Wright


Human prosperity never rests but always craves more, till blown up with pride it totters and falls.  From the opulent mansions pointed at by all passers-by none warns it away, none cries, "Let no more riches enter!"  ~Aeschylus


In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.  ~Benjamin Franklin


There is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.  ~Washington Irving, The Sketch Book, 1820


It is generally agreed, that few men are made better by affluence or exaltation.  ~Samuel Johnson


A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity 'til he has tasted adversity.  ~Sa'di (Musharrif-uddin)


Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.  ~John Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957


We've got the most prosperous culture in human history and we've also got the biggest spiritual hole in human history.  ~Mark Victor Hansen


In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment.  ~Richard Wilkinson


It isn't so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going.  ~Groucho Marx


Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo:  not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.  ~Lewis Mumford


I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.  ~E.F. Schumacher


All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.  ~Mark Kennedy


A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.  ~Author Unknown

[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts.  Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.  ~Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 1945

Behavioral psychology is the science of pulling habits out of rats.  ~Douglas Busch

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?  ~Michael Torke

Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.  ~Mark Epstein

Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.  ~G.K. Chesterton

The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions.  The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's":  fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating.  ~Marvin Dunnette

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.  ~Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin: Psychology, 1973

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.  ~Vladimir Nabokov, 1951

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding.  ~Wilhelm Stekel

A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.  ~Paul Dudley White

The reflex is physiology below the collar button.  Psychology is physiology above the collar button.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.  ~Carl Jung

I don't go for this auto-cannibalism.  Very damaging.  ~Peter O'Toole, on psychoanalysis

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.  ~Alan Watts

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.  ~Sigmund Freud, attributed

If you just set people in motion they'll heal themselves.  ~Gabrielle Roth

A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.  ~Joey Adams

There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else.  But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere.  ~C.G. Jung

There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.  ~Ben Williams

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.  ~Carl G. Jung

Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.  ~Aeschylus

Anybody who is 25 or 30 years old has physical scars from all sorts of things, from tuberculosis to polio.  It's the same with the mind.  ~Moses R. Kaufman

I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unseasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.  ~James Thurber

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature.  History keeps undermining the effort.  ~Mason Cooley

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, on leaving psychotherapy

If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell.  Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.  ~D.H. Lawrence

There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair.  There have always been human beings like that.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.  ~Sigmund Freud

Sure you can psychoanalyze!  But as Baehr used to say, why bother to sort garbage?  ~Martin H. Fischer

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.  ~Carl Jung

Perception is a clash of mind and eye, the eye believing what it sees, the mind seeing what it believes.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Thoughts shut up want air,
And spoil, like bales unopen'd to the sun.
~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

A psychiatrist is a man who goes to the Folies-Bergre and looks at the audience.  ~Mervyn Stockwood

Work cure is the best of all psychotherapy, in my opinion.... As well might we expect a patient to recover without food as to recover without work.... The sound man needs work to keep him sound, but the nervous invalid has an even greater need of work to draw him out of his isolation, and to stop the miseries of doubt and self-scrutiny, to win back self-respect and the support of fellowship.  ~Richard C. Cabot

Psychology doesn't address the soul; that's something else.  ~David Chase, The Sopranos, "Pilot," original airdate 10 January 1999, spoken by the character Carmela Soprano

A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis.  Makes quite simple people feel they're complex.  ~S.N. Behrman

It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.  ~G.K. Chesterton, London Observer, 9 December 1934

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.  ~Hermann Ebbinghaus

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air.  A psychotic is the man who lives in it.  A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.  ~Jerome Lawrence

A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting.  It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.  ~Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

The two main hazards of psychoanalysis:  that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you'll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Depression is rage spread thin.  ~George Santayana

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.  ~Voltaire

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.  ~Paul Valéry, Tel Quel, 1943

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.  ~E.M. Cioran

To be too conscious is an illness - a real thoroughgoing illness.  ~Fyodor Dostoevski

Depressed?  Of course we're all depressed.  We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant.  The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance.  Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries.  ~M. Robin D'Antan

Loneliness... is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.  ~Thomas Wolfe

Handwriting is autobiography.  ~Carrie Latet

Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected the American society within the last fifty years.  ~Thomas S. Szasz

Why do we pay for psychotherapy when massages cost half as much?  ~Jason Love

Idleness is the beginning of all psychology.  What?  Could it be that psychology is - a vice?  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, alluding to the proverb "Idleness is the beginning of all vices"

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.  ~Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons but one out of one.  ~William Menninger

To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own.  Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness.  ~Fritz Perls

A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work.  ~Geoffrey Norman

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.  ~Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle



The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability.  ~Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, 1849


A pun is a short quip followed by a long groan.  ~Author Unknown


A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself.  ~Doug Larson


Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.  ~Fred Allen


Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.  ~Dave Barry, Why Humor Is Funny


A lurking pun is the worst pun, one the offender has been waiting to spring on you.  ~Harry Mahtar


A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return.  But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858


Punning and groaning are brothers.  ~B.F. Tucson


A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit.  It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.  ~Charles Lamb, "Popular Fallacies: That the Worst Puns are the Best," Last Essays of Elia, 1833


A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.  ~John Dennis, 1781


In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.  ~Arthur Koestler


A good pun is its own reword.  ~Author Unknown


I'm an incorrigible punster.  Do not incorrige me.  ~Author Unknown  (Thanks, Bob)


Puns are the gag hand buzzers of conversation.  It hurts a bit but everyone gets a good laugh out of it.  ~Grey Livingston


People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks.  They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858




Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.  ~Walter Savage Landor


The purpose of life is a life of purpose.  ~Robert Byrne


To have no set purpose in one's life is the harlotry of the will.  ~Stephen MacKenna


Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.  ~Washington Irving


We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years, and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.  ~George Bernard Shaw


An "unemployed" existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.  ~José Ortega y Gasset


A useless life is an early death.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


When he walks he casts a shadow of purpose.  ~Terri Guillemets


I love the valiant; but it is not enough to wield a broadsword, one must also know against whom.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1892


There is a purpose to our lives that each day tugs at our sleeve as an annoying distraction.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


We all possess the thunder of pure fury and the calm breeze of tranquility.  If it wasn't for tomorrow, how much would we get done today?  Whatever your purpose... embrace it completely.  Get lost in the clouds every now and then so you never lose sight of God's wonder.  ~Paul Vitale


When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.  ~Seneca


Begin each day as if it were on purpose.  ~Author Unknown


Never ask, "What reason do I have to be happy?"  Instead ask, "To what purpose can I attach my happiness?"  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.  ~George Bernard Shaw


To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.  ~Alan Coren, The Sanity Inspector, 1974


If you don't decide what your life is about, it defaults to what you spend your days doing.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


If Heaven made him - earth can find some use for him.  ~Chinese Proverb


A book of quotations... can never be complete.  ~Robert M. Hamilton

Quotation, n.:  The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.  The words erroneously repeated.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Most anthologists of quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters:  first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything.  ~Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort, Maxims, 1825

Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning, if you have enough of them.  ~James Murray

I am fully conscious of the fact, that aphorisms are like wandering Gypsies.  They must always be published without guarantee of the authenticity.  ~Erkki Melartin

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?  Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings - they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them.  Nonetheless they embody the concentrated experience of the race.  ~Norman Douglas

It's such a pleasure to write down splendid words - almost as though one were inventing them.  ~Rupert Hart-Davis

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again.  Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry.  I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy.  I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth.  ~Robert Byrne, The Other 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, "Sources, References, and Notes," 1984

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.  ~Miguel de Cervantes

The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

All maxims have their antagonist maxims; proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half truth.  ~William Mathews

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.  ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.  ~Orson Welles

Always verify your quotations.  ~Martin Joseph Routh, also sometimes quoted as "your references" or "your sources"

A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a witty person, but a pebble in the hands of a fool.  ~Author Unknown

I hate quotations.  Tell me what you know.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, May 1849

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away with the centuries, although it serves as food for every speech.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.... The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts.  They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.  ~Winston Churchill, Roving Commission: My Early Life, 1930

Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.  ~Hendrik Willem van Loon

Most collectors collect tangibles.  As a quotation collector, I collect wisdom, life, invisible beauty, souls alive in ink.  ~Terri Guillemets

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.  ~William Feather

Quotes are nothing but inspiration for the uninspired.  ~Richard Kemph

Anthologies of aphorisms are usually arranged according to themes.... This is not the best method for the aphorism, because it often has several themes and interpretations.  ~Markku Envall

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.  ~Somerset Maugham

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.  ~George Eliot

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.  ~Michel De Montaigne

Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond districts of the mind.  ~William R. Alger

A quotation at the right moment is like bread in a famine.  ~Talmud

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.  ~Francis H. Bradley

The only way to read a book of aphorisms without being bored is to open it at random and, having found something that interests you, close the book and meditate.  ~Prince de Ligne

A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words, but cannot a few well-spoken words convey as many pictures?  ~Author Unknown

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.  ~Marlene Dietrich

An epigram is a gag that's played Carnegie Hall.  ~Oscar Levant (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

People will accept your idea much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.  ~David H. Comins

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.  ~Elias Canetti

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigram.  Our heart's blood, as we write with it, turns to mere dull ink.  ~F.H. Bradley

Aphorism, n.:  Predigested wisdom.  ~Ambrose Bierce

He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.  ~Rudyard Kipling

One is more apt to become wise by doing fool things than by reading wise sayings.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?  ~Philip G. Hamerton

An aphorism is never exactly true.
It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.
~Karl Kraus, Sprüche und Widersprüche, 1909

I've compiled a book from the Internet.  It's a book of quotations attributed to the wrong people.  ~Jerry Seinfeld

Aphorism, n.: A concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late.  ~James Alexander Thom

What are the proper proportions of a maxim?  A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.  ~Mark Twain

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.  ~E.M. Cioran

The aphorist sees in every truth a wise saying, and in every contradiction, two wise sayings.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
~Dorothy Parker, referring to Oscar Wilde

A proper collection of quotations is the whole world digested.  ~Terri Guillemets

The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in few words.  ~Samuel Johnson

Epigrams succeed where epics fail.  ~Author Unknown

I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damned things.  ~Dorothy Parker

The quoting of an aphorism, like the angry barking of a dog or the smell of overcooked broccoli, rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen.  ~Lemony Snicket

Life itself is a quotation.  ~Jorge Luis Borges

Dialogue is not just quotation.  It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossing of legs.  ~Jerome Stern

I have laboriously collected this cento out of diverse writers.  I have wronged no authors but given every man his own.... Bees do little harm and damage no one in extracting honey; I can say of myself, whom have I injured?  The matter is theirs most part, and yet mine.... it becomes something different in its new setting.  ~Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

Laying in bed this morning contemplating how amazing it would be if somehow Oscar Wilde and Mae West could twitter from the grave...  ~Dita Von Teese

Unraveling proverbs is a suitable puzzle for an old man.  I put pieces in order and build up a kind of Utopian castle.  ~Matti Kuusi

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote,
And think they grow immortal as they quote.
~Edward Young, Love of Fame

The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.  ~John Jay Chapman

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.  ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak but for that you must have long legs.  Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are addressed should be big and tall of stature.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.  ~Franklin P. Jones

Let's have some new cliches.  ~Samuel Goldwyn

A proverb is the wisdom of many and the wit of one.  ~Lord John Russell

I'm discovering that everybody is a closet quotesmith.  Just give them a chance.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A quote is just a tattoo on the tongue.  ~William F. DeVault

But as young men, when they knit and shape perfectly, do seldom grow to a further stature, so knowledge, while it is in aphorisms and observations, it is in growth; but when it once is comprehended in exact methods, it may, perchance, be further polished, and illustrate and accommodated for use and practice, but it increaseth no more in bulk and substance.  ~Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.  ~Seneca

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.  ~Havelock Ellis

You might not be able to answer a question with a question but you can always answer a question with a quote!  ~Hunter Brinkmeier

We prefer to believe that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.  ~Clifton Fadiman, Any Number Can Play

When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple.  Take it and copy it.  ~Anatole France

I swim across a sea of quotes, splashing in the words and riding the waves of wisdom.  ~Terri Guillemets

If you don't quote yourself, nobody else will.  And you can quote me on that.  ~Scott Ginsberg, www.hellomynameisscott.com

Classical quotation is a parole of literary men all over the world.  ~Samuel Johnson

Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate.  Truth has to get somewhat chiseled, as it were, before it will fit into an epigram.  ~Joseph Farrell

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice.  It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.  ~Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, 1948

The maxims of men disclose their hearts.  ~French Proverb

An aphorism is a single sentence that totally exhausts its subject.  ~Robert Brault

Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers.  The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.  ~Leo Rosten

To me, novels are just quotations with a bunch of filler.  ~Terri Guillemets

I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to find his Works respectfully quoted by other learned Authors.  ~Benjamin Franklin, "Preface," Poor Richard Improved, wording verified by Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations

I love quotes because good quotes are vitamins for the brain!  ~Patrick Driessen

Patch grief with proverbs.  ~William Shakespeare

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.  ~Santayana, Essays

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.  But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.  ~Niels Bohr

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them.  You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever.  There are men whose phrases are oracles; who can condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character, or illustrates an existence.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.  ~Aldous Huxley

Platitude:  an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.  ~H.L. Mencken

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats and one always secretes too much jelly.  ~Virginia Woolf

There are aphorisms that, like air planes, stay up only while they are in motion.  ~Vladimir Nabokov

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.  ~Hesketh Pearson

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Someone might say of me that I have only made a bouquet of other people's flowers here, having supplied nothing of my own but the thread to bind them.  ~Michel de Montaigne



Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught.  I have a two-year-old son.  You know what he hates?  Naps!  End of list.  ~Dennis Leary


One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.  ~Franklin Thomas


I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.


If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it's just a drunk.  If a Negro does, it's the whole damn Negro race.  ~Bill Cosby


I got nothing against no Viet Cong.  No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.  ~Muhammad Ali, 1967, refusing to fight in Vietnam


I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats.  ~Woody Allen, on the Ku Klux Klan


The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.  ~Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness


Jim Bakker spells his name with 2 k's because 3 would be too obvious.  ~Bill Maher


I swear to the Lord
I still can't see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.
~Langston Hughes, The Black Man Speaks


To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.  ~William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches and Public Letters


The African race is a rubber ball.  The harder you dash it to the ground, the higher it will rise.  ~African Proverb


A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.  ~Saul Alinsky


When we're unemployed, we're called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it's called a depression.  ~Jesse Jackson


Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color.  ~Author Unknown


Racial superiority is a mere pigment of the imagination.  ~Author Unknown


I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns, and women join the unqualified men in running our government.  ~Cissy Farenthold


Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.  ~Desmond Tutu


The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.  As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird


Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.  ~Abraham Joshua Heschel


Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.  ~Philip K. Dick

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.  ~Albert Einstein

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?  ~M.C. Escher

No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.  ~Samuel Johnson

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?  Four.  Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Most passport pictures are good likenesses, and it is time we faced it.  ~Katharine Brush

There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values.  ~David G. Myers, Social Psychology

Objectivity has about as much substance as the emperor's new clothes.  ~Connie Miller

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.  We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.  ~Sigmund Freud

How do we know that the sky is not green and we are all colour-blind?  ~Author Unknown

There are no facts, only interpretations.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

What is reality anyway!  It's nothing but a collective hunch.  ~Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1985, performed by Lily Tomlin

What is a face, really?  Its own photo?  Its make-up?  Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter?  That which is in front?  Inside?  Behind?  And the rest?  Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way?  Deformations simply do not exist.  ~Pablo Picasso

I am a thread too slender
To suspend all this reality...
~Phillip Pulfrey, "Madness," Love, Abstraction and other Speculations, www.originals.net

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.  ~Lewis Mumford, "Orientation to Life," The Conduct of Life, 1951

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.  ~John Lennon

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.  ~T.S. Eliot

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.  ~Democritus

Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblances that may have sprung from this condition.  Both loved plants that foamed and frothed over walls and pergolas, spread in tides beneath trees; both saw flowers in islands of colored light - an image the normal eye captures only by squinting.  ~Eleanor Perenyi

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.  ~Louise Nevelson

It must be hard to be a model, because you'd want to be like the photograph of you, and you can't ever look that way.  ~Andy Warhol

Few people have the imagination for reality.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another.  ~John Burroughs

I have a very firm grasp on reality!  I can reach out and strangle it any time!  ~Author Unknown

Reality is not always probable, or likely.  ~Jorge Luis Borges

Question reality, especially if it contradicts the evidence of your hopes and dreams.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?  ~Author Unknown

Okay, who put a "stop payment" on my reality check?  ~Author Unknown

Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides.  ~Frank Tyger

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas.  It means their "agreement," as falsity means their disagreement, with "reality."  ~William James

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith

I hate cameras.  They are so much more sure than I am about everything.  ~John Steinbeck

Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?  ~Calvin and Hobbes

Belief in God?  An afterlife?  I believe in rock:  this apodictic rock beneath my feet.  ~Edward Abbey

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.  ~Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain

All is illusion, although as long as there's an illusion that the kids need to be fed, all might as well be reality.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Reality bites... and doesn't let go.  ~Author Unknown

The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.  ~Francis Bacon

The formula "two and two make five" is not without its attractions.  ~Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, 1864

How reluctantly the mind consents to reality!  ~Norman Douglas

If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I find it the lesser chaos.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There is a fine line between dreams and reality, it's up to you to draw it.  ~B. Quilliam

Reality is too much to take in heapfuls, but sprinkle it sparingly upon life's path and most can tread it lightly.  ~Terri Guillemets

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.  I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.  ~M.C. Escher

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact - even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.  ~Daniel J. Boorstin

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.  ~Eugene O'Neill

Reality is a palette that humans paint on to let themselves sleep better at night.  ~Author Unknown

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.  ~Tom Robbins

I believe in a real, physical world.  I figure if the world existed only in my mind, it would pay more attention to me.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.  ~E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 1960

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.  ~Jules de Gaultier

Everything you can imagine is real.  ~Pablo Picasso

Faith is a fine invention
When gentlemen can see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
~Emily Dickinson, "Faith Is a Fine Invention," Poems, Second Series

Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.  ~Woody Allen

After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident, you begin to worry about history.  ~Author Unknown

One bright day in the middle of night two dead boys rose to fight.  Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot one another.  A deaf policeman heard the noise, and saved the lives of the two dead boys.  If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.  ~Author Unknown

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.  ~Voltaire

You must be blind if you can't see
The gaping hole called reality.
~Stereo MC's, "Connected"

This is a work of fiction.  All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence.  Or lack thereof.  ~Neil Gaiman, Books of Magic III

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.  ~Jessamyn West

Every time I close the door on reality it comes in through the windows.  ~Jennifer Yane

As I was sitting in my chair,
I knew the bottom wasn't there,
Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that.
~Hughes Mearns

Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.  ~Jane Wagner

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need.  ~Margaret Mead

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.  ~Swedish Proverb

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us.  That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand.  ~Emily Kimbrough

There are days when you need someone who just wants to be your sunshine and not the air you breathe.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There's one sad truth in life I've found
While journeying east and west -
The only folks we really wound
Are those we love the best.
We flatter those we scarcely know,
We please the fleeting guest,
And deal full many a thoughtless blow
To those who love us best.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Don't smother each other.  No one can grow in the shade.  ~Leo Buscaglia

For lack of an occasional expression of love, a relationship strong at the seams can wear thin in the middle.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.  ~Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say?  And why are you waiting?  ~Stephen Levine

Sometimes it is the person closest to us who must travel the furthest distance to be our friend.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Sticks and stones are hard on bones
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything
But silence breaks the heart.
~Phyllis McGinley, "Ballade of Lost Objects," 1954

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.  ~Henry Winkler

I like her because she smiles at me and means it.  ~Anonymous

Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.  ~Miles Franklin

In the end, who among us does not choose to be a little less right to be a little less lonely.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.  ~Frederick Buechner

Present your family and friends with their eulogies now - they won't be able to hear how much you love them and appreciate them from the grave.  ~Anonymous

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.  "Pooh!" he whispered.  "Yes, Piglet?"  "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw.  "I just wanted to be sure of you."  ~A.A. Milne

I felt it shelter to speak to you.  ~Emily Dickinson

Are we not like two volumes of one book?  ~Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Trouble is part of your life, and if you don't share it, you don't give the person who loves you enough chance to love you enough.  ~Dinah Shore

Lust is easy.  Love is hard.  Like is most important.  ~Carl Reiner

Basically, the only thing we need is a hand that rests on our own, that wishes it well, that sometimes guides us.  ~Hector Bianciotti, Sans La Misericorde du Christ

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.  ~Marcel Proust

When something is missing in your life, it usually turns out to be someone.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

To know when to go away and when to come closer is the key to any lasting relationship.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada

Never give up on someone you can't go a day without thinking about.  ~Author Unknown

As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that wasn't supposed to ever let you down probably will.  You will have your heart broken probably more than once and it's harder every time.  You'll break hearts too, so remember how it felt when yours was broken.  You'll fight with your best friend.  You'll blame a new love for things an old one did.  You'll cry because time is passing too fast, and you'll eventually lose someone you love.  ~Author Unknown

Without a single thought, two hands collide and the world finally makes sense again.  ~Kayla Dawn

A lovers' quarrel is always about every quarrel you ever had.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Some people come into our lives and quickly go.  Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same.  ~Flavia Weedn, Forever, © Flavia.com

No road is long with good company.  ~Turkish Proverb

Happiness is having a dream you cannot let go of and a partner who would never ask you to.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Sometimes, we need a few people in our lives who will calmly call our bluff.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

If fame were based on kindness instead of popularity, on understanding and not on worldwide attention, you would be the biggest celebrity on earth.  And to my heart, you already are.  ~Anonymous

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.  ~Oprah Winfrey

Good company upon the road is the shortest cut.  ~Author Unknown

There are times when two people need to step apart from one another, but there is no rule that says they have to turn and fire.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul.  ~Julie-Jeanne Eléonore de Lepsinasse

In the coldest February, as in every other month in every other year, the best thing to hold on to in this world is each other.  ~Linda Ellerbee, Move On: Adventures in the Real World

Soul-mates are people who bring out the best in you.  They are not perfect but are always perfect for you.  ~Author Unknown

There are couples a matchmaker would match every time - and couples who, for no rhyme or reason, rhyme.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

People change and forget to tell each other.  ~Lillian Hellman

Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you're really strangers.  ~Mary Tyler Moore

Sometimes two people need to step apart
and make a space between
that each might see the other anew,
in a glance across a room
or silhouetted against the moon.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.  ~Wayne W. Dyer

We are, many of us, a planet orbiting somebody's sun, unconscious of a lonely moon, orbiting our planet.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.  ~From the movie Annie



There's something in every atheist, itching to believe, and something in every believer, itching to doubt.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.  ~John Updike, Self-Consciousness, 1989


A religion without the element of mystery would not be a religion at all.  ~Edwin Lewis


It is doubtless true that religion has been the world's psychiatrist throughout the centuries.  ~Karl Menninger


Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer


All religions are the same:  religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.  ~Cathy Ladman


No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard.  ~William Ernest Hocking


The church is the great lost and found department.  ~Robert Short


I speak not of men's creeds - they rest between
Man and his Maker.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me.  The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green.  The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.  ~Thomas Merton


God made so many different kinds of people.  Why would he allow only one way to serve him?  ~Martin Buber


All religions must be tolerated... for... every man must get to heaven his own way.  ~Frederick the Great


This is my simple religion.  There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy.  Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.  ~Dalai Lama


People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


Most men's anger about religion is as if two men should quarrel for a lady that neither of them care for.  ~George Savile, Marquess de Halifax


Most sermons sound to me like commercials - but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances.  ~Theodore Dreiser, 1941


I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


All men have need of the gods.  ~Homer


There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure.  ~Harvard Lamphoon, "Doon" (paraphrase)


Follow Descartes!  Do not give up the religion of your youth until you get a better one.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.  ~Seneca the Younger


No man treats a motor car as foolishly as he treats another human being.  When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin, he does not say, "You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go."  He attempts to find out what is wrong and set it right.  ~Bertrand Russell, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?


My religious position:  I think that God could do a lot better, and I'm willing to give Him the chance.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine.  ~Austin O'Malley


If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.  ~G.K. Chesterton


The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell.  ~Sean Ningen


Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.  ~G.K. Chesterton


Christianity is not being destroyed by the confusions and concussions of the time; it is being discovered.  ~Hugh E. Brown


A faith of convenience is a hollow faith.  ~M*A*S*H, Father Mulcahy, "A Holy Mess," 1982


The churches must learn humility as well as teach it.  ~George Bernard Shaw, St. Joan


I considered atheism, but there weren't enough holidays.  ~Author Unknown


A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.  ~Havelock Ellis


This is a little prayer dedicated to the separation of church and state.  I guess if they are going to force those kids to pray in schools they might as well have a nice prayer like this:  Our Father who art in heaven, and to the republic for which it stands, thy kingdom come, one nation indivisible as in heaven, give us this day as we forgive those who so proudly we hail.  Crown thy good into temptation but deliver us from the twilight's last gleaming.  Amen and Awomen.  ~George Carlin


Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.  ~John Morley


In church, sacred music would make believers of us all - but preachers can be counted on to restore the balance.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


How orderly philosophical is the landscape, are all the inhabitants of this World!  It is the creation of a god who "ever plays the geometer."  ~Aldous Huxley, "Music at Night"


Man is a Religious Animal.  He is the only Religious Animal.  He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them.  He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.  He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.  ~Mark Twain


Traveler:  "God has been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer."
Farmer:  "You should have seen how he treated them when I wasn't around."
~Author Unknown


I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.  ~Doug McLeod


I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it.  ~Joe Mullally


According to science, the universe began as a swirl of gas that, as it cooled, spun off the Ten Commandments.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.  ~William James


You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.  ~Anne Lamott


But who prays for Satan?  Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?  ~Mark Twain


Infidel:  In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soul-less conditions.  It is the opium of the people.  ~Karl Marx, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," 1884


I believe in God; I just don't trust anyone who works for him.  ~Author unknown, from a stand-up comedy routine on television


There are three religious truths:  1) Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.  2) Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian faith.  3) Baptists do not recognize each other in the liquor store or at Hooters.  ~Author Unknown


Not all religion is to be found in the church, any more than all knowledge is found in the classroom.  ~Author Unknown


Philosophy is questions that may never be answered.  Religion is answers that may never be questioned.  ~Author Unknown


Were the purportings of the Bible to be a revelation false, it would still be the truest book that was ever written.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal.  If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


It is fear that first brought gods into the world.  ~Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon


If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides.  ~Old Yiddish Proverb


The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.  ~Richard Burton


Religion is a fashionable substitute for Belief.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891


I contend that we are both atheists.  I just believe in one fewer god than you do.  When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.  ~Stephen Roberts


I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.  ~Tony Kushner, Angels in America






Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?  ~Douglas Adams


No creed can be stretched to the size of truth; no church can be made as large as man.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays


Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.  ~David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 1739


In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.  ~Thomas Jefferson


I didn't know I had a quarrel with him.  ~Henry Thoreau in answer to the question, "Have you made your peace with God?"


In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners.  ~Jonathon Miller


I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State.  My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.  ~George Carlin


It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.  ~Thomas Jefferson


Mankind have banned the Divinity from their presence; they have relegated him to a sanctuary; the walls of the temple restrict his view; he does not exist outside of it.  ~Diderot, Pensées philosophiques, 1746


If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying."  And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is, "Probably because of something you did."  ~Saturday Night Live, Jack Handey, "Deep Thoughts "


When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.  ~Frank Sinatra


My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.  Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God.  ~Albert Einstein


Oh, honey, God don't care which church you go, long as you show up!  ~Robert Harling, Steel Magnolias


Some people would have us love, or rather obey God, chiefly because he outbids the devil.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians.  It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.  ~G.C. Lichtenberg


I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless.  ~Peter Walker


What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.  ~George Santayana, Reason in Religion


Scriptures:  the sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.  ~Ambrose Bierce


"I refuse to prove that I exist" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing."  "Oh," says man, "but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn't it?  It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't.  Q.E.D."  "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.  ~Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


There are ten church members by inheritance for every one by conviction.  ~Author Unknown


A man without religion is like a horse without a bridle.  ~Latin Proverb


There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.  ~Louis Kronenberger


The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?  ~John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, 20 June 1815


Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated


Moral:  a peerless maxim enumerated by God in his Holy Bible, such as that of Deut. 23:1, if your testicles are crushed or your male member missing, you must never enter a sanctuary of the Lord.  ~Donald Morgan


It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.  ~Denis Diderot


How many observe Christ's birthday! How few his precepts!
O! 'tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.
~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1757


Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.  ~C.C. Colton


To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.  ~Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinthes, 1962


Religion is a pill best swallowed without chewing.  ~Author Unknown


A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.  ~Francis Bacon, Essays: Of Atheism, 1625


Impiety, n.:  Your irreverence toward my deity.  ~Ambrose Bierce


There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa.  They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land.  They said "Let us pray," and we dutifully shut our eyes.  When we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible.  ~Desmond M. Tutu, "Religious Human Rights and the Bible"


A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.  ~James Feibleman, Understanding Philosophy, 1973


I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.  Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.  ~Pearl S. Buck


Religion:  A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.  ~Ambrose Bierce


An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest:  "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"  "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know."  "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"  ~Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek


I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.  ~D. Dale Gulledge


God is a concept by which we measure our pain.  ~John Lennon


The faith that stands on authority is not faith.   ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.  ~Edgar Allen Poe


On religious issues there can be little or no compromise.  There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs.  There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being.  But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly.  The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom.  They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent.  If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.  I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D.  Just who do they think they are?  And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?  And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate.  I am warning them today:  I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.  ~Barry Goldwater


People who rely most on God rely least on themselves.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays


Why should we take advice on sex from the pope?  If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't.  ~George Bernard Shaw


God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.  ~Imamu Amiri Baraka


Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.  ~George Santayana


The world is not a prison house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.  ~Edwin Arlington Robinson


To crush out fanaticism and revere the infinite, such is the law.  Let us not confine ourselves to falling prostrate beneath the tree of creation and contemplating its vast ramifications full of stars.  We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and to reject the absurd; to admit nothing that is inexplicable excepting what is necessary, to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion, to remove the vermin from the garden of God.  ~Victor Hugo


It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.  ~Abraham Lincoln, quoted in What Great Men Think Of Religion by Ira Cardiff


Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains.... But it can put mountains where there are none.  ~Friedrich Nietzche, Human, All Too Human, 1879


It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.  ~H.L. Mencken


Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.  ~George Bernard Shaw


The Bible is literature, not dogma.  ~George Santayana


The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby.  Let us be duly thankful for out blessings.  ~Garrett Hardin


Sunday school:  a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.  ~H.L. Mencken


Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent and the serpent didn't have a leg to stand on.  ~Author Unknown


The wages of sin are death, but after they take the taxes out, it's more like a tired feeling, really.  ~Paula Poundstone


To all things clergic
I am allergic
~Alexander Woolcott, attributed


No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.  ~G.B. Shaw, Androcles and the Lion, 1912


What has been the effect of religious coercion?  To make half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.  ~Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785


The act of bellringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions.  It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.  ~Ezra Pound


In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.  ~John Updike, A Month of Sundays, 1975


Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.  ~Mark Twain


In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.  ~Mark Twain


If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words.  I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.  ~Isaac Asimov, I.  Asimov:  A Memoir


Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.  ~Robert Green Ingersoll


God - but a word invoked to explain the world.  ~Prat de Lamartine


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


How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?  ~John W. Draper


Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves.  Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.  ~Robert Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long


The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress.  ~Emmet F. Fields


When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession.  He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are damned.  ~Robert Ingersoll, Some Reasons Why


Religions are like farts.  Yours is good, but everyone else's stinks.  ~Picket Fences


Geology shows that fossils are of different ages.  Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time.  Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species.  Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together.  Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing "Does not!"  ~Author Unknown


We are not accountable for the sins of Adam.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


The third major characteristic of God - "infinitude" - is the catchall, the universal modifier of Christian theology.  God is not merely a being; he is infinite being.  God is not merely good; he is infinite goodness.  God is not merely wise; he is infinite wisdom.  And so on down the list.  God is exaggeration run amuck.  ~George H. Smith, Atheism:  The Case Against God


We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.  ~H.L. Mencken


[The true Indian] sees no need for setting apart one day in seven as a holy day, because to him all days are God's days.  The first American mingled with his pride a singular humility.  Spiritual arrogance was foreign to his nature and teaching.  ~Ohiyesa of the Santee Sioux (Charles Alexander Eastman)


On the sixth day God created man.  On the seventh day, man returned the favor.  ~Author Unknown


If God has created us in His image, we have more than returned the compliment.  ~Voltaire


For the skeptic there remains only one consolation:  if there should be such a thing as superhuman law, it is administered with subhuman efficiency.  ~Eric Ambler


God is innocent.  Noah built in a flood plain.  ~Author Unknown


To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.  ~Ghose Aurobindo


Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing... he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard.  Never does one see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised.  ~Author Unknown


The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.  ~Alfred North Whitehead


Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.  ~Soren Kierkegaard, Time, 16 December 1946


Christian fundamentalism:  the doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.  ~Andrew Lias


Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founders' than any other agency in the world.  ~Richard Le Gallienne


I prefer to think of them as the Ten Suggestions.  ~Author Unknown


Christian, n.:  one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.  ~Judith Hayes, In God We Trust:  But Which One?


God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.  ~Voltaire


If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel.  Until then, let us stand erect.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872


It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.  ~H.L. Mencken


On the other hand, the Bible contains much that is relevant today, like Noah taking forty days to find a place to park.  ~Curtis McDougall


An infinite God ought to be able to protect Himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures.  ~Robert Ingersoll, quoted in Ingersoll the Magnificent


Religion supports nobody.  It has to be supported.  It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests.  It is a perpetual mendicant.  It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


Christianity is not a religion; it's an industry.  ~Author Unknown


It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


In an early class, one of the students asked me if I believed in God.  I replied, 'I don't think so.'  And then proceeded to wail on the theme, using material from this column of some weeks ago, in which I observed the perpetuation of insanity on this planet through the mediums of Arabs-vs-Jews, Catholics-vs-Protestants, Southern Baptists-vs-Everyone.  I said I felt if 'God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them,' (Genesis 2:27, King James's italics, not mine) then we were God.  And when Man (my capitalization, not King James's) in his most creative, his most loving, his most gentle and most human, then he is most God-like.  The student said he would pray for my immortal soul.  He also asked for my address, so he could send me some literature on the subject of God.  I thanked him politely and told him I'd gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas.  ~Harlan Ellison


Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.  ~Chapman Cohen


I think I'll believe in Gosh instead of God.  If you don't believe in Gosh too, you'll be darned to heck.  ~Author Unknown


Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.  ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion


The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there.  ~Bono


He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.  ~George Orwell


God is dead:  but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.  ~Friedrich Neitzsche


None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors.  The records do not show that Adam and Eve were married.  ~Ed Howe


In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."  I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.  ~Stephen J. Gould


The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Church tax exemption means that we all drop our money in the collection boxes, whether we go to church or not and whether we are interested in the church or not.  It is systematic and complete robbery, from which none of us escapes.  ~E. Haldeman-Julius, The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life



You can never tell the sinner from the Christian.  They drink the same drinks and smoke the same cigars.  ~Aimee Semple McPherson


An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.  ~John Buchan


Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.  ~Author Unknown


Instead of being born again, why not just grow up?  ~Author Unknown


A Christian is a man who feels
Repentance on a Sunday
For what he did on Saturday
And is going to do on Monday.
~Thomas Russell Ybarra, The Christian


A great deal of what passes for current Christianity consists in denouncing other people's vices and faults.  ~Henry H. Williams


The point is, could God pass an examination in Theology?  ~Malcolm Muggeridge



The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd:  why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker?... Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our sakes was the world created."  ~Julian the Apostate


Jesus saves... passes to Moses... shoots... scores!  ~Author Unknown


Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.  ~Author Unknown






They were allowed to stay there on one condition, and that is that they didn't eat of the tree of knowledge.  That has been the condition of the Christian church from then until now.  They haven't eaten as yet, as a rule they do not.  ~Clarence Darrow


To hear many religious people talk, one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms, but the devil slapped on the genitals.  ~Don Schrader


Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams - they all have different names, but they all contain water.  Just as religions do - they all contain truths.  ~Muhammad Ali


A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven.  An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain - then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity.  Is that the system?  ~Robert A. Heinlein


God tells Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  If this was the only way they could understand the difference between good and evil, how could they have known that it was wrong to disobey God and eat the fruit?  ~Laurie Lynn


A converted cannibal is one who, on Friday, eats only fishermen.  ~Emily Lotney


I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.  ~Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason


I believe in God, but I'm not too clear on the other details.  ~Bill Veeck


People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.  ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


Thousands have gone to heaven who never read one page of the Bible.  ~Francis A. Baker


If God doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you.  ~Author Unknown


No rage is equal to the rage of a contented right-thinking man when he is confronted in the marketplace by an idea which belongs in the pulpit.  ~Thurman W. Arnold


Those people who tell me that I'm going to hell while they are going to heaven somehow make me very glad that we're going to separate destinations.  ~Martin Terman


Inspiration:  a peculiar effect of divine flatulence emitted by the Holy Spirit which hisses into the ears of a few chosen of God.  ~Voltaire


A theologian is a person who uses the word 'God' to hide his ignorance.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays


The myths about Hades and the gods, though they are pure invention, help to make men virtuous.  ~Diodorus Siculus, c. 20 BC


The Bible may be the truth but it's not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  ~Samuel Butler


Religion seems to have a way of making people abandon logic.  ~Amanda Baxter


So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.  ~Bertrand Russell


You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.  Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly.  It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.  ~Aldous Huxley


Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness.  It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.  ~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity


One cannot erect, on the basis of a motive that exists only for a very few, an obligation that shall apply to everyone.  ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion


The Cross is a gibbet - rather an odd thing to make use of as a talisman against bad luck, if that is how we regard it.  Or is it, instead, a cynical reminder that Virtue usually gets pilloried whenever it makes one of its occasional appearances in this world?  ~Denis Johnston, The Brazen Horn


God has always resembled his creators.  He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism.  ~Donald Morgan



I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.  ~Frederick Douglass, escaped slave


[A]ll deities reside in the human breast.  ~William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"


Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things:  One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell.  The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.  ~Butch Hancock


The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs.  ~Bill Maher


Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.  ~Pascal, Pensees, 1670


The observances of the church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably well-kept, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts.  ~Sydney Smith


A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.  ~Carl Sagan


The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man's chains.  Man must throw off the flowers and also the chains.  ~Karl Marx, The Wisdom of Karl Marx



Strange...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!  ~Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger


It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he wished to become an author - and not to learn it better.  ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886


The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend.  Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?  ~Judith Hayes


Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite.  ~Sainte-Beuve, Les Cahiers


There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the clergyman.  ~Victor Hugo


Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays


Most people's religion is what they want to believe, not what they do believe.  ~Luther Burbank, Why I Am an Infidel


I have never resisted the lord in my life, and I never will.  But I'm not so hungry for dialogue with him that I have to make up his part as well as my own.  ~Orson Scott Card



No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says:  He is always convinced that it says what he means.  ~George Bernard Shaw


But I was not, to use the theological phrase, receptive.  The great obstacle to the influx of grace was my own perfect happiness, and it is well known that God takes no thought for the happy, any more than He does for birds and puppies, perhaps realizing they have no need of Him and mercifully letting them alone.  ~John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse, 1970


This doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind.  ~Herbert J. Muller


Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.  ~Fred Allen


It is the position of some theists that their right to freedom OF religion is abridged when they are not allowed to violate the rationalists' right to freedom FROM religion.  ~James T. Green


A dogma will thrive in soil where the truth could not get root.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays


I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.  ~George Carlin


Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behavior?  ~James Donovan


Faith is never identical with piety.  ~Karl Barth


I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off.  So I ran over and said 'Stop!  don't do it!'  'Why shouldn't I?'  he said.  I said, 'Well, there's so much to live for!'  He said, 'Like what?'  I said, 'Well...are you religious or atheist?'  He said, 'Religious.'  I said, 'Me too!  Are you Christian or  Buddhist?'  He said, 'Christian.'  I said, 'Me too!  Are you Catholic or Protestant?'  He said, 'Protestant.'  I said, 'Me too!  Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?'  He said, 'Baptist!'  I said, 'Wow!  Me too!  Are you Baptist church of god or Baptist church of the lord?'  He said, 'Baptist church of god!'  I said, 'Me too!  Are you original Baptist church of god, or are you reformed Baptist church of god?'  He said, 'Reformed Baptist church of god!'  I said, 'Me too!  Are you reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?'  He said, 'Reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!'  I said, 'Die, heretic scum,' and pushed him off.  ~Emo Phillips


Jesus picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.  ~Bruce Barton




The problem with fundamentalists insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible is that the meaning of words change.  A prime example is 'Spare the rod, spoil the child.'  A rod was a stick used by shepherds to guide their sheep to go in the desired direction.  Shepherds did not use it to beat their sheep.  The proper translation of the saying is 'Give your child guidance, or they will go astray.'  It does not mean 'Beat the shit out of your child or he will become rotten' as many fundamentalist parents seem to belive.  ~Author Unknown


Most reformers wore rubber boots and stood on glass when God sent a current of Commonsense through the Universe.  ~Elbert Hubbard


The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous.  But if by 'God' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God.  This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.  ~Carl Sagan


If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said "No."  ~Margaret "Stevie" Smith


Give the church a place in the Constitution, let her touch once more the sword of power, and the priceless fruit of all ages will turn to ashes on the lips of men.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll, Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1


He talked about Father Junipero Serra's qualifications for sainthood:  they say he cured a nun's lupus.  A miracle.  Now I'm not a doctor, but I know lupus goes into remission.  It's not always fatal.  Have Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder play ping-pong together.  That's a miracle.  ~Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 February 1989


The last Christian died on the cross.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.  ~Albert Einstein


If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbour is because God has forbidden it and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life - then, when you learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbour without hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force.  Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision.  ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion


Everyday people are straying away from the church and going back to God.  ~Lennie Bruce, The Essential Lennie Bruce, 1972


If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.  ~Lenny Bruce


Puritanism:  the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.  ~H.L. Mencken


God wanted to have a holiday, so He asked St. Peter for suggestions on where to go.  "Why not go to Jupiter?"  asked St.  Peter.  "No, too much gravity, too much stomping around," said God.  "Well, how about Mercury?"  "No, it's too hot there."  "Okay," said St. Peter, "what about Earth?"  "No," said God, "They're such horrible gossips.  When I was there 2000 years ago, I had an affair with a Jewish woman, and they're still talking about it."  ~Author Unknown


The Virgin Mary was an unwed teenage mother.  ~Author Unknown


The Christian Right is neither.  ~Author Unknown


[Creation science is] an attempt to give credibility to Hebrew mythology by making people believe that the world's foremost biologists, paleontologists, and geologists are a bunch of incompetent nincompoops.  ~Ron Peterson


Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.  ~Author Unknown


"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.  ~James Morrow


Without cultural sanction, most or all our religious beliefs and rituals would fall into the domain of mental disturbance.  ~John F. Schumaker, Corruption of Reality, Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis and Psychotherapy


We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.  ~Jonathan Swift, Miscellanies, 1711



We are punished by our sins, not for them.  ~Elbert Hubbard


It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil.  If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.  ~Helen Keller


As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in schools.  ~Author Unknown


Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.  ~Agnes Repplier, Points of View


It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.  ~G.K. Chesterton


If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.  ~Abigail Van Buren

"I must do something" always solves more problems than "Something must be done."  ~Author Unknown

A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.  ~James Allen

If you mess up, 'fess up.  ~Author Unknown

"It's a question of discipline," the little prince told me later on.  "When you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet."  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French by Richard Howard

Responsibility:  A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor.  In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Responsibility's like a string we can only see the middle of.  Both ends are out of sight.  ~William McFee, Casuals of the Sea, 1916

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.  ~Joan Didion

Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else.  ~Ivern Ball

The great thought, the great concern, the great anxiety of men is to restrict, as much as possible, the limits of their own responsibility.  ~Giosué Borsi

We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty.  It is the other side of rights.  ~Pearl Buck

Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.  ~Colin Powell

Ef you take a sword an' dror it,
An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,
God'll send the bill to you.
~James Russell Lowell

Why do children want to grow up?  Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity.  But what is there today, in America, that very poor and very rich adolescents want to do but cannot do?  Not much:  they can "do" drugs, "have" sex, "make" babies, and "get" money (from their parents, crime, or the State).  For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty.  Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?  ~Thomas Szasz

With every civil right there has to be a corresponding civil obligation.  ~Edison Haines

When there is hell to pay, it is usually cheaper to pay it than to finance an endless purgatory.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.  ~John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

We have the Bill of Rights.  What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.  ~Bill Maher

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens?  A terrible thing:  no one to blame.  ~Erica Jong

The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree
I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed.
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

When you blame others, you give up your power to change.  ~Author Unknown

The ultimate folly is to think that something crucial to your welfare is being taken care of for you.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Even when we know what is right, too often we fail to act.  More often we grab greedily for the day, letting tomorrow bring what it will, putting off the unpleasant and unpopular.  ~Bernard M. Baruch

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own.  You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president.  You realize that you control your own destiny.  ~Albert Ellis

Duty is what one expects from others.  ~Oscar Wilde

For me the diamond dawns are set
In rings of beauty,
And all my ways are dewy wet
With pleasant duty.
~John Townsend Trowbridge

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.  ~William James

Mistakes fail in their mission of helping the person who blames them on the other fellow.  ~Henry S. Haskins

YYou must take personal responsibility.  You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.  ~Jim Rohn

ou are not responsible for the programming you picked up in childhood.  However, as an adult, you are one hundred percent responsible for fixing it.  ~Ken Keyes, Jr.

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.  ~Booker T. Washington

God has entrusted me with myself.  ~Epictetus

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until... we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say "I lost it."  ~Sidney J. Harris

When others, a man begins to blame
He'll soon find himself alone,
The same.
~Nigel Bloomfield

You can awaken each day to obligations you never chose - or you can decide now to choose them.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.  ~Stanley Milgram

When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself.  ~Louis Nizer

Whether or not you have children yourself, you are a parent to the next generation.  If we can only stop thinking of children as individual property and think of them as the next generation, then we can realize we all have a role to play.  ~Charlotte Davis Kasl, Finding Joy, 1994

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.  ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous.  Its compulsion is upon us.  ~Woodrow Wilson

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.  ~Voltaire

No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility.  ~Gerald W. Johnson

Those who are unwilling to invest in the future haven't earned one.  ~H.W. Lewis, Technological Risk, 1990

Never point a finger where you never lent a hand.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Dr. Miller says we are pessimistic because life seems like a very bad, very screwed-up film.  If you ask "What the hell is wrong with the projector?" and go up to the control room, you find it's empty.  You are the projectionist, and you should have been up there all the time.  ~Colin Wilson

We all participate in weaving the social fabric; we should therefore all participate in patching the fabric when it develops holes.  ~Anne C. Weisberg, Everything a Working Mother Needs to Know, 1994

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.  ~George Bernard Shaw

The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off.  ~Abe Lemons

When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance, his colleagues generally present him with a watch.  ~R.C. Sherriff

When a man retires, his wife gets twice the husband but only half the income.  ~Chi Chi Rodriguez

A retired husband is often a wife's full-time job.  ~Ella Harris

Retired is being twice tired, I've thought
First tired of working,
Then tired of not.
~Richard Armour

I've been attending lots of seminars in my retirement.  They're called naps.  ~Merri Brownworth

Retirement:  It's nice to get out of the rat race, but you have to learn to get along with less cheese.  ~Gene Perret

I'm retired - goodbye tension, hello pension!  ~Author Unknown

Retirement: World's longest coffee break.  ~Author Unknown

Retirement has been a discovery of beauty for me.  I never had the time before to notice the beauty of my grandkids, my wife, the tree outside my very own front door.  And, the beauty of time itself.  ~Hartman Jule

O, blest retirement! friend to life's decline -
How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these,
A youth of labor with an age of ease!
~Oliver Goldsmith

Middle age is when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.  ~Author Unknown

Life begins at retirement.  ~Author Unknown

The challenge of retirement is how to spend time without spending money.  ~Author Unknown

If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles.  ~Doug Larson

Retirement is wonderful. It's doing nothing without worrying about getting caught at it.  ~Gene Perret

There are some who start their retirement long before they stop working.  ~Robert Half

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.  ~J. Lubbock

When you retire, think and act as if you were still working; when you're still working, think and act a bit as if you were already retired.  ~Author Unknown

The question isn't at what age I want to retire, it's at what income.  ~George Foreman

Retirement means no pressure, no stress, no heartache... unless you play golf.  ~Gene Perret

I'm not just retiring from the company, I'm also retiring from my stress, my commute, my alarm clock, and my iron.  ~Hartman Jule

Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.  ~Jim Bishop

Don't play too much golf.  Two rounds a day are plenty.  ~Harry Vardon

The best time to start thinking about your retirement is before the boss does.  ~Author Unknown

Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

I'm now as free as the breeze - with roughly the same income.  ~Gene Perret

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.  ~Will Rogers, Autobiography, 1949

When you retire, you switch bosses - from the one who hired you to the one who married you.  ~Gene Perret

When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces.  Women go right on cooking.  ~Gail Sheehy

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Retirement without the love of letters is a living burial.  ~Seneca

Age is only a number, a cipher for the records.  A man can't retire his experience.  He must use it.  ~Bernard Baruch

A gold watch is the most appropriate gift for retirement, as its recipients have given up so many of their golden hours in a lifetime of service.  ~Harry Mahtar

Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.  ~Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne

Retirement is having nothing to do and someone always keeping you from it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Retire from work, but not from life.  ~M.K. Soni

Sometimes it's important to work for that pot of gold.  But other times it's essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow.  ~Douglas Pagels, These Are the Gifts I'd Like to Give to You

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I enjoy waking up and not having to go to work.  So I do it three or four times a day.  ~Gene Perret

In retirement, every day is Boss Day and every day is Employee Appreciation Day.  ~Terri Guillemets

Retirement is like a long vacation in Las Vegas.  The goal is to enjoy it the fullest, but not so fully that you run out of money.  ~Jonathan Clements

I try to treat each evening and weekend as little slices of retirement because no one is guaranteed a lengthy one at the end of their career.  ~Mike Hammar

Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous.  When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.  ~George Burns

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.  ~Ogden Nash

Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.  ~Herbert Asquith

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.  ~Ernest Hemingway

Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.  ~William Wordsworth

First you forget names; then you forget faces; then you forget to zip up your fly; and then you forget to unzip your fly.  ~Branch Rickey

In my retirement I go for a short swim at least once or twice every day.  It's either that or buy a new golf ball.  ~Gene Perret

Sometimes it's hard to tell if retirement is a reward for a lifetime of hard work or a punishment.  ~Terri Guillemets

The reason the pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can't see him laughing.  ~Phyllis Diller

If you drink, don't drive.  Don't even putt.  ~Dean Martin

If you are going to throw a club, it is important to throw it ahead of you, down the fairway, so you don't have to waste energy going back to pick it up.  ~Tommy Bolt

Retirement kills more people than hard work ever did.  ~Malcolm Forbes

There are days in retirement that are the waking equivalent of a dreamless sleep, if you know what I mean.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Retirement:  That's when you return from work one day and say, "Hi, Honey, I'm home - forever."  ~Gene Perret

Don't refuse to go on an occasional wild goose chase - that's what wild geese are for.  ~Author Unknown

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily.  To not dare is to lose oneself.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.  ~Pablo Picasso

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself.  There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth.  So what the hell, leap.  ~Cynthia Heimel, "Lower Manhattan Survival Tactics"

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Progress always involves risks.  You can't steal second base and keep your foot on first.  ~Frederick B. Wilcox

Why not go out on a limb?  Isn't that where the fruit is?  ~Frank Scully

Yes, risk taking is inherently failure-prone.  Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing-taking.  ~Tim McMahon

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.  ~Author Unknown

If you don't take risks, you'll have a wasted soul.  ~Drew Barrymore

The fear of being laughed at makes cowards of us all.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

You'll always miss 100% of the shots you don't take.  ~Wayne Gretzky

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.  ~G.K. Chesterton

What is more mortifying than to feel you've missed the Plum for want of courage to shake the Tree?  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

A ship in harbor is safe - but that is not what ships are for.  ~John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic

To eat an egg, you must break the shell.  ~Jamaican Proverb

To win you have to risk loss.  ~Jean-Claude Killy

The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided.  It is sometimes better to abandon one's self to destiny.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte

If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.  ~Julia Sorel (Rosalyn Drexler), See How She Runs, 1978

Take risks:  if you win, you will be happy; if you lose, you will be wise.  ~Author Unknown

Prudence keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.  ~Samuel Johnson

This nation was built by men who took risks - pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, business men who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.  ~Brooks Atkinson

The more chance there is of stubbing your toe, the more chance you have of stepping into success.  ~Author Unknown

The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge of appetite, his own little festival of the Saturnalia, a brief excursion from his way of life.  ~Robert MacIver

Of all the people I have ever known, those who have pursued their dreams and failed have lived a much more fulfilling life than those who have put their dreams on a shelf for fear of failure.  ~Author Unknown

Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.  ~Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, 1759

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.  ~Robert F. Kennedy

Adventure is what happens when you just did something stupid.  ~Professor Bernie

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.  ~Seneca

What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?  ~Robert H. Schuller

You must lose a fly to catch a trout.  ~George Herbert

While forbidden fruit is said to taste sweeter, it usually spoils faster.  ~Abigail van Buren

The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.  ~Lord Chesterfield

Often we... expect and want every day to be just like today.  Even though we're not satisfied with today, we settle for security instead of discovery.  ~Stephen G. Scalese, The Whisper in Your Heart

Never be afraid to try something new.  Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic.  ~Author Unknown

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?  ~Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

Dare to be naive.  ~Buckminster Fuller

It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.  ~André Gide

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it.  Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?  ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There are those who are so scrupulously afraid of doing wrong that they seldom venture to do anything.  ~Vauvenargues

One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.  ~Chinese Proverb

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

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.  ~André Gide

Behold the turtle.  He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.  ~James Bryant Conant

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.  ~James Thurber

We fail more often by timidity than by over-daring.  ~David Grayson

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.  ~Ray Bradbury



I always loved running... it was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power.  You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.  ~Jesse Owens


Jogging is very beneficial.  It's good for your legs and your feet.  It's also very good for the ground.  It makes it feel needed.  ~Charles Schulz, Peanuts


The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.  ~Erma Bombeck


Most people run a race to see who is fastest.  I run a race to see who has the most guts.  ~Steve Prefontaine


You dont run against a bloody stop watch, do you hear?  A runner runs against himself, against the best that's in him.  Not against a dead thing of wheels and pulleys.  That's the way to be great, running against yourself.  Against all the rotten mess in the world.  Against God, if youre good enough.  ~Bill Persons


To a runner, a side stich is like a car alarm.  It signifies something is wrong, but you ignore it until it goes away.  ~Author Unknown


I don't jog.  If I die I want to be sick.  ~Abe Lemmons


It's unnatural for people to run around the city streets unless they are thieves or victims.  It makes people nervous to see someone running.  I know that when I see someone running on my street, my instincts tell me to let the dog go after him.  ~Mike Royko


Only think of two things - the gun and the tape.  When you hear the one, just run like hell until you break the other.  ~Sam Mussabini


The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.  ~Martin Mull


Finland has produced so many brilliant distance runners because back home it costs $2.50 a gallon for gas.  ~Esa Tikkannen, 1979


Blink and you miss a sprint.  The 10,000 meters is lap after lap of waiting.  Theatrically, the mile is just the right length - beginning, middle, end: a story unfolding.  ~Sebastian Coe


There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life.  But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint.  So, too, are you.  Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be.  ~George Sheehan


If God invented marathons to keep people from doing anything more stupid, the triathlon must have taken Him completely by surprise.  ~P.Z. Pearce


Everyone who has run knows that its most important value is in removing tension and allowing a release from whatever other cares the day may bring.  ~Jimmy Carter


My feet have several thousand meetings scheduled with the dirt on a trail not far from here.  Who am I to keep them waiting?  Time to run.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


The difference between a jogger and a runner is an entry blank.  ~George Sheehan


There is an itch in runners.  ~Arnold Hano


I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street.  ~Neil Armstrong on jogging, in an interview with Walter Cronkite


I don't think jogging is healthy, especially morning jogging.  If morning joggers knew how tempting they looked to morning motorists, they would stay home and do sit-ups.  ~Rita Rudner


Runners just do it - they run for the finish line even if someone else has reached it first.  ~Author Unknown


Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.  ~William Shakespeare

For safety is not a gadget but a state of mind.  ~Eleanor Everet

Safety doesn't happen by accident.  ~Author Unknown

"Safety First" is "Safety Always."  ~Charles M. Hayes

Better a thousand times careful than once dead.  ~Proverb

Precaution is better than cure.  ~Edward Coke

As soon as you see a mistake and don't fix it, it becomes your mistake.  ~Author Unknown

Safety is a cheap and effective insurance policy.  ~Author Unknown

Who can hope to be safe? who sufficiently cautious?
Guard himself as he may, every moment's an ambush.
~Horace

Safety means first aid to the uninjured.  ~Author Unknown

Accidents, and particularly street and highway accidents, do not happen - they are caused.  ~Ernest Greenwood

Prepare and prevent, don't repair and repent.  ~Author Unknown

Chance takers are accident makers.  ~Author Unknown

Hug your kids at home, but belt them in the car.  ~Author Unknown

It's better to crash into a nap than to nap into a crash.  ~Author Unknown

Luck runs out but safety is good for life.  ~Author Unknown

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.  ~James Thurber

Accidents hurt - safety doesn't.  ~Author Unknown

Working safely may get old, but so do those who practice it.  ~Author Unknown

The door to safety swings on the hinges of common sense.  ~Author Unknown

Working without safety is a dead-end job.  ~Author Unknown

Know safety, no injury.  No safety, know injury.  ~Author Unknown

We now have unshakable conviction that accident causes are man-made and that a manmade problem can be solved by men and women.  ~W.H. Cameron

Carelessness doesn't bounce; it shatters.  ~Terri Guillemets

Safety never takes a holiday.  ~Author Unknown

Danger never takes a vacation.  ~Author Unknown

When you gamble with safety, you bet your life.  ~Author Unknown

If safety is a joke, then death is the punchline.  ~Paul Laforest

Is better to lose one minute in life... than to lose life in a minute.  ~Author Unknown

While on a ladder, never step back to admire your work.  ~Author Unknown

Hearing protection is a sound investment.  ~Author Unknown

To learn about eye protection, ask someone who has one.  ~Author Unknown

Safety glasses: making foresight 20/20.  ~Author Unknown

Your safety gears are between your ears.  ~Author Unknown

Broken tools can be replaced.  You can't.  ~Author Unknown

Personal protective equipment is self-defense.  ~Author Unknown

Tomorrow - your reward for working safely today.  ~Attributed to Robert Pelton

Unsafe acts will keep you in stitches.  ~Author Unknown

Don't learn safety by accident.  ~Author Unknown

If you mess up, 'fess up.  ~Author Unknown

Road sense is the offspring of courtesy and the parent of safety.  ~Australian Traffic Rule, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren, 1938

Safety is as simple as ABC - Always Be Careful.  ~Author Unknown

Safety isn't expensive, its priceless.  ~Author Unknown

Be alert!  Accidents hurt.  ~Author Unknown

Alert today, alive tomorrow.  ~Author Unknown

Better dead sure than sure dead.  ~Author Unknown

If you don't think it's safe, it probably isn't.  ~Author Unknown

When safety is a factor, call in a contractor.  ~Author Unknown

Wishing won't keep you safe - safety will.  ~Author Unknown

Working safely is like breathing - if you don't, you die.  ~Author Unknown

The safest risk is the one you didn't take.  ~Author Unknown

Safety isn't just a slogan, it's a way of life.  ~Author Unknown



Might we not say to the confused voices which sometimes arise from the depths of our being:  "Ladies, be so kind as to speak only four at a time?"  ~Madame Swetchine


A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.  ~Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, 1942


Sanity is madness put to good uses.  ~George Santayana, Little Essays


I don't suffer from insanity.  I enjoy every minute of it.  ~Author Unknown


Madness takes its toll.  Please have exact change.  ~Author Unknown


The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness.  Think of your three best friends.  If they're okay, then it's you.  ~Rita Mae Brown


See, the human mind is kind of like... a piñata.  When it breaks open, there's a lot of surprises inside.  Once you get the piñata perspective, you see that losing your mind can be a peak experience.  ~Jane Wagner


Madness need not be all breakdown.  It may also be break-through.  ~R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience


You're only given a little spark of madness.  You mustn't lose it.  ~Robin Williams


Temporary madness may be necessary in some cases, to cleanse and renovate the mind; just as a fit of illness is to carry off the humours of the body.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


I haven't lost my mind; I have a tape back-up somewhere.  ~Author Unknown


I'll be the in to your sane.  ~Numan


I am but mad north-north-west:  when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.  ~William Shakespeare


Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.  ~Oliver W. Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858


I have my own little world, but it's okay - they know me here.  ~Author Unknown


No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, political parties, nations, and eras it's the rule.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886


A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.  ~William Ellery Channing


I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.  ~William H. Mauldin


You should listen to your heart, and not the voices in your head.  ~Matt Groening, The Simpsons, spoken by the character Marge Simpson


There is a pleasure sure
In being mad which none but madmen know.
~John Dryden, The Spanish Friar, 1681


If you are physically sick, you can elicit the interest of a battery of physicians; but if you are mentally sick, you are lucky if the janitor comes around.  ~Martin H. Fischer


No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.  ~Aristotle


There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.  ~Edwin Denby


Sanity is very rare: every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.
~Emily Dickinson


Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.  ~Marcel Proust


Today I felt pass over me
A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
~Charles Baudelaire


Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.  ~Diogenes


When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.  ~Mark Twain 


There is no great genius without some touch of madness.  ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca, "On Tranquillity of the Mind," Moral Essays


I suppose it is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one's doubts.  ~G.B. Burgin


Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.  ~Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954

I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts.  Namely, the physical universe.  ~Ken Jenkins

No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.  ~Thomas Browne

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.  ~Henry J. Tillman

A biophysicist talks physics to the biologists and biology to the physicists, but then he meets another biophysicist, they just discuss women.  ~Author Unknown

Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.  ~Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, 1972

There is something fascinating about science.  One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.  ~Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.  ~Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.  ~Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."  ~Isaac Asimov

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes.  It is innocent, unless found guilty.  A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe.  It is guilty, until found effective.  ~Edward Teller

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.  ~Wernher Von Braun

Science does not know its debt to imagination.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.  ~William Lawrence Bragg

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.  ~John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 1929

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.  ~Jean Rostand

Scientists should always state the opinions upon which their facts are based.  ~Author Unknown

That theory is worthless.  It isn't even wrong!  ~Wolfgang Pauli

Louise:  "How did you get here?"
Johnny:  "Well, basically, there was this little dot, right?  And the dot went bang and the bang expanded.  Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man, amo amas amat, quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum, sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill till Doomsday."
~From the movie Naked

Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.  ~Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1905

A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.  ~Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual, 1965

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.  ~Walter Lippmann

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.  ~Alan Valentine

Science is simply common sense at its best.  ~Thomas Huxley

Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.  ~Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics"

Physics is imagination in a straight jacket.  ~John Moffat

If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready.  The first one, too, was made out of chaos.  ~Robert Quillen

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.  ~Albert Einstein

To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.  ~Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 1995

The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it.  ~Robert L. Park, in The New York Times, 7 December 1999

The great men of science are supreme artists.  ~Martin H. Fischer

It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.  ~John Desmond Bernal, The Origin of Life, 1967

Science is the topography of ignorance.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Medical Essays, 1883

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.  ~Karl Marx, Capital, 1867

Observations always involve theory.  ~Edwin Hubble

The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA.  Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.  ~Lewis Thomas

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.  ~Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit, 1964

Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science.  ~Henry David Thoreau

I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.  ~Bertrand Russell, Icarus, or the Future of Science, 1925

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.  ~Bertrand Russell

In comparing religious belief to science, I try to remember that science is belief also.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay.  New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.  ~William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1910

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.  ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974

Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.  ~Robert K. Merton, Social Theory, 1957

The whole history of physics proves that a new discovery is quite likely lurking at the next decimal place.  ~F.K. Richtmeyer

There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool.  This is obviously impossible.  ~Richard Davisson

The task of asking nonliving matter to speak and the responsibility for interpreting its reply is that of physics.  ~J.T. Fraser, Time, the Familiar Stronger, 1987

The quantum is that embarrassing little piece of thread that always hangs from the sweater of space-time.  Pull it and the whole thing unravels.  ~Fred Alan Wolfe, Star Wave: Mind Consciousness of Quantum Physics, 1984

The doubter is a true man of science; he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.  ~Claude Bernard

In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.  ~Frank Wilczek

There were two kinds of physicists in Berlin:  on the one hand there was Einstein, and on the other all the rest.  ~Rudolph Ladenburg

Science without conscience is the soul's perdition.  ~François Rabelais, Pantagruel, 1572

Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.  ~Bertrand Russell, What I Believe, 1925

Science is the record of dead religions.  ~Oscar Wilde

In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.  ~John Reader, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man

Amoebas at the start
Were not complex;
They tore themselves apart
And started Sex.
~Arthur Guiterman

Physics is geometric proof on steroids.  ~S.A. Sachs

Ethics and Science need to shake hands.  ~Richard Clarke Cabot

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.  ~Stephen Jay Gould

Engineering is merely the slow younger brother of physics.  ~Steven Molaro and Daley Haggar, The Big Bang Theory, "The Killer Robot Instability"

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, 1872

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.  ~Albert Einstein

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

Life preys upon life.  This is biology's most fundamental fact.  ~Martin H. Fischer

But the great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact - which is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers... ~T.H. Huxley, "Biogenesis and Abiogenesis," The Royal Society President's Address to the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Liverpool, Critiques and Addresses, 1870, Collected Essays VIII

How index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of science by the tail!
~Alexander Pope, Dunciad

DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine.  ~Kenneth Boulding, "Energy and the Environment," Beasts, Ballads, and Bouldingisms, 1976

If it's green or wriggles, it's biology.
If it stinks, it's chemistry.
If it doesn't work, it's physics.
~Handy Guide to Science

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms.  A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.  ~George Wald

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.  ~Hugh Walpole

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature.  They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.  ~John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920

The microwave oven is the consolation prize in our struggle to understand physics.  ~Jason Love

I have had my results for a long time:  but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.  ~Karl Friedrich Gauss

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.  ~Thomas Henry Huxley

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.  Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.  ~Mike Adams

The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.  ~Celia Green, The Decline and Fall of Science, 1972

When gravity calls, something falls.  ~J.L.W. Brooks

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.  ~Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, 1926

Science, in the very act of solving problems, creates more of them.  ~Abraham Flexner, Universities, 1930

Science is always wrong.  It never solves a problem without creating ten more.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Reason, Observation, and Experience - the Holy Trinity of Science.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.  ~Anton Chekhov

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual.  It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.  ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook, 1956

But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.  ~Francis Darwin

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.  ~Charles Peirce

The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself.  ~Gerard Piel

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.  ~Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, 1949

Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts.  ~George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, 1896

In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again.  They really do it.  It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful.  But it happens every day.  I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.  ~Carl Sagan, 1987

Physics isn't a religion.  If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.  ~Leon Lederman

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.  ~Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes

Ah, gravity: thou art a heartless bitch.  ~Robert Cohen, Chuck Lorre, and Bill Prady, The Big Bang Theory, "The Big Bran Hypothesis," original airdate 1 October 2007

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to.  Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, "So?  Did you learn anything today?"  But not my mother.  "Izzy," she would say, "did you ask a good question today?"  That difference - asking good questions - made me become a scientist.  ~Isidor Isaac Rabi

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.  ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook, 1956

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally.  This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue.  They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.  ~Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point, 1982

Not fact-finding, but attainment to philosophy is the aim of science.  ~Martin H. Fischer

There is no gravity.  The earth sucks.  ~Graffito

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.  ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.  ~Immanuel Kant

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.  ~Max Planck, A Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, 1949

The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer.  Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.  ~G.W. Allport, Becoming, 1955

The improver of natural science absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such.  For him, scepticism is the highest of duties:  blind faith the one unpardonable sin.  ~Thomas Henry Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews, 1871

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.  ~H.L. Mencken, "Minority Report," Notebooks, 1956



Scrapbooking fills my days - not to mention my living room, bedroom and closets!  ~Author Unknown


Blessed are the children of scrapbookers, for they shall inherit the scrapbooks.  ~Author Unknown


I scrapbook therefore I am - broke.  ~Author Unknown


I could keep on scrappin'
or I could go to bed,
but then what would I do
with all these layouts in my head?
~Author Unknown, "My Addiction"


Just as pieces stitched together in a quilt warm our bodies, scrapbooks bind together memories to warm our hearts.  ~Author Unknown


My grandmother made me a scrapbook because I was once too young to remember; I am making scrapbooks for my family because one day I may be too old to remember.  ~Author Unknown


No scrap of paper bigger than my smallest punch shall be thrown away.  ~Author Unknown, "The Scrappers Creed"


When life gives you scraps, make something with them.  ~Author Unknown


Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn't all a dream?  ~Ashleigh Brilliant


We gather up pictures and bits of our past
and scrapbook them into a gift that will last.
~Kimberly Rinehart, "Scrapbooker's Verse"


Scrapbooking isn't about scraps of paper and photos.  Scrapbooking is about scraps of life - yours and those special to you.  ~Rebecca Sower


To crop or not to crop, that is the question.  ~Author Unknown


She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.  ~Frank Deford


Scrapbooking is cheaper than a therapist.  ~Author Unknown


My husband lets me have all the scrapbooking supplies I can hide.  ~Author Unknown


Time flies... scrapbook it.  ~Vivian Perez-Essockosa, owner of Lets Scrap!, a scrapbooking store in South Miami, Florida (www.lets-scrap.com)


A person is neither whole nor healthy without the memories of photo albums.  They are the storybook of our lives.  They provide a nostalgic escape from the tormented days of the present.  ~Patrick Garry


The album we've made is much more than a book.
It's worth even more than the time that it took.
~Kimberly Rinehart, "Scrapbooker's Verse"


A true scrapbook addict is one who stages photographs to match paper she likes.  ~Author Unknown


So many pictures, so little time!  ~Author Unknown


[Mama] follows us around
hoping we'll sneeze
So she can have the tissue
"For my scrapbook please."
~Toni Sorenson Brown, "She's Out of Control"


Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.  ~Henry Van Dyke, The Prison and the Angel

We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.  ~Jean Guitton

We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

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.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.  ~D.H. Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity

To wash one's hair, make one's toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure.  ~Sei Shonagon

Man is never alone.  Acknowledged or unacknowledged, that which dreams through him is always there to support him from within.  ~Laurence van der Post

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.  ~Jane Austen

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894

Think positively about yourself.... ask God who made you to keep on remaking you.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.  ~Katherine Anne Porter

Looking back, you realize that a very special person passed briefly through your life, and that person was you.  It is not too late to become that person again.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The only man we have any respect for, is he who uses all the endowment he has, and uses it until he bleeds.  ~Martin H. Fischer

And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.  ~Confucius

There are at least two kinds of cowards.  One kind always lives with himself, afraid to face the world.  The other kind lives with the world, afraid to face himself.  ~Roscoe Snowden

So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close you can walk without losing your balance.  ~Attributed to Richard M. Nixon

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge.  ~Eckhart

Self-destruction is the effect of cowardice in the highest extreme.  ~Daniel Defoe

My life has been one great big joke,
A dance that's walked,
A song that's spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke,
When I think about myself.
~Maya Angelou

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart!  What jailer so inexorable as one's self.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables, 1822

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.  ~Agnes Repplier

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart.  I am.  I am.  I am.  ~Sylvia Plath

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be the gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

The words "I am" are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to.  The thing you're claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.  ~A.L. Kitselman

People wish to be settled:  only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, 1841

You have the Answer.  Just get quiet enough to hear it.  ~Pat Obuchowski

Your soul is all that you possess.  Take it in hand and make something of it!  ~Martin H. Fischer

The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.  No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.  ~The Sickness Unto Death

We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is civil war.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

At some point in my life, I swallowed a Sun.  And now it dawns and sets in my belly.  ~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com

My heart filled with love, flowing over with joy, my own little drum that I like to march by!  ~Gunda Fijnje-Nolan

A man is ever apt to contemplate himself out of all proportion to his surroundings.  ~Christina G. Rossetti

The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You.  ~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892

You are your own judge.  The verdict is up to you.  ~Astrid Alauda

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title.  ~Virginia Woolf

One cannot spend forever sitting and solving the mysteries of one's history.  ~Lemony Snicket

Sometimes at night I light a lamp so as not to see.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

There comes a morning in life when you wake up a new person; that is to say, you wake up the same person but you realize it's your own fault.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.  ~Marcel Proust

There are plenty of people holding flashlights casting shadows, offering directions.  Perhaps it's best if you light your own way.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

The naïve follow their hearts.  The wise lead with their hearts.  ~Author Unknown

Be there for others, but never leave yourself behind.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.  ~John Donne

At this very moment, you may be saying to yourself that you have any number of admirable qualities.  You are a loyal friend, a caring person, someone who is smart, dependable, fun to be around.  That's wonderful, and I'm happy for you, but let me ask you this:  are you being any of those things to yourself?  ~Phillip C. McGraw, The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Loss Freedom, 2003

Let's get lost in the dark, forget who we were, and resurface as something new.  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

Every morning I start with a drink from my cup of sunshine, to remind myself of who I am before I step into the world of "this is who we think you are."  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created.  ~Osho

A wise man never loses anything if he have himself.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated

The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.  ~Michel de Montaigne, Of Solitude

Your heart knows your song, but you have to be willing to listen to the words.  ~Sue Rock, http://sue215.blogspot.com

All men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of a masterpiece.  ~Eddie Murphy, 1979

May those who are impoverished by their thoughts be blessed with the realization of the richness of their spirit.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.  ~W.B. Yeats

A bud can be beautiful, a work of art even.  But I'm finding it simply can't compare to the openness of the blossom.  Looking for my sun.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Present yourself always
As who you would be,
And that is the person
The world will see.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart's curtain?  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, "The Fourth Elegy," translated from German by Albert Ernest Flemming

What we do flows from who we are.  ~Paul Vitale

There is great security in the prisons we create for ourselves.  ~Stephen G. Scalese, The Whisper in Your Heart

Tell me what you feel in your room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy.  ~Henri Frederic Amiel

Every day I go into the world to seek my identity, feeling greatly blessed by the things I don't find it in.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.  ~Mark Twain

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.  And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us.  Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.  ~Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one's self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.  ~Michelangelo

Do what you must,
And your friends will adjust.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir.  He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.  ~H.F. Hedge

My heart beat, beats me senselessly,
Why's everything gotta be so intense with me...
~Katy Perry, Glen Ballard, and Matt Thiessen, "Long Shot"

There is nothing noble about being superior to some other person.  The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.  ~Hindustani Proverb

Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.  ~Chinese inscription cited by Thoreau in Walden

Almost always it is the fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The peace you seek is there, it's there between all the traffic in your mind, stop and rest for peace will find you if you let it.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don't fool.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I like too many things and get all confused and hung up running from one falling star to another till I drop.  ~Jack Kerouac, On the Road

I loathe the expression "What makes him tick."  It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression.  A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.  ~James Thurber

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Your spirit is the true shield.  ~Morihei Ueshiba

No matter what you do in life, a part of you still sits at a curbside, still hearing the drumbeat of a distant parade, still waiting for it to turn the corner.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

No one can drive us crazy unless we give them the keys.  ~Doug Horton

When I look for my existence I do not look for it in myself.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The power inside you is energy amplified.  ~Claire Todae

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892

It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz:  am I proud of me?  I gave my life to become the person I am right now!  Was it worth what I paid?  ~Richard Bach

Just let awareness have its way with you completely.  ~Scott Morrison

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion.  It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.  ~P.G. Wodehouse

My flag is raised high today.  For others to see, sure.  But more so to find which way my wind is blowing.  Almost time to chart a course.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written.  ~Mark Twain, Autobiography, 1924

Misfortunes one can endure - they come from outside, they are accidents.  But to suffer for one's own faults - ah! there is the sting of life.  ~Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892

One's only real life is the life one never leads.  ~Oscar Wilde

Your heart is full of fertile seeds, waiting to sprout.  Just as a lotus flower springs from the mire to bloom splendidly, the interaction of the cosmic breath causes the flower of the spirit to bloom and bear fruit in this world.  ~Morihei Ueshiba

A criminal becomes a popular figure because he unburdens in no small degree the consciences of his fellow man, for now they know once more where evil is to be found.  ~Carl G. Jung

We are known to our friends by a look in our eyes that we never see in a mirror.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something.  ~Robert Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apology"

Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend's emancipator.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The man that shows off, to that one who wants to convince of his value is to himself.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false...
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch), translated from German and modified by Anita Barrows and Joanna Marie Macy

A man is sometimes lost in the dust of his own raising.  ~David Ruggles

Some things become so completely our own that we forget them.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Though confined to our destiny, we do get to pick the color scheme.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize.  ~Robert Mallett, Apostilles, 1972

The Divine does not like to be shut up in a building.  The Divine likes to be out in the open.  It is right here in this very body.  Each one of us is a miniature universe, a living shrine.  ~Morihei Ueshiba

Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him.  Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be.  Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate.  Everyone has it within his power to say, "This I am today; that I will be tomorrow."  ~Louis L'Amour

There is luxury in self-reproach.... When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.  ~Oscar Wilde

Take the time to come home to yourself every day.  ~Robin Casarjean

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.  ~André Maurois

That's the thing about needs.  Sometimes when you get them met, you don't need them anymore.  ~Michael Patrick King, Sex and the City, "The Good Fight"

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.  ~Jonathan Safran Foer

Alexandros of Antioch took a block of marble and chiseled away from it everything that was not his masterpiece, the Venus de Milo.  If you will chisel away one fault from your character every day, you may discover -
a) that you're actually a statue of Margaret Thatcher.
b) that you're still just a block of marble.
c) that there are pigeon droppings on your shoes.
d) that you, too, are a hidden masterpiece.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.  ~Michel de Montaigne

Reputation is in itself only a farthing candle, of a wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.  ~James Russell Lowell

The only person you should ever compete with is yourself.  You can't hope for a fairer match.  ~Todd Ruthman

If we cannot be happy and powerful and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Unjust.  How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it.  All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.  ~Lillian Hellman

Only you can set you free.  ~Living Colour, "Cult of Personality"

I say me, knowing all the while it's not me.  ~Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 1953

There's nothing like self-improvement to get your friends to like you for who you were.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Everything that I bear within me bound, is to be found somewhere else free.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh, at yourself.  ~Ethel Barrymore

Daily I learn - sometimes painfully, other times with glee - that mine is a path never meant to be paved.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

I am my own heaven and hell!  ~J.C.F. von Schiller

Most often, walking alone with my shadow is how I find my answer, the result of gathering together all agreeable parties.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Falling, falling, falling, falling down.  Look yourself in the eye before you drown.  ~Emily Saliers, "Center Stage," Indigo Girls, 1989

We must be our own before we can be another's.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Discipline is remembering what you want.  ~David Campbell

Self-respect is the root of discipline:  The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.  ~Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence, 1967

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and apply myself to them, if they will not apply themselves to me.  ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1588

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own.  No apologies or excuses.  No one to lean on, rely on, or blame.  The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it.  This is the day your life really begins.  ~Bob Moawad

I have been my own disciple and my own master.  And I have been a good disciple but a bad master.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons.  ~Author Unknown

Everyone must choose one of two pains: The pain of discipline or the pain of regret.  ~Jim Rohn

All men are tempted.  There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.  ~Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

The cyclone derives its powers from a calm center.  So does a person.  ~Norman Vincent Peale

Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address.  ~Lane Olinghouse

It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.  ~Buddha

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

You must admit you have self-control before you can use it.  ~Carrie Latet

What makes resisting temptation difficult for many people is they don't want to discourage it completely.  ~Franklin P. Jones 

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation?  I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.  ~Oscar Wilde

It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.  ~Mick Jagger

And so, Reader, (for it is time to have done with guessing) would I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

I am,
indeed,
a king,
because I know how
to rule myself.
~Pietro Aretino, 1537

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage - pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically - to say 'no' to other things.  And the way to do that is by having a bigger 'yes' burning inside.  The enemy of the 'best' is often the 'good.'  ~Stephen Covey

If we resist our passions, it is more because of their weakness than because of our strength.  ~François, duc de La Rochefoucauld

For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The first attribute that characterizes the greater man from the moron is his thicker layer of inhibition.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Heaven is on the other side of that feeling you get when you're sitting on the couch and you get up and make a triple-decker sandwich.  It's on the other side of that, when you don't make the sandwich.  It's about sacrifice.... It's about giving up the things that basically keep you from feeling.  That's what I believe, anyway.  I'm always asking, "What am I going to give up next?"  Because I want to feel.  ~Jim Carrey, from a Michael Fleming interview in the March 2004 issue of Playboy magazine

An element of abstention, of restraint, must enter into all finer joys.  ~Vida D. Scudder

Conscience whispers, but interest screams aloud.  ~J. Petit-Senn

Not using faults does not mean that one does not have them.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The trouble with resisting temptation is it may never come your way again.  ~Korman's Law

Who is fit to govern others?
He who governs himself.
You might as well have said: nobody.
~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Serving one's own passions is the greatest slavery.  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomolia

There is no allurement or enticement, actual or imaginary, which a well-disciplined mind may not surmount.  The wish to resist more than half accomplishes the object.  ~Charlotte Dacre, The Passions, 1811

Most people want to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch.  ~Robert Orben

Nothing makes it easier to resist temptation than a proper bringing-up, a sound set of values - and witnesses.  ~Franklin P. Jones

About the only time losing is more fun than winning is when you're fighting temptation.  ~Tom Wilson

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.  ~Mark Twain

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.  ~Thomas Jefferson

We like slipping, but not falling; our real anxiety is to be tempted enough.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.  ~Benjamin Franklin

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means.  This is an obvious lie.  Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is....  A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later.  That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness.  They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.  ~C.S. Lewis

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

You are a puppet, but in the hands of the infinite, which may be your own.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Abstainer, n.  A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself.  But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.  ~Thomas Szasz, "Personal Conduct," The Second Sin, 1973

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.  What you'll discover will be wonderful.  What you'll discover is yourself.  ~Alan Alda

Never mind searching for who you are.  Search for the person you aspire to be.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.  ~Dr. Alexis Carrel

The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.  ~Julien Green

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.  ~Anaïs Nin

The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.  ~Richard Grant

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

All men should strive
to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to, and why.
~James Thurber

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.  ~Michel de Montaigne

If you don't get lost, there's a chance you may never be found.  ~Author Unknown

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  ~Henry David Thoreau, 1854

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.  ~George Moore

It is good to feel lost... because it proves you have a navigational sense of where "Home" is.  You know that a place that feels like being found exists.  And maybe your current location isn't that place but, Hallelujah, that unsettled, uneasy feeling of lost-ness just brought you closer to it.  ~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com

If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse.  You may be dead.  ~Gelett Burgess

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.  ~Elizabeth Bibesco, Haven, 195

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, he wants to reestablish them.  Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.  ~Amiel, Journal, 1884

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.  ~Muhammad Ali

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.  ~Wallace Stevens

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.  ~G.K. Chesterton, "The Logic of Elfland," Orthodoxy, 1908

If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe?  The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.  ~Author Unknown

It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts.  ~K.T. Jong

I met a lot of people in Europe.  I even encountered myself.  ~James Baldwin

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.  ~Carol Shields

To the question of your life, you are the only answer.  To the problems of your life, you are the only solution. ~Jo Coudert, Advice From A Failure  (Thanks, Elizabeth!)

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.  ~Henry David Thoreau

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.  To live is to be slowly born.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.  ~Alice Walker

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle?  A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.  ~William Butler Yeats

If you haven't had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature.  ~Phyllis Battelle

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.  ~Timothy Leary

I've left Bethlehem
and I feel free...
I've left the girl I was supposed to be
and some day I'll be born.
~Paula Cole

Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.  ~Matthew Arnold, "Self-Dependence," Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, 1852

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.  ~Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon, 1825

No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.  ~Thomas Mann

Every one of us has in him a continent of undiscovered character.  Blessed is he who acts the Columbus to his own soul.  ~Author Unknown

There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.  ~Pearl Bailey

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life.  The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.  ~Mark Twain

He who knows others is learned;
He who knows himself is wise.
~Lao-tzu, Tao te Ching

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.  ~James A. Froude

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.  ~Alan Watts

Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it's dark.  ~Zen Proverb

We are the products of editing, rather than authorship.  ~George Wald, "The Origin of Optical Activity," Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1975

To be too conscious is an illness - a real thoroughgoing illness.  ~Fyodor Dostoevski

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.  Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.  This is a kind of death.  ~Anaïs Nin

There are... things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.  ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Notes from the Underground," 1864

It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.  ~Lucille Ball

Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves.  ~William Shakespeare, "Coriolanus"

Know thyself, or at least keep renewing the acquaintance.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It's terrifying to see someone inside of whom a vital spring seems to have been broken.  It's particularly terrifying to see him in your mirror.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.  ~Anna Quindlen

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.  ~St. Augustine

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before.  You see more in you than there was before.  ~Clifton Fadiman

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.  ~Nelson Mandela

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.  ~Clifton Fadiman

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast.  People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there.  They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.  ~Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.  ~William Shakespeare

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

We run away all the time to avoid coming face to face with ourselves.  ~Author Unknown

When one feels pulled to do a particular thing, when one has passion for a certain life path, karma is always involved.  In such an instance, when the goal is worthy and makes one happy, one should continue on that same life path.  Just because the elephant cannot carry you anymore doesn't mean you should give up your goal.  Continue down the path that makes you feel fulfilled.  Those who continue on an unrewarding path for the sake of only monetary gain are displaying a lack of trust in life.  ~Kwan Yin

In order to find yourself you need to get lost in the forest of life.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion but rather to know it.  ~André Maurois

The road to self-belief is potholed.  ~Nyasha Madavo

He not busy being born is busy dying.  ~Bob Dylan

It is a puzzling thing.  The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away.  Puzzling.  ~Robert M. Pirsig

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.  ~Jean de La Fontaine

There is a limit to how much you can change to be liked for who you really are.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this:  decide what you want.  ~Ben Stein

Driving down the wrong road and knowing it,
The fork years behind, how many have thought
To pull up on the shoulder and leave the car
Empty, strike out across the fields; and how many
Are still mazed among dock and thistle,
Seeking the road they should have taken?
~Damon Knight, The Man in the Tree, 1984

What a gloomy thing, not to know the address of one's soul.  ~Victor Hugo

Knowing who you are is the best defense against who they think you are.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Those who are brutally honest are seldom so with themselves.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.  ~Buddha

By all means use sometimes to be alone.  Salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear.  ~George Herbert

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.  ~Carl G. Jung

We catch frightful glimpses of ourselves in the hostile eyes of others.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

"Know thyself?"  If I knew myself, I'd run away.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.  ~Hugh Prather

And if you find everything as soon as you look for it, you find it in vain, you look for it in vain.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

You'll never find peace of mind until you listen to your heart.  ~George Michael, "Kissing A Fool"

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying "Amen" to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to keep your soul alive.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Let your heart guide you.  It whispers, so listen carefully.  ~Littlefoot's mother, Land Before Time

Basically we are all looking for someone who knows who we are and will break it to us gently.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.  ~James A. Michener

It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself.  Makes you wonder what else you can do that you've forgotten about.  ~Alan Ball, American Beauty, 1999

One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Better you don't search for who you are until you know who it is you want to find.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.  ~Thomas Carlyle

If you're not a rebel by the age of twenty, you've got no heart, but if you haven't turned establishment by thirty, you've got no brains.  ~Swimming with Sharks, 1994, written & directed by George Huang, spoken by the character Buddy Ackerman played by Kevin Spacey

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.  ~Confucius

Your distress about life might mean you have been living for the wrong reason, not that you have no reason for living.  ~Tom O'Connor

In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it.  This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself.  ~André Gide

You cannot fully understand your own life without knowing and thinking beyond your life, your own neighborhood, and even your own nation.  ~Johnnetta Cole

There's more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line.
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine.
~Indigo Girls, "Closer to Fine"

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.  ~Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1783

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.  ~George Bernard Shaw

There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.  ~Josephine Hart

God, why do I storm heaven for answers that are already in my heart?  Every grace I need has already been given me.  Oh, lead me to the Beyond within.  ~Macrina Wieherkehr

Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.  ~Russell Lynes

[L]ife ceases to be a fraction and becomes an integer.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick, On Being a Real Person

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.  ~Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

Truth hurts - not the searching after; the running from!  ~John Eyberg

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I... recommend to every one of my Readers, the keeping a Journal of their Lives for one Week, and setting down punctually their whole Series of Employments during that Space of Time.  This kind of Self-Examination would give them a true State of themselves, and incline them to consider seriously what they are about.  One Day would rectifie the Omissions of another, and make a Man weigh all those indifferent Actions, which, though they are easily forgotten, must certainly be accounted for.  ~Joseph Addison, 1712

It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too.  ~H.W. Shaw

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipators.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Few people know so clearly what they want.  Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

All your life you pretend to be someone else, and it turns out that you were someone else pretending to be you.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Living is being born slowly.  It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942

If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably havent been born yet.  ~Neil Simon

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

That's the way things come clear.  All of a sudden.  And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.  ~Madeleine L'Engle

In the end you don't so much find yourself as you find someone who knows who you are.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.  ~G.C. Lichtenberg

There are joys which long to be ours.  God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

You will never come up against a greater adversary than your own potential, my young friend.  ~Michael Piller and Michael Wagner, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Evolution," Dr. Paul Stubbs to Wesley Crusher, original airdate 25 September 1989, stardate 43,125.8

"Know thyself" - a maxim as pernicious as it is odious.  A person observing himself would arrest his own development.  Any caterpillar who tried to "know himself" would never become a butterfly.  ~André Gide, Nouvelles Nourritures

Real birthdays are not annual affairs.  Real birthdays are the days when we have a new birth.  ~Ralph Parlette

If you aren't sure who you are, you might as well work on who you want to be.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Readjusting is a painful process, but most of us need it at one time or another.  ~Arthur Christopher Benson

When your heart speaks, take good notes.  ~Judith Campbell

Like an old gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later patiently wash out a few minute particles of gold ore.  ~Dorothy Bryant

Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile.  ~Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, 1893

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.  The most important product of his effort is his own personality.  ~Erich Fromm

Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.  ~Robert Neelly Bellah, Habits of the Heart, 1985

The contemplative life is often miserable.  One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.  ~Nicolas Chamfort

The simplest questions are the most profound.  Where were you born?  Where is your home?  Where are you going?  What are you doing?  Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.  ~Richard Bach

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.  ~George Eliot

Man can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as... from a lack of bread.  ~Richard Wright, Native Son, 1940

The truth is that it is natural, as well as necessary, for every man to be a vagabond occasionally.  ~Samuel H. Hammond

We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us.  But there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.  ~Oliver Sacks

There is deep wisdom within our very flesh, if we can only come to our senses and feel it.  ~Elizabeth A. Behnke

There are people who live their whole lives on the default settings, never realizing you can customize.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

God hides things by putting them all around us.  ~Author Unknown

I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience - and laughter.  ~Susan M. Watkins

Quality begins on the inside... and then works its way out.  ~Bob Moawad



In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.  ~Jane Haddam


Self-respect is the fruit of discipline...  ~Abraham J. Heschel


He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


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


The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.  ~Joan Didion


I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.  ~Frederick Douglass


A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself.  ~Axel Munthe


To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.  ~Joan Didion


Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.  ~Marcus Aurelius


Respect your efforts, respect yourself.  Self-respect leads to self-discipline.  When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.  ~Clint Eastwood


They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


Self-respect cannot be hunted.  It cannot be purchased.  It is never for sale.  It cannot be fabricated out of public relations.  It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when e suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it.  ~Whitney Griswold


If I despised myself, it would be no compensation if everyone saluted me, and if I respect myself, it does not trouble me if others hold me lightly.  ~Max Nordau


Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.  ~Theodore Parker


No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.  ~John Herschel


That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.  ~William J.H. Boetcker


I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself.  I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.  ~Michel de Montaigne


Self-respect permeates every aspect of your life.  ~Joe Clark


If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself.  Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.  ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky


Some people have so much respect for their superiors they have none left for themselves.  ~Peter McArthur


I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes.  What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself.  To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Respect for ourselves guides our morals; respect for others guides our manners.  ~Laurence Sterne


You do not need to be the designated driver of someone's intoxicated ego.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com


You punch me, I punch back.  I do not believe it's good for ones self-respect to be a punching bag.  ~Edward Koch


Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough.  Good enough.  Successful enough.  Thin enough.  Rich enough.  Socially responsible enough.  When you have self-respect, you have enough.  ~Gail Sheehy


Be beautiful if you can, wise if you want to, but be respected - that is essential.  ~Anna Gould


Self-respect knows no considerations.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


In order to preserve your self-respect, it is sometimes necessary to lie and cheat.  ~Robert Byrne


The individual woman is required... a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.  ~Jeannette Rankin


Respect yourself and others will respect you.  ~Confucius


A man who doesn't trust himself can never really trust anyone else.  ~Cardinal De Retz


Respecting yourself means listening to your body and emotions continuously.  Then acting beyond a linear logic to achieve ones goals.  ~Author Unknown


Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.  ~Author Unknown


If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.  ~Maya Angelou


It is the highest form of self-respect to admit our errors and mistakes and make amends for them.  To make a mistake is only an error in judgment, but to adhere to it when it is discovered shows infirmity of character.  ~Dale E. Turner


Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach flunked geography.  ~Robert Byrne, quoted in 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, 1988

The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.  ~William B. Yeats

Sex on television can't hurt you unless you fall off.  ~Author Unknown

Flies spread disease - keep yours zipped.  ~Author Unknown

Remember, if you smoke after sex you're doing it too fast.  ~Woody Allen

Don't knock masturbation - it's sex with someone I love.  ~Woody Allen

For the first time in history, sex is more dangerous than the cigarette afterward.  ~Jay Leno

Sex is not the answer.  Sex is the question.  "Yes" is the answer.  ~Swami X

Men get laid, but women get screwed.  ~Quentin Crisp

It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.  ~Elizabeth Taylor

When a guy goes to a hooker, he's not paying her for sex, he's paying her to leave.  ~Author Unknown

A dirty book is rarely dusty.  ~Author Unknown

Sex.  In America an obsession.  In other parts of the world a fact.  ~Marlene Dietrich

When a man talks dirty to a woman, it's sexual harassment.  When a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95 a minute.  ~Author Unknown

Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things:  One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell.  The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.  ~Butch Hancock

To hear many religious people talk, one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms, but the devil slapped on the genitals.  ~Don Schrader

The best sex education for kids is when Daddy pats Mommy on the fanny when he comes home from work.  ~William H. Masters

There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered:  entertainment, food, and affection.  It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection.  As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately.  When the affection is the entertainment, we no longer call it dating.  Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.  ~Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.  ~Abraham Lincoln

My reaction to porn films is as follows:  After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw.  After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.  ~Erica Jong, Playboy Magazine, September 1975

Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.  ~Mark Twain, Notebooks, 1935

What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh.  ~Henry Fielding

Sex is God's joke on human beings.  ~Bette Davis

Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.  ~Woody Allen

Against diseases here the strongest fence
Is the defensive vertue, Abstinence.
~Robert Herrick, "Abstinence"

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull.  It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all.  Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.  ~Henry Louis Mencken

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences:  suicide.  Or murder.  ~Susan Sontag

There is nothing wrong with going to bed with someone of your own sex.  People should be very free with sex, they should draw the line at goats.  ~Elton John

There's nothing better than good sex.  But bad sex?  A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is better than bad sex.  ~Billy Joel

The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.  ~William Osler

The good thing about masturbation is that you don't have to get dressed up for it.  ~Truman Capote

Sex relieves tension - love causes it.  ~Woody Allen

If you use the electric vibrator near water, you will come and go at the same time.  ~Louise Sammons

Men wake up aroused in the morning.  We can't help it.  We just wake up and we want you.  And the women are thinking, "How can he want me the way I look in the morning?"  It's because we can't see you.  We have no blood anywhere near our optic nerve.  ~Andy Rooney

I think I could fall madly in bed with you.  ~Author Unknown

Whoever called it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.  ~Groucho Marx

Sex is emotion in motion.  ~Mae West

Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
~John Donne, Extasy

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope?  If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!  ~George Bernard Shaw

I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.  ~John Waters

For women the best aphrodisiacs are words.  The G-spot is in the ears.  He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.  ~Isabel Allende

Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best.  ~Woody Allen

Sex between a man and a woman can be absolutely wonderful - provided you get between the right man and the right woman.  ~Woody Allen

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around.  ~David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965

Masturbation:  the primary sexual activity of mankind.  In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure.  ~Thomas Szasz

We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.  ~Lily Tomlin

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.  ~Aldous Huxley

The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs less.  ~Brendan Francis, Playboy, 1985

The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.  ~Leonardo da Vinci

I know nothing about sex, because I was always married.  ~Zsa Zsa Gabor

Desire is in men a hunger, in women only an appetite.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions.  The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's":  fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating.  ~Marvin Dunnette

Sex at age ninety is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.  ~George Burns

It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.  ~Marge Piercy

Sudden acquaintance brings repentance.  ~Thomas Fuller

A chicken and an egg are lying in bed.  The chicken is smoking a cigarette with a satisfied smile on its face and the egg is frowning and looking put out.  The egg mutters to no one in particular, "I guess we answered that question."  ~Author Unknown

Love is a matter of chemistry, but sex is a matter of physics.  ~Author Unknown

Sex got me into trouble from the age of fifteen:  I'm hoping that by the time I'm seventy I'll straighten it out.  ~Harold Robbins

Nymphomaniac:  a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Conservatives say teaching sex education in the public schools will promote promiscuity.  With our education system?  If we promote promiscuity the same way we promote math or science, they've got nothing to worry about.  ~Beverly Mickins

Nature abhors a virgin - a frozen asset.  ~Clare Booth Luce

A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.  ~J.G. Ballard, "News from the Sun," Myths of the Near Future, 1982

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.  ~W. Somerset Maugham, The Bread-Winner

Sex:  the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.  ~John Barrymore

It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins.  ~Chinese Proverb

Chastity:  The most unnatural of the sexual perversions.  ~Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza, 1936

Obscenity is whatever gives the Judge an erection.  ~Author Unknown

The only thing wrong with being an atheist is that there's nobody to talk to during an orgasm.  ~Author Unknown

Out upon it, I have lov'd
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.
~John Suckling

My sexual preference is often.  ~Author Unknown

Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled.  ~Harlan Ellison

Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player.  It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.  ~Casey Stengel

Sex:  the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.  ~Lord Chesterfield

Virginity can be lost by a thought.  ~St. Jerome

The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.  ~D.H. Lawrence

Men reach their sexual peak at eighteen.  Women reach theirs at thirty-five.  Do you get the feeling that God is playing a practical joke?  ~Rita Rudner

Pornography is supposed to arouse sexual desires.  If pornography is a crime, when will they arrest makers of perfume?  ~Richard Fleischer

Kids in back seats cause accidents, accidents in back seats cause kids.  ~Author Unknown

Sex is the great amateur art.  The professional, male or female, is frowned on:  he or she misses the point, and spoils the show.  ~David Cort

The best contraceptive is a glass of cold water:  not before or after, but instead.  ~Author Unknown

Instruction in sex is as important as instruction in food; yet not only are our adolescents not taught the physiology of sex, but never warned that the strongest sexual attraction may exist between persons so incompatible in tastes and capacities that they could not endure living together for a week much less a lifetime.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What, 1944

Were kisses all the joys in bed,
One woman would another wed.
~William Shakespeare, Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music, IV

Having sex is like playing bridge.  If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.  ~Woody Allen

Isn't it interesting how the sounds are the same for an awful nightmare and great sex?  ~From the television show The Golden Girls

Vanity, revenge, loneliness, boredom, all apply:  lust is one of the least of the reasons for promiscuity.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Don't worry, it only seems kinky the first time.  ~Author Unknown

The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery.  Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay.  ~Martin Luther

Sex contains all,
Bodies, Souls, meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk;
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals,
All the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,
All the governments, judges, gods, follow'd persons of the earth,
These are contain'd in sex, as parts of itself, and justifications of itself.
~Walt Whitman, "A Woman Waits for Me"

When a man goes on a date he wonders if he is going to get lucky.  A woman already knows.  ~Frederike Ryder

My father told me all about the birds and the bees, the liar - I went steady with a woodpecker till I was twenty-one.  ~Bob Hope

Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?  ~Murray Banks

I once knew a woman who offered her honor
So I honored her offer
And all night long I was on her and off her.
~Author Unknown

Those who have prophesied dreadful consequences as a result of the greater sexual freedom which the young assert - unwanted babies, venereal disease and so on - are usually the very same people who seek the fulfillment of their prophecies by opposing the free availability to the young of contraception and the removal of the stigma and mystification that surround venereal disease.  ~Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action

Be naughty - save Santa a trip.  ~Author Unknown

To know the difference between erotica and pornography you must first know the difference between naked and nude.  ~Bernard Poulin

Don't do it behind the garden gate.
Love is blind but the neighbors ain't!
~Author Unknown

An erection is like the Theory of Relativity - the more you think about it, the harder it gets.  ~Author Unknown

Men are those creatures with two legs and eight hands.  ~Jayne Mansfield

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.  ~Gore Vidal

The difference between light and hard is that you can sleep with a light on.  ~Author Unknown

Older women are best because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.  ~Ian Fleming

Kinky is using a feather.  Perverted is using the whole chicken.  ~Author Unknown

I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.  ~Jay McInerney

I'd like to meet the man who invented sex and see what he's working on now.  ~Author Unknown

A student undergoing a word-association test was asked why a snowstorm put him in mind of sex.  He replied frankly:  "Because everything does."  ~Honor Tracy

How lucky we are that we can reach our genitals instead of that spot on our back that itches.  ~Flash Rosenberg

The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.  ~Gloria Leonard

Its avowed purpose is to excite sexual desire, which, I should have thought, is unnecessary in the case of the young, inconvenient in the case of the middle aged, and unseemly in the old.  Malcolm Muggeridge, on pornography, Tread Softly For You Tread On My Jokes, 1966

Playboy exploits sex the way Sports Illustrated exploits sports.  ~Hugh Hefner

Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important.  I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion.  A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.  ~Charles Bukowski, Notes on a Dirty Old Man

When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned.  Do not have sex with the authorities.  ~Matt Groening

There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women.  Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.  ~J. Edgar Hoover, attributed

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.  ~D.H. Lawrence

I'm not cheap, but I am on special this week.  ~Author Unknown

Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.  ~S.J. Perelman

A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
~Aldous Huxley

My wife is a sex object.  Every time I ask for sex, she objects.  ~Les Dawson

It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.  ~Mrs. Patrick Campbell

A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.  ~Karl Kraus

During sex I fantasize that I'm someone else.  ~Richard Lewis

Never let the little head do the thinking for the big head.  ~Author unknown, advice to teenage boys, quoted in Friendly Advice compiled by Jon Winokur

Our love could change the orbit of the earth.  So, if a meteor ever comes hurtling towards earth with the guarantee of destruction, top scientists may call on us to, well, you know, do it like crazy for the sake of humankind.  ~Author Unknown

Nothing risqué, nothing gained.  ~Alexander Woollcott

My cock doesn't talk politics.  ~S.A. Sachs

Pornography tells lies about women.  But pornography tells the truth about men.  ~John Stoltenberg

To succeed with the opposite sex, tell her you're impotent.  She can't wait to disprove it.  ~Cary Grant

My message to businessmen of this country when they go abroad on business is that there is one thing above all they can take with them to stop them catching AIDS, and that is the wife.  ~Edwina Currie, quoted in The Observer, 15 February 1987

[T]he common thread that binds nearly all animal species seems to be that males are willing to abandon all sense and decorum, even to risk their lives, in the frantic quest for sex.  ~Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape

Now, if groups like Moral Majority have their way, there won't be any sex education at school, and our kids will be the dumbest in the world when it comes to sex.... But our parents are sexually retarded too.... Fear and primitive morals are creating a sexual pressure-cooker in this country and soon the top will blow.... Only in the U.S. do we find children drawing a picture of a baby coming from the clouds or from under a cabbage leaf.  ~Floyd Martinson



Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping.  ~Bo Derek


When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping.  Men invade another country.  It's a whole different way of thinking.  ~Elayne Boosler


If men liked shopping, they'd call it research.  ~Cynthia Nelms


A consumer is a shopper who is sore about something.  ~Harold Coffin


Shopping is a woman thing.  It's a contact sport like football.  Women enjoy the scrimmage, the noisy crowds, the danger of being trampled to death, and the ecstasy of the purchase.  ~Erma Bombeck


The quickest way to know a woman is to go shopping with her.  ~Marcelene Cox


Shopping tip:  You can get shoes for 85 cents at the bowling alley.  ~Author Unknown


I always say shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.  ~Tammy Faye Bakker


Thank God we're living in a country where the sky's the limit, the stores are open late and you can shop in bed thanks to television.  ~Joan Rivers


A Christmas shopper's complaint is one of long-standing.  ~Author Unknown


People will buy anything that is one to a customer.  ~Sinclair Lewis


The other line moves faster.  ~Etorre's Observation


Buying something on sale is a very special feeling.  In fact, the less I pay for something, the more it is worth to me.  I have a dress that I paid so little for that I am afraid to wear it.  I could spill something on it, and then how would I replace it for that amount of money?  ~Rita Rudner


We used to build civilizations.  Now we build shopping malls.  ~Bill Bryson


I like my money right where I can see it - hanging in my closet.  ~From the television show Sex and the City


A bargain is something you can't use at a price you can't resist.  ~Franklin P. Jones


I haven't reported my missing credit card to the police because whoever stole it is spending less than my wife.  ~Ilie Nastase


I love to go shopping.  I love to freak out salespeople.  They ask me if they can help me, and I say, "Have you got anything I'd like?"  Then they ask me what size I need, and I say, "Extra medium."  ~Steven Wright


The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.  ~Erma Bombeck


I've been shopping all my life and still have nothing to wear.  ~Author Unknown


Anyone who believes the competitive spirit in America is dead has never been in a supermarket when the cashier opens another checkout line.  ~Ann Landers


The woman just ahead of you at the supermarket checkout has all the delectable groceries you didn't even know they carried.  ~Mignon McLaughlin


A bargain ain't a bargain unless it's something you need.  ~Sidney Carroll


Credit buying is much like being drunk.  The buzz happens immediately and gives you a lift.... The hangover comes the day after.  ~Joyce Brothers


Only one shopping day left 'til tomorrow.  ~Author Unknown


I went to a general store but they wouldn't let me buy anything specific.  ~Steven Wright


If the shoe fits, buy it in every color!  ~Author Unknown


Shopping:  The fine art of acquiring things you don't need with money you don't have.  ~Author Unknown


I shop like a bull - I charge everything!  ~Author Unknown


Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.  ~Dave Barry


On the one hand, shopping is dependable:  You can do it alone, if you lose your heart to something that is wrong for you, you can return it; it's instant gratification and yet something you buy may well last for years.  ~Judith Krantz


The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.  ~Mad Magazine


Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.  ~Author Unknown


Shopping is better than sex.  If you're not satisfied after shopping you can make an exchange for something you really like.  ~Adrienne Gusoff


But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


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


True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.  ~William Penn

Silence is the true friend that never betrays.  ~Confucius

An inability to stay quiet is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.  ~Walter Bagehot

Silence is a source of great strength.  ~Lao Tzu

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.  ~John Lahr

The Arctic expresses the sum of all wisdom:  Silence.  ~Walter Bauer

Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.  ~Jean Arp

I have often lamented that we cannot close our ears with as much ease as we can our eyes.  ~Richard Steele

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.  ~James Thurber

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.  ~W.S. Merwin

The silence depressed me.  It wasn't the silence of silence.  It was my own silence.  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Everybody should have his personal sounds to listen for - sounds that will make him exhilarated and alive or quite and calm.... One of the greatest sounds of them all - and to me it is a sound - is utter, complete silence.  ~Andre Kostelanetz

All noise is waste.  So cultivate quietness in your speech, in your thoughts, in your emotions. Speak habitually low.  Wait for attention and then you low words will be charged with dynamite.  ~Elbert Hubbard

unplug iPod
music stops abruptly
cricket song instead
~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in an clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness.  Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

God's poet is silence! His song is unspoken,
And yet so profound, so loud, and so far,
It fills you, it thrills you with measures unbroken,
And as soft, and as fair, and as far as a star.
~Joaquin Miller

Silence is a fence around wisdom.  ~German Proverb

Silence is as deep as eternity; speech, shallow as time.  ~Thomas Carlyle

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not - silence is the sharper sword.  ~Samuel Johnson

Silence is medication for sorrow.  ~Arab Proverb

To silence another, first be silent yourself.  ~Latin Proverb

Silence was never written down.  ~Italian Proverb

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.  ~Edward Hoagland

You can hear the footsteps of God when silence reigns in the mind.  ~Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Not merely an absence of noise, Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws from the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary.  ~Peter Minard

Silence is a text easy to misread.  ~A.A. Attanasio

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.  ~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Our greatest gift is the thunder of Silence.  ~Joel Goldsmith

Silence is more musical than any song.  ~Christina Rossetti

Nothing is more useful than silence.  ~Menander of Athens

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Silence is a sounding thing, to one who listens hungrily.  ~Gwendolyn Bennett

Silence is the mother of truth.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

What shall I say to you?  What can I say
Better than silence is?  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The deepest rivers make least din, the silent soule doth most abound in care.  ~William Alexander

Honk if you hate noise pollution.  ~Author unknown, as seen on a bumper sticker

Her hearing was keener than his, and she heard silences he was unaware of.  ~D.M. Thomas

We must have reasons for speech but we need none for silence.  ~Proverb

All was silent as before -
All silent save the dripping rain.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Noise:  a stench in the ear.  ~Ambrose Bierce

There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace.  You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.  ~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.  ~Josh Billings

There are times when silence has the loudest voice.  ~Leroy Brownlow

Silences make the real conversations between friends.  Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.  ~Margaret Lee Runbeck

The best answer to anger is silence.  ~Author Unknown

Some days, we just need to turn the quiet up.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Silence is also speech.  ~Proverb

Words can make a deeper scar than silence can heal.  ~Author Unknown

Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.  ~Author Unknown

When all the noise is gone there is only God.  ~Author Unknown

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness.  God is the friend of silence.  See how nature - trees, flowers, grass - grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence.... We need silence to be able to touch souls.  ~Mother Teresa

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.  ~Hans Hofmann, Introduction to the Bootstrap, 1993

To poke a wood fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world.  ~Charles Dudley Warner

Eliminate physical clutter.  More importantly, eliminate spiritual clutter.  ~Terri Guillemets

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.  It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.  ~E.F. Schumacher (Thanks, Arly)

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.  ~Albert Einstein, possibly a paraphrase by Roger Sessions

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.  ~Confucius

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.  ~Author Unknown

Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying.  The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.  ~Elise Boulding

Everything we possess that is not necessary for life or happiness becomes a burden, and scarcely a day passes that we do not add to it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn't simple.  ~Doris Janzen Longacre

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.  ~John Burroughs

People love chopping wood.  In this activity one immediately sees results.  ~Albert Einstein

Maybe a person's time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.  ~Frank A. Clark

The best things in life are nearest:  Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.  Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.  ~Philip Wylie

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.  ~George Santayana, "The Irony of Liberalism"

Live simply that others might simply live.  ~Elizabeth Ann Seton

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone.  The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.  ~Lin Yutang

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.  ~William Morris

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.  ~Leonardo DaVinci

Anything simple always interests me.  ~David Hockney

Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than submit to the desolation of an empty abundance.  ~Michael Harrington

How many things are there which I do not want.  ~Socrates

I go about looking at horses and cattle.  They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young.  I am sick with envy of them.  ~Sherwood Anderson

More good has been accomplished by simple people seeking their own honest ends than by all the philanthropists in history.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.  ~Arthur Helps, Essays Written in Intervals of Business, 1841

People overestimate the pleasure they'll get from having more stuff.  This does not apply to new rose bushes, crayons, or yarn stashes.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

The true Indian sets no price upon either his property or his labor.  His generosity is limited only by his strength and ability.  He regards it as an honor to be selected for difficult or dangerous service and would think it shameful to ask for any reward, saying rather:  Let the person I serve express his thanks according to his own bringing up and his sense of honor.  ~Ohiyesa of the Santee Sioux (Charles Alexander Eastman)

The waste of life occasioned by trying to do too many things at once is appalling.  ~Orison Marden

Who is rich?  He who rejoices in his portion.  ~The Talmud

You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.  ~Vernon Howard

What a unique treasure are the things we have learned to live without, for no thief can take them from us.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Since all the riches of this world
May be gifts from the Devil and earthly kings,
I should suspect that I worshipp'd the Devil
If I thank'd my God for worldly things.
~William Blake, Gnomic Verses

The greatest step towards a life of simplicity is to learn to let go.  ~Steve Maraboli

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!  I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The greatest truths are the simplest: so likewise are the greatest men.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.  ~Socrates

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.  ~Annie Dillard, "Seeing," Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are.  When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.  ~Lao Tzu

We don't need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants.  Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.  ~Donald Horban

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.  ~Edwin Way Teale

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Each day, awakening, are we asked to paint the sky blue? Need we coax the sun to rise or flowers to bloom? Need we teach birds to sing, or children to laugh, or lovers to kiss? No, though we think the world imperfect, it surrounds us each day with its perfections. We are asked only to appreciate them, and to show appreciation by living in peaceful harmony amidst them. The Creator does not ask that we create a perfect world; He asks that we celebrate it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com



A bird does not sing because it has an answer.  It sings because it has a song.  ~Chinese Proverb


He who sings frightens away his ills.  ~Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote


Some days there won't be a song in your heart.  Sing anyway.  ~Emory Austin


Sing out loud in the car even, or especially, if it embarrasses your children.  ~Marilyn Penland


The singer has everything within him.  The notes come out from his very life.  They are not materials gathered from outside.  ~Rabindranath Tagore


You can cage the singer but not the song.  ~Harry Belafonte


Those who wish to sing always find a song.  ~Proverb


I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.  ~William James


So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing "Embraceable You" in spats.  ~Woody Allen


God sent his Singers upon earth
With songs of sadness and of mirth,
That they might touch the hearts of men,
And bring them back to heaven again.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear!  ~William Shakespeare


God respects me when I work; but God loves me when I sing.  ~Rabindranath Tagore


As long as we live, there is never enough singing.  ~Martin Luther


The total person sings not just the vocal chords.  ~Esther Broner


Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound;
She feels no biting pang the while she sings,
Nor as she turns the giddy wheel around,
Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things.
~William Gifford


A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.  ~Henry Giles


It was his nature to blossom into song, as it is a tree's to leaf itself in April.  ~Alexander Smith


Faith and joy are the ascensive forces of song.  ~Edmund Clarence Stedman


That music in itself, whose sounds are song,
The poetry of speech.
~Lord Byron


It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.  The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.  ~Joan Baez


Life is a song.  Love is the music.  ~Author Unknown


Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.  ~Chinese Proverb


Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?  ~Rose F. Kennedy


Sweetest the strain when in the song
The singer has been lost.
~Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward


Who, as they sung, would take the prison'd soul
And lap it in Elysium.
~John Milton


I sing like I feel.  ~Ella Fitzgerald


The lively Shadow-World of Song.  ~Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller


Little dew-drops of celestial melody.  ~Thomas Carlyle


Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.
~Alfred Tennyson


You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.  ~Author Unknown


Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship.  But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.  ~John Muir


A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.  ~Donna Roberts


Having a sister is like having a best friend you can't get rid of.  You know whatever you do, they'll still be there.  ~Amy Li

A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.  ~Marion C. Garretty

Is solace anywhere more comforting than in the arms of a sister.  ~Alice Walker

Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.  ~Charles M. Schulz

If you don't understand how a woman could both love her sister dearly and want to wring her neck at the same time, then you were probably an only child.  ~Linda Sunshine

You can kid the world.  But not your sister.  ~Charlotte Gray

I would like more sisters, that the taking out of one, might not leave such stillness.  ~Emily Dickinson

Help one another, is part of the religion of sisterhood.  ~Louisa May Alcott

Sisters never quite forgive each other for what happened when they were five.  ~Pam Brown

In thee my soul shall own combined the sister and the friend.  ~Catherine Killigrew

Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet.  ~Vietnamese Proverb

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.  ~Toni Morrison

Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply...  ~Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814

What's the good of news if you haven't a sister to share it?  ~Jenny DeVries

Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.  ~Margaret Mead

Bless you, my darling, and remember you are always in the heart - oh tucked so close there is no chance of escape - of your sister.  ~Katherine Mansfield

A sister smiles when one tells one's stories - for she knows where the decoration has been added.  ~Chris Montaigne

More than Santa Claus, your sister knows when you've been bad and good.  ~Linda Sunshine

If sisters were free to express how they really feel, parents would hear this:  "Give me all the attention and all the toys and send Rebecca to live with Grandma."  ~Linda Sunshine

My sister taught me everything I really need to know, and she was only in sixth grade at the time.  ~Linda Sunshine

I, who have no sisters or brothers, look with some degree of innocent envy on those who may be said to be born to friends.  ~James Boswell

How do people make it through life without a sister?  ~Sara Corpening

If your sister is in a tearing hurry to go out and cannot catch your eye, she's wearing your best sweater.  ~Pam Brown

Sisters are different flowers from the same garden.  ~Author Unknown

There can be no situation in life in which the conversation of my dear sister will not administer some comfort to me.  ~Mary Montagu

I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones.  ~Author unknown, attributed to a 4-year-old named Lauren

In the cookies of life, sisters are the chocolate chips.  ~Author Unknown

When sisters stand shoulder to shoulder, who stands a chance against us?  ~Pam Brown

The mildest, drowsiest sister has been known to turn tiger if her sibling is in trouble.  ~Clara Ortega

A sister is a forever friend.  ~Author Unknown

I know some sisters who only see each other on Mother's Day and some who will never speak again.  But most are like my sister and me... linked by volatile love, best friends who make other best friends ever so slightly less best.  ~Patricia Volk

Sisterly love is, of all sentiments, the most abstract.  Nature does not grant it any functions.  ~Ugo Betti

Sisters function as safety nets in a chaotic world simply by being there for each other.  ~Carol Saline

Sweet is the voice of a sister in the season of sorrow.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

When mom and dad don't understand, a sister always will.  ~Author Unknown

Elder sisters never can do younger ones justice!  ~Charlotte M. Yonge

A toast once heard:  "To my big sister, who never found her second Easter egg until I'd found my first."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A sister is a gift to the heart, a friend to the spirit, a golden thread to the meaning of life.  ~Isadora James

To the outside world we all grow old.  But not to brothers and sisters.  We know each other as we always were.  We know each other's hearts.  We share private family jokes.  We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys.  We live outside the touch of time.  ~Clara Ortega

The best thing about having a sister was that I always had a friend.  ~Cali Rae Turner

An older sister helps one remain half child, half woman.  ~Author Unknown

An older sister is a friend and defender - a listener, conspirator, a counsellor and a sharer of delights.  And sorrows too.  ~Pam Brown

There is no better friend than a sister.  And there is no better sister than you.  ~Author Unknown

Our brothers and sisters are there with us from the dawn of our personal stories to the inevitable dusk.  ~Susan Scarf Merrell

I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers.  It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage.  Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.  ~Maya Angelou

A sibling may be the keeper of one's identity, the only person with the keys to one's unfettered, more fundamental self.  ~Marian Sandmaier

Our roots say we're sisters, our hearts say we're friends.  ~Author Unknown

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago - the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider.... It doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we've traveled.  ~Jane Mersky Leder

Our siblings.  They resemble us just enough to make all their differences confusing, and no matter what we choose to make of this, we are cast in relation to them our whole lives long.  ~Susan Scarf Merrell

Sibling relationships - and 80 percent of Americans have at least one - outlast marriages, survive the death of parents, resurface after quarrels that would sink any friendship.  They flourish in a thousand incarnations of closeness and distance, warmth, loyalty and distrust.  ~Erica E. Goode, "The Secret World of Siblings," U.S. News & World Report, 10 January 1994

Siblings are the people we practice on, the people who teach us about fairness and cooperation and kindness and caring - quite often the hard way.  ~Pamela Dugdale

Sisters share the scent and smells - the feel of a common childhood.  ~Pam Brown

A sister shares childhood memories and grown-up dreams.  ~Author Unknown

Sisters annoy, interfere, criticize.  Indulge in monumental sulks, in huffs, in snide remarks.  Borrow.  Break.  Monopolize the bathroom.  Are always underfoot.  But if catastrophe should strike, sisters are there.  Defending you against all comers.  ~Pam Brown

Between sisters, often, the child's cry never dies down.  "Never leave me," it says; "do not abandon me."  ~Louise Bernikow

It was nice growing up with someone like you - someone to lean on, someone to count on... someone to tell on!  ~Author Unknown

Sisterhood is powerful.  ~Robin Morgan

Sisters don't need words.  They have perfected a language of snarls and smiles and frowns and winks - expressions of shocked surprise and incredulity and disbelief.  Sniffs and snorts and gasps and sighs - that can undermine any tale you're telling.  ~Pam Brown

One of the best things about being an adult is the realization that you can share with your sister and still have plenty for yourself.  ~Betsy Cohen

We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar.  We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.  ~Rose Macaulay

Sisters may share the same mother and father but appear to come from different families.  ~Author Unknown

Sister to sister we will always be,
A couple of nuts off the family tree.
~Author Unknown

We acquire friends and we make enemies, but our sisters come with the territory.  ~Evelyn Loeb

Sisters are blossoms in the garden of life.  ~Author Unknown

We may look old and wise to the outside world.  But to each other, we are still in junior school.  ~Charlotte Gray

Whatever you do they will love you; even if they don't love you they are connected to you till you die.  You can be boring and tedious with sisters, whereas you have to put on a good face with friends.  ~Deborah Moggach

You keep your past by having sisters.  As you get older, they're the only ones who don't get bored if you talk about your memories.  ~Deborah Moggach

It's hard to be responsible, adult and sensible all the time.  How good it is to have a sister whose heart is as young as your own.  ~Pam Brown

Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.  ~Louise Glück

She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities.  She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway.  She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark.  She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink.  Some days, she's the reason you wish you were an only child.  ~Barbara Alpert

Skiing is a dance, and the mountain always leads.  ~Author Unknown

Stretch pants - the garment that made skiing a spectator sport.  ~Author Unknown

There are really only three things to learn in skiing:  how to put on your skis, how to slide downhill, and how to walk along the hospital corridor.  ~Lord Mancroft, A Chinaman in the Bath, 1974

The sport of skiing consists of wearing three thousand dollars' worth of clothes and equipment and driving two hundred miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and get drunk.  ~P.J. O'Rourke, Modern Manners, 1984

Gotta use your brain, it's the most important part of your equipment.  ~Kevin Andrews and Warren Miller, Extreme Skiing

When it comes to skiing, there's a difference between what you think it's going to be like, what it's really like, and what you tell your friends it was like.  ~Author Unknown

The sensual caress of waist deep cold smoke.... glory in skiing virgin snow, in being the first to mark the powder with the signature of their run.  ~Tim Cahill

Skiing is the only sport where you spend an arm and a leg to break an arm and a leg.  ~Author Unknown

I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.  ~Erma Bombeck

Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.  ~Dave Barry

Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country.  ~Steven Wright

The sun is bright and the powder's bitchin'!  ~From How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000 movie), based on book by Dr. Seuss, screenplay by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, spoken by the Grinch played by Jim Carrey  (Thanks, Robert)

Traverse: One of two ways to stop while skiing.  Tree: The other method.  ~Author Unknown

All things are possible, except for skiing through a revolving door.  ~Author Unknown

Gravity is love and every turn is a leap of faith.  ~Author Unknown

Skiing:  the art of catching cold and going broke while rapidly heading nowhere at great personal risk.  ~Author Unknown

There's no waiting for friends on a powder day.  ~Author Unknown

Snow: a form of precipitation that usually occurs three weeks prior to and the morning of your departure from your ski vacation.  ~Author Unknown

Turn right, turn left, repeat as necessary.  ~Author Unknown

The ski bum trades security for face shots, the future for the moment.  Considering how hollow the promise of a corporate career has become, who can say the ski bum is not the wiser investor in his or her youth?  ~Author Unknown

If you aren't crashing, you aren't skiing.  ~Author Unknown

Kids today, all they talk about is big air.  I say, stay on the mountain, that's where the action is.  If you want big air, pull my finger.  ~Smooth Johnson

Powder snow skiing is not fun.  It's life, fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality.  ~Dolores LaChapelle

Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.... I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty-seven-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding.  ~Dave Barry

If you marry a skier, marry tall - they walk with their knees bent ten months out of the year.  ~Author Unknown

If you are going to try cross-country skiing, start with a small country.  ~Author Unknown

I think my favorite sport in the Olympics is the one in which you make your way through the snow, you stop, you shoot a gun, and then you continue on.  In most of the world, it is known as the biathlon, except in New York City, where it is known as winter.  ~Michael Ventre, L.A. Daily News

Thanks to Amy for submitting some of these quotes.

It's only a matter of inches, but skipping gets me just that much closer to heaven.  ~Terri Guillemets

If you've lost your enthusiasm, there's no better place to find it than on a skipping excursion.  And, you might just find your lost youth as well!  ~Jessi Lane Adams

I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things.... I play with leaves.  I skip down the street and run against the wind.  I never water my garden without soaking myself.  ~Leo F. Buscaglia, Bus 9 to Paradise

I think skipping could be the answer to many of our adult health problems.  ~Jeanne, as posted on iskip.com

Be a rebel against gravity:  Skip!  ~Jessi Lane Adams

I skip to the heartbeat of my angel.  ~Terri Guillemets

Time sure flies when you skip an hour.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

People ask why I skip and I give the incomparable reason of "why not?"  ~Author unknown, as posted on iskip.com

Learning to skip has brought control into her life.  Whenever she feels all sad, she switches into this wholly happy gait, sliding, hopping, and sliding again; when doing this, it seems as though her head separates from her body, making her feel dizzy and emptied out of bad thoughts.  Does anyone else know this trick, she wonders?  Probably not, although her Mother sometimes smiles and waves from the window.  ~Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

Skipping is jumping for joy, step after step.  ~Terri Guillemets

I don't think it's possible to skip with a frown on your face.... I'd like to see the world's governing and terrorist leaders on a skipping tour through the Middle East and across the subcontinent and China to Korea.  ~Sue Irwin, as posted on iskip.com

Skip like the wind!  ~Author Unknown

You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing.  What!  Is it nothing to be happy?  Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long?  Never in his life will he be so busy again.  ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Just like yoga, skipping provides exercise for the body, mind, and spirit.  ~"Skipper" Kim Corbin, founder of iskip.com

Skipping is a form of flying.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

With all its ups and downs, skipping is just one more metaphor for life.  ~Terri Guillemets

Skipping isn't for everyone.  Getting out of our comfort zones for a momentary skipping escape takes guts.  It is much more difficult than many realize.  Our ego likes to feel in control and is afraid of what others will think.... When we can learn to simply observe our ego's fear and then choose to skip on despite it, we develop the spiritual strength necessary for inner peace.  ~Kim Corbin, founder of iskip.com

Skipping:  a joyful impulse, stunted at puberty.  ~M. Robin D'Antan

What a hero Tom was become now!  He did not go skipping and prancing, but moved with a dignified swagger as became a pirate who felt that the public eye was on him.  ~Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Skipping is oxygen for the soul.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Skipping by the flowers,
Skipping around for hours,
Skipping in rain showers -
Skipping has magical powers!
~Jessi Lane Adams

There's another powerful benefit of skipping which is that it adds joy and positive energy to the world.  Seeing adults consumed by the joy of skipping sends a compelling message about the power of the spirit over fear.  When you learn to turn off your logical mind and get lost in the spirit of skipping, it's like exercising a muscle that will help you deal with other fears.  As external events become increasingly intense, that kind of inner strength will be more important than ever.  ~Kim Corbin, founder of iskip.com

If I had time for only two exercises, I would choose yoga and skipping.  ~Terri Guillemets

There was a boyishness about Mr. Clemens sometimes that found different modes of expression.  Once, when the long corridor of the second floor of the hotel presented a temptingly empty avenue, he hopped, skipped, and ran, and then gave a delicious suggestion of a cake-walk.  As soon as a door opened, however, he stopped and assumed a supernaturally grave aspect.  ~Elizabeth Wallace, Mark Twain and the Happy Island, 1914

Out came the children running.
All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
~Robert Browning, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"

Skipping is nature's Prozac.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

If you're enjoying your depression, then for goodness sake do not go skipping.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

SKIPPING!  The hippity hoppity gait that came naturally to us as children, but that the majority of adults haven't done since they were ten... SKIPPING!  Like Dorothy and gang did arm in arm down the yellow brick road... SKIPPING!  As in expressing joy by leaping happily down the street without a care in the world.  ~Kim Corbin, founder of iskip.com

Adults aren't generally struck with the urge to skip because their worries and burdens weigh them down and they forget that they can take themselves lightly.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

I skip for that all-over body tickle.  ~John Olesen

I have loved skipping since I was a little girl and I have never been able to restrain myself when an open stretch of sidewalk or path beckons me. ~Marelu Marson, as posted on iskip.com

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself.  I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house.  It's as though I could fly, almost, and I get very tense before I've told the truth - hard.  Then I sit down at the desk and get going with it.  ~Anne Sexton

The two best things about skipping are:
1)  It's free.
2)  It frees you.
~Jessi Lane Adams

Skipping exercises your happiness muscles.  ~Terri Guillemets

Skipping is great exercise!  It burns twice as many calories as walking.  It has less impact on your joints than running.  And it is joy-based, unlike running which generates from our fight or flight reflex.  ~Kim Corbin, founder of iskip.com

Skipping is the walk of joy.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Skipping turns -
moping into hoping,
pity into giddy,
sad into glad,
lazy into crazy,
old into bold,
tired into wired!
~Terri Guillemets

Skipping is to fly like an angel.  ~Opal Montagne

And I'll skip to Heaven on my own two feet.  ~Terri Guillemets

I like to skip because I can't help but smile when I'm skipping (either I'm too uncoordinated to frown and skip at the same time or else it's a physical impossibility)!  ~Nancy, as posted on iskip.com

Sometimes I do a little mental skipping, just to shake things up in my mind.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Angels skip, fairies skip, children skip - why can't you and I skip?  ~Jessi Lane Adams

[I]nspiration abounds when I skip and I do feel like a kid again.  It frees the cobwebs, stimulates the soul, and enlightens the spirit.  ~Nancy, as posted on skip.com

I'm addicted to this exercise - I never skip a day!  ~Jessi Lane Adams

You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.  ~James M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Happiness will not pass you by when you're skipping.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

We used to fly past shoppers in the town centre and especially in the winter, wrapped up in our duffle coats, woolen hats and scarves we used to get so warm that there would soon be coats unbuttoned, scarves trailing behind and rosy cheeks by the time we got to school.  ~Karen Elkins, as posted on iskip.com

While the rhythm of running emphasizes a downward motion, the upward motion of skipping defies gravity and elevates my mood in the process.  ~Susan Reineck, as posted on iskip.com

Skipping arm in arm is double the joy!  ~Jessi Lane Adams

When I skip, I have no worries.  ~Carolyn Tyler, as posted on iskip.com

D'ya ever go for a midnight skip
Or an after-dark skinny dip?
Exercise your inner child at night,
It's twice as fun than in daylight.
~Jessi Lane Adams

Skipping chases away the blues, and happiness will come chasing after you.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Skipping turns your legs into built-in pogo sticks.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

[Skipping] makes me a kid again - not just feel like a kid - a KID again.  ~John-Hans Melcher, as posted on iskip.com

Skipping subtracts years from your heart, adds joy to your life, multiplies your happiness, and divides your stress.  It's a prime exercise, and I count it among one of my greatest blessings.  ~Terri Guillemets

[Skipping] takes me back to less complicated times, without leaving the present!  ~Hope Trachtenberg-Fifer, as posted on iskip.com

If you are happy, go skipping.  If you are sad, go skipping!  ~Terri Guillemets

Jump for joy,
Come skip with me.
Don't be coy,
Let's merry be!
~Jessi Lane Adams

The first time the duchess halted by my side, I whispered to her to calm her gushing spirits, not to meddle with her dress, and for public opinion's sake, not to step so high.  I said she could get over just as much ground at a moderate gait; and, beside the noble grand duke, her father, might happen along at any moment.  I might as well have talked to the wind.  She only laughed that characteristic laugh of hers that silvery laugh that I could recognize anywhere if I were to the leeward, and then, bending a little, she grabbed up the sides of her apparel with both hands, began to jerk it to and fro in a violent manner, threw her magnificent head back and skipped furiously away on an Irish jig step, all excitement, wild hilarity, distracted costume, frenzied motion!  A spectacle to seal the eye-balls and to astonish the soul of a hermit!  ~Mark Twain (unconfirmed), Atlanta Daily Constitution, 28 February 1878, "The Fascinating Duchess"

The pursuit of happiness:  skipping is your best chance of catching it.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Skipping is inner joy and outer joy.  ~Author Unknown

If I were a doctor, skipping would be my number one prescription.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

If movement was a language, skipping would be the natural word for "bliss."  ~Theresa "Heartdancer" Carey, as posted on iskip.com

Jogging is for those who don't have the guts to skip.  ~Terri Guillemets

Skipping gives the adult a well-deserved break and lets the inner child be in charge for a while.  ~Opal Montagne

Skipping is just a dancing walk, or if you prefer, a walking dance.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

The feeling was elation.... I skip really big and fast.  And the amazing thing is, it really cracks me up!  I laugh out loud because it is so much fun!  And I love to hold my arms out and flap them like a bird.... When I get to the bottom of the trail, I am drenched in sweat and riding high on endorphins from exercise plus laughter.  ~Gail, as posted on iskip.com

Skipping:  the ultimate display of nonconformity.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Restore your sanity - go skipping like crazy!  ~Jessi Lane Adams

Why march to the beat of your own drummer when you can skip?  ~Dave May, as posted on iskip.com

When you take flight by skipping, your baggage gets left behind - there's no room to carry on worries.  ~Jessi Lane Adams

When most people see an adult skipping they assume it must be on the way either to or from the asylum.  ~Terri Guillemets

Acknowledgment:
Many thanks to Kim Corbin of iskip.com
for sharing some of these wonderful quotes!

Sleeping is no mean art:  for its sake one must stay awake all day.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying.  It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.  ~Dale Carnegie

No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap.  ~Carrie Snow

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.
~William Shakespeare, Macbeth

There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.  ~Edward Lucas

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.  ~Leo J. Burke

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.  ~Fran Lebowitz

It's a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it's light out.  ~Bill Watterson

The bed is a bundle of paradoxes:  we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book.  ~Irish Proverb

Life is too short to sleep on low thread-count sheets.  ~Leah Stussy

Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.  ~Ellen Goodman

Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death.  ~Author unknown, various wordings commonly attributed to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Journey to the Center of the Earth

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
~D.H. Lawrence

May sleep envelop you as a bed sheet floating gently down, tickling your skin and removing every worry.  Reminding you to consider only this moment.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Consciousness:  that annoying time between naps.  ~Author Unknown

There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.  ~Author Unknown

Insomnia is a gross feeder.  It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.  ~Clifton Fadiman

Dawn:  When men of reason go to bed.  ~Ambrose Bierce

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body.  It rarely sets the soul at rest.  The repose of the night does not belong to us.  It is not the possession of our being.  Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms.  In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.  ~Gaston Bachelard

Sleep is perverse as human nature,
Sleep is perverse as legislature....
So people who go to bed to sleep
Must count French premiers or sheep,
And people who ought to arise from bed
Yawn and go back to sleep instead.
~Ogden Nash, Read This Vibrant Exposé

If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters.  ~Author unknown, attributed to Jim Davis

Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation.  ~Author Unknown

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky -
I've thought of all by turns, and still I lie
Sleepless...
~William Wordsworth, "To Sleep"

If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he'd make a fortune.  ~Griff Niblack

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.  ~Charlotte Brontë

[S]leep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.  ~Thomas Dekker

People who snore always fall asleep first.  ~Author Unknown

Without enough sleep, we all become tall two-year-olds.  ~JoJo Jensen, Dirt Farmer Wisdom, 2002

When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake.  ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

The best cure for insomnia is a Monday morning.  ~Author Unknown

Now, blessings light on him that first invented sleep!  It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot.  It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.  ~Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.  ~Colette

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

O bed! O bed! delicious bed!
That heaven upon earth to the weary head.
~Thomas Hood, Miss Kilmansegg - Her Dream

There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.  ~Author Unknown

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.  ~John Steinbeck

Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it's time to get up.  ~Author Unknown

Sleep, rest of things, O pleasing Deity,
Peace of the soul, which cares dost crucify,
Weary bodies refresh and mollify.
~Ovid, attributed

Sometimes I sit up late with my thoughts, reluctant to fall asleep and leave my thoughts alone by themselves.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Don't fight with the pillow, but lay down your head
And kick every worriment out of the bed.
~Edmund Vance Cooke

All men whilst they are awake are in one common world:  but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.  ~Plutarch

Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets....
~Rupert Brooke, "The Great Lover,"

I hate it when my foot falls asleep during the day, because that means it's going to be up all night.  ~Steven Wright

The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep.  ~E. Joseph Cossman

Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fatigue is the best pillow.  ~Benjamin Franklin

O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my sense in forgetfulness?
~William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

I'm not asleep... but that doesn't mean I'm awake.  ~Author Unknown

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals.  ~Vladimir Nabokov

I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.  ~Tom Hodgkinson

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.  ~Marcel Proust

It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull.  I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind.  I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while.  Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around.  Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it!  A "bad night" is not always a bad thing.  ~Brian W. Aldiss

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.  ~Virginia Woolf

The days are cold, the nights are long,
The North wind sings a doleful song;
Then hush again upon my breast;
All merry things are now at rest,
Save thee, my pretty love!
~Dorothy Wordsworth, "The Cottager to Her Infant"

Not being able to sleep is terrible.  You have the misery of having partied all night... without the satisfaction.  ~Lynn Johnston

Sleep 'til you're hungry, eat 'til you're sleepy.  ~Author Unknown

What hath night to do with sleep?  ~John Milton

Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine.  ~Author Unknown

Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay,
And could not win thee, Sleep, by any stealth:
So do not let me wear to-night away.
Without thee what is all the morning's wealth?
Come, blessed barrier between day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!
~William Wordsworth, "To Sleep"

The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.  ~Wilson Mizener

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness.  ~Charles Dickens

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.  ~Colette

Many things - such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly - are done worst when we try hardest to do them.  ~C.S. Lewis

Leisure time is that five or six hours when you sleep at night.  ~George Allen

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.  ~Leonard Cohen

But no one ever is allowed in Sleepytown, unless
He goes to bed in time to take the Sleepytown Express!
~James Jackson Montague, The Sleepytown Express

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.  ~Anthony Burgess

Early to rise and early to bed
Makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead.
~James Thurber, Fables for Our Times, 1940

It appears that every man's insomnia is as different from his neighbour's as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by,
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky;
I have thought of all by turns, and yet do lie
Sleepless!
~William Wordsworth

How do people go to sleep?  I'm afraid I've lost the knack.  I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light.  I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.  ~Dorothy Parker

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.  ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Cut if you will with sleep's dull knife
The years from off your life, my friend!
The years that death takes off my life,
He'll take from off the other end!
~Edna St. Vincent Millay

There are twelve hours in the day, and above fifty in the night.  ~Marie de Rabutin-Chantal

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.  ~Jessamyn West

The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed, and can't get there, is the meanest feeling in the world.  ~Edgar Watson Howe

Today, give a stranger one of your smiles.  It might be the only sunshine he sees all day.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

A smile confuses an approaching frown.  ~Author Unknown

People seldom notice old clothes if you wear a big smile.  ~Lee Mildon

A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.  ~Phyllis Diller

Smile.  Have you ever noticed how easily puppies make human friends?  Yet all they do is wag their tails and fall over.  ~Walter Anderson, The Confidence Course, 1997

The world always looks brighter from behind a smile.  ~Author Unknown

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.  ~W.C. Fields

Before you put on a frown, make absolutely sure there are no smiles available.  ~Jim Beggs

A smile is an inexpensive way to change your looks.  ~Charles Gordy

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.  ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.  ~William Shakespeare, Othello

A smile is the light in the window of your face that tells people you're at home.  ~Author Unknown

If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it.  ~Andy Rooney

If you smile at someone, they might smile back.  ~Author Unknown

Life is like a mirror, we get the best results when we smile at it.  ~Author Unknown

Always remember to be happy because you never know who's falling in love with your smile.  ~Author Unknown

Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile.  ~Paul Simon, "Only Living Boy in New York"

Everyone smiles in the same language.  ~Author Unknown

If you don't have a smile, I'll give you one of mine.  ~Author Unknown

I've never seen a smiling face that was not beautiful.  ~Author Unknown

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.  ~George Eliot

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.  ~Raymond Chandler

Smiling is infectious,
You can catch it like the flu.
Someone smiled at me today,
And I started smiling too.
~Author Unknown

A smile appeared upon her face as if she'd taken it directly from her handbag and pinned it there.  ~Loma Chandler

A laugh is a smile that bursts.  ~Mary H. Waldrip

Smile - sunshine is good for your teeth.  ~Author Unknown

The shortest distance between two people is a smile.  ~Author unknown, modification of Victor Borge's "Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."

Every scowling face also contains the shapes of engaging smiles, just waiting to be released.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

If you don't start out the day with a smile, it's not too late to start practicing for tomorrow.  ~Author Unknown

Is a smile a question?  Or is it the answer?  ~Lee Smith

Smiling is my favorite exercise.  ~Author Unknown

I have a tickle in my brain.  And it keeps making the corners of my mouth point toward the heavens.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Wear a smile - one size fits all.  ~Author Unknown

People are not perfect (except when they smile).  ~Author Unknown

No matter how grouchy you're feeling,
You'll find the smile more or less healing.
It grows in a wreath
All around the front teeth -
Thus preserving the face from congealing.
~Anthony Euwer

Every day you spend without a smile, is a lost day.  ~Author Unknown

Sometimes it's just enough to smile sincerely.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.  ~Mother Teresa

A smile is like tight underwear - it makes your cheeks go up.  ~Author Unknown

A friendly look, a kindly smile, one good act, and life's worthwhile.  ~Author Unknown

What a snapshot is to your life, your life is to eternity, so wouldn't it be nice if eternity captured you smiling?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.  ~Washington Irving

Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.  ~Charles Reade

A smile is the universal welcome.  ~Max Eastman

Keep smiling - it makes people wonder what you've been up to.  ~Author Unknown

You're never fully dressed without a smile.  ~Martin Charnin

A smile can brighten the darkest day.  ~Author Unknown

Smile, it lets your teeth breathe.  ~Author Unknown

It takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty-three to frown.  ~Author Unknown

Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.  ~Janet Lane

The teeth are smiling, but is the heart? ~African Proverb

All the statistics in the world can't measure the warmth of a smile.  ~Chris Hart

If you would like to spoil the day for a grouch, give him a smile.  ~Author Unknown

Smile!  It increases your face value.  ~Robert Harling, Steel Magnolias

Peace begins with a smile.  ~Mother Teresa

A smile is a powerful weapon; you can even break ice with it.  ~Author Unknown

Most smiles are started by another smile.  ~Author Unknown

A smile is something you can't give away; it always comes back to you.  ~Author Unknown

A smile costs nothing but gives much.  It enriches those who receive without making poorer those who give.  It takes but a moment, but the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.  None is so rich or mighty that he cannot get along without it and none is so poor that he cannot be made rich by it.  Yet a smile cannot be bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen, for it is something that is of no value to anyone until it is given away.  Some people are too tired to give you a smile.  Give them one of yours, as none needs a smile so much as he who has no more to give.  ~Author Unknown

It takes a lot of work from the face to let out a smile, but just think what good smiling can bring to the most important muscle of the body... the heart.  ~Author Unknown

I kissed my first girl and smoked my first cigarette on the same day.  I haven't had time for tobacco since.  ~Arturo Toscanini

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did.  I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.  ~Mark Twain, attributed

I thought I couldn't afford to take her out and smoke as well.  So I gave up cigarettes.  Then I took her out and one day I looked at her and thought:  "Oh well," and I went back to smoking again, and that was better.  ~Benny Hill

One thousand Americans stop smoking every day - by dying.  ~Author Unknown

There's something luxurious about having a girl light your cigarette.  In fact, I got married once on account of that.  ~Harold Robbins

Remember, if you smoke after sex you're doing it too fast.  ~Woody Allen

Thank you for Not Smoking.  Cigarette smoke is the residue of your pleasure.  It contaminates the air, pollutes my hair and clothes, not to mention my lungs.  This takes place without my consent.  I have a pleasure, also.  I like a beer now and then.  The residue of my pleasure is urine.  Would you be annoyed if I stood on a chair and pissed on your head and your clothes without your consent?  ~Sign from Ken's Magic Shop

If we see you smoking we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action.  ~Douglas Adams

It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.  ~Mark Twain

If you must smoke, take your butt outside.  ~Author Unknown

Smoke your pipe and be silent; there's only wind and smoke in the world.  ~Irish Proverb

Little tube of mighty pow'r,
Charmer of an idle hour,
Object of my warm desire.
~Isaac Hawkins Browne, "A Pipe of Tobacco"

A good cigar is like a beautiful chick with a great body who also knows the American League box scores.  ~M*A*S*H, Klinger, "Bug-Out," 1976

Much smoking kills live men and cures dead swine.  ~George D. Prentice

If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction.  There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism.  The dead drug leaves a ghost behind.  At certain hours it haunts the house.  ~Jean Cocteau

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes.  ~Katharine Whitehorn

Tobacco is a dirty weed.  I like it.
It satisfies no normal need.  I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean
It's the worst darn stuff I've ever seen.
I like it.
~Graham Lee Hemminger, Tobacco

For the first time in history, sex is more dangerous than the cigarette afterward.  ~Jay Leno

Tobacco.  Tumor causing, teeth staining, smelly, puking habit.  ~Arizona Department of Health Services Tobacco Education and Prevention Program ad campaign, created by Riester-Robb Advertising

Nicotine patches are great.  Stick one over each eye and you can't find your cigarettes.  ~Author Unknown

To smoke or not to smoke:  I can make of either a life-work.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure.  It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.  What more can one want?  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

On CBS Radio the news of [Ed Murrow's] death, reportedly from lung cancer, was followed by a cigarette commercial.  ~Alexander Kendrick

The best way to stop smoking is to just stop - no ifs, ands or butts.  ~Edith Zittler

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.  ~Kurt Vonnegut

It's all one thing - both tend into one scope -
To live upon Tobacco and on Hope,
The one's but smoke, the other is but wind.
~Sir Robert Aytoun of Kincaldie, "Sonnet on Tobacco"

Thank heaven, I have given up smoking again!... God! I feel fit.  Homicidal, but fit.  A different man.  Irritable, moody, depressed, rude, nervy, perhaps; but the lungs are fine.  ~A.P. Herbert

There's a lot of people who, a cigarette is about the only vacation they have.  ~Trey Parker, mini-commentary on DVD South Park episode "Butt Out"

I'd rather kiss a mad cow on the muzzle than a smoker on the mouth.  ~Paul Carvel

Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time!  ~"Alfred E. Neuman" (Mad Magazine)

He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from heaven.  ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, What Will He Do With It?

In a gathering of two or more people, when a lighted cigarette is placed in an ashtray, the smoke will waft into the face of the non-smoker.  ~Author Unknown

A cigarette is a pipe with a fire at one end and a fool at the other.  ~Author Unknown

Please don't throw your cigarette butts in the urinal.  It makes them soggy and hard to light.  ~Author Unknown

Tobacco and alcohol, delicious fathers of abiding friendships and fertile reveries.  ~Luis Buuel

Good food, good sex, good digestion, good sleep:  to these basic animal pleasures, man has added nothing but the good cigarette.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.  ~Author Unknown

I'm glad I don't have to explain to a man from Mars why each day I set fire to dozens of little pieces of paper, and put them in my mouth.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

I want all hellions to quit puffing that hell fume in God's clean air.  ~Carrie Nation

I've been smoking nearly 50 years now.  I just don't feel safe breathing anything I can't see!  ~Dave Beard

Ods me I marle what pleasure or felicity they have in taking their roguish tobacco.  It is good for nothing but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke and embers.  ~Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour

Cigarettes are killers that travel in packs.  ~Author Unknown

Your clothes smell heavily of clothing.  Your den is filled with low-hanging palls of fresh air.  The only rattle in your car is the sound of toll change in the ashtray.  The absence of telltale tobacco stains on your shirt collar tells the tale - you've licked the smoking habit.  ~Robert Brault, 1973, www.robertbrault.com

Tobacco, divine, rare superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.  ~Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

The cigarette does the smoking - you're just the sucker.  ~Author Unknown

It is quite a three-pipe problem.  ~Arthur Conan Doyle, The Red-Headed League

They threaten me with lung cancer, and still I smoke and smoke.  If they'd only threaten me with hard work, I might stop.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

What a weird thing smoking is and I can't stop it.  I feel cosy, have a sense of well-being when I'm smoking, poisoning myself, killing myself slowly.  Not so slowly maybe.  I have all kinds of pains I don't want to know about and I know that's what they're from.  But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living.  I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself.  ~Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary, 1975

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.  ~Rudyard Kipling, The Betrothed

Coffee and tobacco are complete repose.  ~Turkish Proverb

Yes, social friend, I love thee well,
In learned doctor's spite;
Thy clouds all other clouds dispel
And lap me in delight.
~Charles Sprague, "To My Cigar"

Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward.  Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all.  It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.  ~Florence King

I used to smoke two packs a day and I just hate being a nonsmoker.... but I will never consider myself a nonsmoker because I always find smokers the most interesting people at the table.  ~Michelle Pfeiffer

Forcing smoke down my lungs is pulmonary rape.  It invades my body against my will, and it's not fair.  ~Patty Young

To some, the cigarette is a portable therapist.  ~Terri Guillemets

Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe
When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe;...
Yet thy true lovers more admire by far
Thy naked beauties - give me a cigar!
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Island

A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.  ~James I of England, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 1604

The best way to stop smoking is to carry wet matches.  ~Author Unknown

Thank you to John C. Shepard of GIGA Quotes
for sharing some of these quotations!



To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.  ~J.B. Priestley, The Good Companions, 1928


If this can be termed the century of the common man, then soccer, of all sports, is surely his game.... In a world haunted by the hydrogen and napalm bomb, the football field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested.  ~Stanley Rous, 1952


Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says.  The seventh day is the Lord thy God's.  The sixth day is for football.  ~Anthony Burgess


Football is the opera of the people.  ~Stafford Heginbotham, 1985


A sport where the players actually enjoy getting hit in the head by a ball.  ~Soccer advertisement, published for the MetroStars Major League Soccer team, 1997


Concerning football playing, I protest to you it may rather be called a friendly kind of fighting, rather than recreation.  ~Author Unknown


In Latin America the border between soccer and politics is vague.  There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team.  ~Luis Suarez


If you're attacking, you don't get as tired as when you're chasing.  ~Kyle Rote, Jr.


I get a kick out of soccer.  ~Author Unknown


Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.  ~Oscar Wilde


Soccer is not about justice.  It's a drama - and criminally wrong decisions against you are part and parcel of that.  ~Pete Davies


Other countries have their history.  Uruguay has its football.  ~Ondino Viera


The roots of our Soccer Tribe lie deep in our primeval past.  ~Desmond Morris


To the aesthete it is an art form, an athletic ballet.  To the spiritually inclined it is a religion.  ~Paul Gardner


The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this:  if it moves, kick it.  If it doesn't move, kick it until it does.  ~Phil Woosnam, 1974



The Glaswegian definition of an atheist:  a bloke who goes to a Rangers-Celtic match to watch the football.  ~Sandy Strang


The goalkeeper is the jewel in the crown and getting at him should be almost impossible.  It's the biggest sin in football to make him do any work.  ~George Graham, 1997


The rest of the world loves soccer.  Surely we must be missing something.  Uh, isn't that what the Russians told us about communism?  There's a good reason why you don't care about soccer - it's because you are an American and hating soccer is more American than mom's apple pie, driving a pick-up and spending Saturday afternoon channel-surfing with the remote control.  ~Tom Weir


All that proves is that most of the world is too poor to build bowling alleys, golf courses, tennis courts and baseball fields.  There's hundreds of millions of poor people out there who still ain't got indoor plumbing, but that don't mean there's something great about an outhouse.  Soccer is boring.  I've never seen a more boring sport.  ~Mike Royko, 1994


I think football would become an even better game if someone could invent a ball that kicks back.  ~Eric Morecambe


Why is there only one ball for 22 players?  If you gave a ball to each of them, they'd stop fighting for it.  ~Author Unknown


Whenever the ball flew toward our goal and a score seemed inevitable, Jesus reached his foot out and cleared the ball.  ~Author unknown, from an article in Rio de Janeiro's Jornal dos Sports


Up to five goals is journalism.  After that, it becomes statistics.  ~Author Unknown


I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it.  Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting.  ~George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys


Soccer is a game in which everyone does a lot of running around.  Twenty-one guys stand around and one guy does a tap dance with the ball.  ~Jim Murray, 1967


Some people say soccer's a matter of life or death, but it isn't.  It's much more important than that.  ~Variation of a famous saying


Most people are awaiting Virtual Reality; I'm awaiting virtuous reality.  ~Eli Khamarov, "Lives of the Cognoscenti"

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.  ~Reuben Blades

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?  ~Chuck Palahniuk

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.  ~Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners, 1954

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.  ~Krishnamurti

Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned.  ~Swami Nirmalananda, Enlightened Anarchism

Do not waste your time on Social Questions.  What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists 

Our democratic capitalist society has converted Eros into an employee of Mammon.  ~Octavio Paz

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft.  ~Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, 1942

I think God's going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.  ~Steven Wright

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?  ~Henry David Thoreau

It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man.  ~David Harris

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.  ~Unknown author, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.  ~Author Unknown

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.  ~Lily Tomlin

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.  ~Mary Ellen Kelly

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?  ~William Lloyd Garrison

Society is composed of two great classes - those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.  ~Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, first inaugural address, 20 January 1953

It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What the Dickens is going on here?  ~Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in National Academy of Sciences, Improving Risk Communication, 1989

Few great men could pass Personnel.  ~Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, 1956

[I]t's getting harder and harder to worry needlessly.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd.  You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.  It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced.  In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers.  That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.  ~Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden, "The Mission," Chapter 8

It would be a service to mankind if the pill were available in slot machines and the cigarette were placed on prescription.  ~Malcolm Potts, MD

There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.  ~Author Unknown

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.  ~Bill Vaughn

The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change.  ~Lowell

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.  ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The danger of the past was that men became slaves.  The danger of the future is that man may become robots.  ~Erich Fromm

We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love.  ~Whitney Moore, Jr.

When people go to work, they shouldn't have to leave their hearts at home.  ~Betty Bender

The choice so often these days is to believe something that seems insane or go insane.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.  ~Greg Egan, "Distress"

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.  ~Carl Sandburg, New York Post, 9 September 1960

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.  ~Author Unknown

Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
~Robert Frost, "The Black Cottage," North of Boston, 1914

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.  ~Peter Medawar

Mammalia, n.pl.  A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to nurse, or use the bottle.  ~Ambrose Bierce

Choice has always been a privilege of those who could afford to pay for it.  ~Ellen Frankfort

You can't make up anything anymore.  The world itself is a satire.  All you're doing is recording it.  ~Art Buchwald

Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.  ~Havelock Ellis

The trouble with our age is that it is all signposts and no destination.  ~The War Cry

It isn't so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going.  ~Groucho Marx

We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.  ~Adam Clayton Powell, Keep the Faith, Baby!, 1967

Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three oclock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  ~Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, commonly misattributed to Barbara Jordan because she quoted Fulghum in a commencement address

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience.  ~Omar Bradley

Being human in our modern civilization is being forced into a boxing ring with Nature.  And we're bloodied every time.  ~M. Robin D'Antan

Speed kills colour... the gyroscope, when turning at full speed, shows up gray.  ~Paul Morand

We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.  ~Alfred E. Newman

Is it my imagination, or does shipping and handling settle a box of crackers more than it used to?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The thoughts of Plato and Machiavelli... don't seem quite enough armor for a world beset with splitting the atoms, urban guerrillas, nineteen varieties of psychotherapists, amplified guitars, napalm, computers, astronauts, and an atmosphere polluted simultaneously with auto exhaust and TV commercials.  ~John Fischer

Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.  ~John W. Gardner

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.  ~Paul Valery

What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet.  It is not competed to the point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished.  We made it and it works."  ~William Faulkner, address, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 8 June 1952

Most people are willing to pay more to be amused than to be educated.  ~Robert C. Savage, Life Lessons

Life has been reduced to getting food out of cans.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Food.  Water.  Shelter.  Air.  Sleep.  Societal inflation has expanded need into greed.  Suddenly the basic survival needs also include a cell phone, cable TV, and French manicured fingernails.... We've become the absolute biggest whiners of all human history with the absolute smallest justification for whining.  ~Charlie Diekatze

When we think of the past, we forget the fools and remember the sage.  We reverse the process for our own time.  ~George Boas

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.  ~Gertrude Stein

Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.  ~Charles Wagner

You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion.  ~Garrison Keillor

Commuter - one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train,
And then rides back to shave again.
~E.B. White, "The Commuter," Poems and Sketches, 1982

Unhappy is a people that has run out of words to describe what is going on.  ~Thurman Arnold

Nowadays you envy a manic-depressive.  Half the time he's happy, the other half he's right.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.  ~Edward R. Murrow

I believe that one of the great problems for us as individuals is the depression and the tension resulting from existence in a world which is increasingly less pleasing to the eye.  ~Lady Bird Johnson

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place.  Nobody realized how boring it would become.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.  ~Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal.  Soon we'll need a new definition.  ~Alvin Toffler

The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.  ~Ronald Firbank

Anyone else tired of how media eats your brain?  ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

Depressed?  Of course we're all depressed.  We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant.  The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance.  Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries.  ~M. Robin D'Antan

We get lost in a fog of abstractions and easily forget that man is a bloodhound sniffing out the real.  ~Robert C. Pollock

Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the single worthy aim of life.  The hair-raising revelations of skullduggery and grand-scale thievery merely incite others to surpass by yet bolder outrages and more corrupt combinations.  ~Charles Francis Adams

The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.  ~Daniel Webster

What they sell to the masses are the chains you must break if you are ever to be in control of your life.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

I love Thanksgiving turkey.  It's the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts.  ~Arnold Schwarzenegger

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face.  Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.  ~Henry Miller

Most people know more about their congressmen via smear campaigns than they know about their own neighbor via conversations, and a lot of people know more about Britney Spears via tabloids than they know about their own congressmen via voting booklets.  Does anyone else see the problem here?  ~Brock Fiant

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.  ~Aldous Huxley, Island

Wall Street criminality is growing by leaps.  There are no bounds.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

People haven't time to learn anything.  They buy things ready-made in stores.  But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French by Richard Howard

The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity.  But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.  ~Alan Gregg

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do now.  ~Will Rogers

I don't believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life.  As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it.  ~Christiaan Barnard

Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself - at the expense of the new demands of each new generation.  ~John Haynes Holmes

The age of chivalry is gone.  That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.  ~Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Information and communications technology unlocks the value of time, allowing and enabling multi-tasking, multi-channels, multi-this and multi-that.  ~Li Ka Shing

[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood.  Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit.  Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room.  ~J.K. Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

If living conditions don't stop improving in this country, we're going to run out of humble beginnings for our great men.  ~Russell P. Askue

With each passing year, one has less to say, and knows better how to say it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

[T]he devil... seldom leads people astray anymore, finding it easier to just follow along in their footsteps.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.  ~Norman Douglas

There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is:  "Beat it to death if it succeeds."  ~Ernie Kovacs

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.  ~Will and Ariel Durant, Lessons of History

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.  ~Russell Baker

Society is now one polish'd horde,
Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.
~Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII, stanza 95

I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives.  One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.  ~Stephen Vincent Benét

Information should be used as food for thought, not poison to the soul.  ~Shellie R. Warren

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.  ~Cesare Pavese

The things that are wrong with the country today are the sum total of all the things that are wrong with us as individuals.  ~Charles W. Tobey

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure.  Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.  ~Russell Baker, New York Times, 1 May 1969

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious.  We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.  ~Thomas Szasz

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.  ~George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, 1950

It is not that artistic power has left the world but that a more rapid life has developed itself in it, leaving no time for deliberate dainty decoration or labours of love.  ~Mrs. Orrinsmith, 1877

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Over the Teacups, 1891

The three horrors of modern life - talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

[Y]ou're never more alive than when you're almost dead.  You recognize what's valuable.  Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.... [Y]ou find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Most of our diversions do not so much delay death as accustom us to it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion.  ~Mark van Doren

Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died.  There's no such thing as secrecy.  It's just a question of whether it's leaked or revealed openly.  ~Andrew Young

It is madness beyond compare
To try to reform the world.
~Molière, The Misanthrope, 1666

In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.  ~Robert Greene Ingersoll, "The New Testament," Some Reasons Why, 1881

The number of substitutes for fine and clean thinking the world provides positively gnaws at one's vitals.  ~Harold J. Laski

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.  ~Marcus Aurelius

I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct - and societal repression much more devastating.  ~D.H. Lawrence

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

In spite of all our speeding it's still the style to be late.  ~Kin Hubbard

Noise, crowding, pollution, and the sheer rush of our complex, modern society are rapidly becoming as oppressive to many individuals as the worst kind of political dictatorship.  ~Thomas F. Eagleton

The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce.  More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food.  ~Martin H. Fischer

The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.  Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?  ~Emma Goldman, Anarchism

I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith

Beggars should be abolished.  It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "On the Pitying," Thus Spake Zarathustra

We have smothered ourselves, buried ourselves, in the vast heap of information which all of us have and none of us has.  ~Gamaliel Bradford

I believe... that security declines as security machinery expands.  ~E.B. White

If some people got their rights they would complain of being deprived of their wrongs.  ~Oliver Herford

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?  ~Paul Sweeney

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.  ~Mignon McLaughlin

Final Ruin fiercely drives
Her ploughshare o'er creation.
~Edward Young

Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.  ~Erik Pepke

There are more doctors in a single North Shore medical building than in one entire West Side ghetto.  ~Jack Starr

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.  ~Arnold Toynbee

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.  ~Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

You make me sick!  You are offered meat and you choose a banana-split-with-nuts.  ~Martin H. Fischer

We're the middle children of history.... no purpose or place.  We have no Great War, no Great Depression.  Our great war is a spiritual war.  Our great depression is our lives.  ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age.  ~Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

You can say this for ready-mixes - the next generation isn't going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother used to make.  ~Earl Wilson

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.  ~Charles Kuralt

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face - forever.  ~George Orwell

No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.  ~Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 50

[A] science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.  ~Harold Hardy Godfrey, A Mathematician's Apology, 1941

It's difficult to view the world outside our human context.  Staying alive and paying the bills both require our attention squarely fixed on our own business.  Our sprawling cities and suburbs are wonderful and frightening tributes to creative self-absorption.  In them, we spend our microscheduled days bustling between work and the endless details of our private lives, turning in our moments of rest to the buzzing distractions of television and computers - all accelerating toward some ultimate, unseen fulfillment of convenience and hyperreality.  Little encourages us to pause and look around, much less question the end goal of all our busyness.  Anything slower than the quick cuts of TV commercials is overwhelmed by our impatience and short attention.  Unfortunately, we might be missing something important - to our happiness and to our survival.  The purpose of this book is to help remind us.  ~From the introduction to The Sacred Earth: Writers on Nature & Spirit, edited by Jason Gardner, 1998, New World Library

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.  Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.  We have guided missiles and misguided men.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

My meaningless office job:  they pay me for my body and mind, but my heart gets no paycheck and my soul pays the taxes.  ~Carrie Latet

Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies.  Nothing is just for the mind.  The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.  ~Fred Allen

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.  ~Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 1973

The trouble with the laws these days is that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs.  ~Author Unknown

Somebody recently figured out that we have 35 million laws to enforce the ten commandments.  ~Attributed to both Bert Masterson and Earl Wilson

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.  ~Jack Horner, on the eighty years between Darwin's On the Origin of Species and the nuclear bomb, in Time, 26 April 1993

Living in this modern toxic world, we are all slowly being poisoned to death.  ~Carrie Latet

Death is losing its terror.  It is the emergency exit for a world that is becoming more frightening death ever was.  ~Julian Green, Diary, 28 December 1958

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome.  Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.  ~H.L. Mencken

Somehow among all our use of antibiotic medicine and antibacterial soap our souls are becoming sanitized as well - don't let it happen to you!  ~Brock Fiant

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.  ~Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950

Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature.  What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.  ~Erwin Chargaff, Columbia Forum, Summer 1969

I always turn to the sports section first.  The sports section records people's accomplishments; the front page nothing but man's failures.  ~Earl Warren, quoted in Sports Illustrated, 22 July 1968

When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, "It would be nice."  ~Author Unknown

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.  ~Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine, 1954

On an average day 7 minutes of news happens.  Yet there are currently three full-time, 24-hour news networks.  ~Jon Stewart

Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife.  ~Arianna Stassinopoulos

Social reform aims to improve the condition of the poor by worsening the condition of the rich.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.  ~Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950

Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail.  ~Benjamin R. Barber

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.  ~Bill Vaughan

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.  ~Pearl S. Buck

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.  ~Matthew Arnold

The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development.  A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success.  Without a revolution in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration.  It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights.  There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear.  ~Aung San Suu Kyi

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.  ~Milton Friedman

There is more to life than increasing its speed.  ~Mohandas K. Gandhi

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.  ~Arundhati Roy

Man loves company even if it is only that of a small burning candle.  ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.  We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.   ~Henry David Thoreau, "Solitude," Walden, 1854

Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone.  And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.  ~Paul Johannes Tillich, The Eternal Now

There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.  ~Colette

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  ~Henry David Thoreau, 1854

When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

In a soulmate we find not company but a completed solitude.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.  ~Henry David Thoreau

We live in a very tense society.  We are pulled apart... and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together.... I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.  ~Helen Hayes

It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts.  ~K.T. Jong

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.  ~Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

By all means use sometimes to be alone.  Salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear.  ~George Herbert

Only in quiet waters do thing mirror themselves undistorted.  Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.  ~Hans Margolius

Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.  ~Robert Cecil

The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.  ~Marya Mannes

In solitude, where we are least alone.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that's where I renew my springs that never dry up.  ~Pearl Buck

What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it - like a secret vice.  ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Finding solitude in the concrete jungle is powerful and peaceful.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."  ~Holbrook Jackson

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves.  For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.  ~Eric Hoffer

When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death - ourselves.  ~Eda LeShan

No matter how reclusive we tend to be, we picture the after-life as a community of souls.  It is one thing to seek privacy in this life; it is another to face eternity alone.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I'm not anti-social.  I'm pro-solitude.  ~Author Unknown

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.  ~Henry David Thoreau

I am alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every hour holy...
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch), translated from German

Solitude never hurt anyone.  Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon.  ~Matt Groening, The Simpsons, spoken by the character Lisa Simpson

The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.  ~Voltaire

True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.  ~William Penn

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.  ~Harold Bloom

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.  ~Edward Hoagland

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.  ~Jack Kerouac

We visit others as a matter of social obligation.  How long has it been since we have visited with ourselves?  ~Morris Adler

There are days when you seek the company of your solitude, and your solitude just wants to be left alone.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.  ~Paul Tillich

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.  ~John Muir

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.  ~Marcus Aurelius

It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.  ~Victor Hugo

There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you.... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.  ~Ruth Stout

You will not find a soulmate in the quiet of your room.  You must go to a noisy place and look in the quiet corners.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I owe my solitude to other people.  ~Alan Watts

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.  ~Henry David Thoreau



It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.  ~Friedrich von Schiller


You don't raise heroes, you raise sons.  And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes.  ~Walter M. Schirra, Sr.


One father is enough to govern one hundred sons, but not a hundred sons one father.  ~George Herbert


You are my sonshine.  ~Author Unknown


Don't wait to make your son a great man - make him a great boy.  ~Author Unknown


What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.  ~The Talmud


By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.  ~Charles Wadsworth


When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.  ~William Shakespeare


Tiger father begets tiger son.  ~Chinese Proverb


Son, you outgrew my lap, but never my heart.  ~Author Unknown


The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.  ~Robert Frost


A boy is a magical creature - you can lock him out of your workshop, but you can't lock him out of your heart.  ~Allan Beck


Remember that every son had a mother
whose beloved son he was,
and every woman had a mother
whose beloved son she wasn't.
~Marge Piercy


Giving your son a skill is better than giving him one thousand pieces of gold.  ~Chinese Proverb


I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.... ~John Adams


We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.  ~Gloria Steinem


No one would be foolish enough to choose war over peace - in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.  ~Croesus of Lydia


Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte


If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.  ~James Baldwin


Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.  ~Aldous Huxley


We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow.  Our wiser sons, no doubt will think us so.  ~Alexander Pope


A man's desire for a son is usually nothing but the wish to duplicate himself in order that such a remarkable pattern may not be lost to the world.  ~Helen Rowland


Your son at five is your master, at ten your slave, at fifteen your double, and after that, your friend or your foe, depending on his bringing up.  ~Author Unknown


Your children are not your children.  They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.  ~Kahlil Gibran


He followed in his father's footsteps, but his gait was somewhat erratic.  ~Nicolas Bentley


He who can be a good son will be a good father.  ~Author Unknown


Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.  ~Epictetus


On the green they watched their sons
Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
As my father once watched me
~Edmund Blunden


A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties.  A father can do neither.  If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma.  ~Marlene Dietrich


Good fathers make good sons.  ~Author Unknown


Fathers and sons are much more considerate of one another than mothers and daughters.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Clever father, clever daughter; clever mother, clever son.  ~Russian Proverb


Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.  ~Plato


Every mother hopes that her daughter will marry a better man than she did, and is convinced that her son will never find a wife as good as his father did.  ~Martin Andersen-Nex


A son is a son till he takes him a wife, a daughter is a daughter all of her life.  ~Author Unknown


If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.  ~Sigmund Freud


Boys will be boys.  And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.  ~Anne Frank


Man's pity for himself, or for his son,
Always premising that said son at college
Has not contracted much more debt than knowledge.
~Author Unknown


It takes one woman twenty years to make a man of her son - and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.  ~Helen Rowland


Boys are beyond the range of anyone's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.  ~James Thurber


Until you know that life is interesting - and find it so - you haven't found your soul.  ~Geoffrey Fisher

The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun.
~John Greenleaf Whittier, My Psalm

You don't have a soul.   You are a Soul.   You have a body.  ~C.S. Lewis

The soul may sleep and the body still be happy, but only in youth.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.  ~Carl Jung

Confession is good for the conscience, but it usually bypasses the soul.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.  ~Henry David Thoreau

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.  ~Plato

What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

Care I for the limb, the thews, the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man!  Give me the spirit.  ~William Shakespeare

I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings.  For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.  ~Anne Sexton

One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine.  I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.  ~Lord Byron

Why do you hasten to remove anything which hurts your eye, while if something affects your soul you postpone the cure until next year?  ~Horace

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.  ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.  ~Octave Mirbeau

How strange a thing this is!  The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.  ~Oscar Wilde

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Following the Equator, 1897

You are a beautiful soul hidden by the trench coat of the ego.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy.  When action come from another section, the feeling disappears.  ~Rumi

Upturned toward the sun, eyes closed.  That color and warmth I see and feel is the soul on fire.  If only it remained when again my eyes opened.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

With all your science - can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?  ~Henry David Thoreau

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."  Say not, "I have found the path of the soul."  Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."  For the soul walks upon all paths.  The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.  The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.  ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923

What is soul?  It's like electricity - we don't really know what it is, but it's a force that can light a room.  ~Ray Charles

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.  ~Cicero

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.  ~Timothy Leary

The soul, like the body, lives by what it feeds on.  ~Josiah Gilbert Holland

Living is being born slowly.  It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942

The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.  ~Ferdinand Foch

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it.  Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.  ~Vincent Van Gogh

You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.  ~Martha Graham

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy.  ~Woody Allen

To speak and to speak well are two things.  A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.  ~Ben Jonson

If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it.  ~Earl Wilson

Two monologues do not make a dialogue.  ~Jeff Daly

Of those who say nothing, few are silent.  ~Thomas Neiel

The older I grow the more I listen to people who don't talk much.  ~Germain G. Glien

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.  ~Margaret Millar

To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered.  ~John Ruskin

There is no such thing as conversation.  It is an illusion.  There are intersecting monologues, that is all.  ~Rebecca West (Cicily Maxwell Andrews), "The Harsh Voice," There Is No Conversation, 1935

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.  ~Winston Churchill

The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid.  ~Author Unknown

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hands on the strings to stop their vibration as in twanging them to bring out their music.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat's Cradle

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.  ~Quentin Crisp

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.  ~Martin Farquhar Tupper, "Of Discretion," Proverbial Philosophy

The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.  ~Edgar Allan Poe

The trouble with talking too fast is you may say something you haven't thought of yet.  ~Ann Landers

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.  ~Hermann Hesse

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.  ~Dorothy Nevill

The easiest way to save face is to keep the lower half shut.  ~Author Unknown

Even a fish wouldn't get into trouble if he kept his mouth shut.  ~Author Unknown

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.  ~Orson Rega Card

Be careful of your thoughts; they may become words at any moment.  ~Ira Gassen

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.  ~Josh Billings

Foolishness always results when the tongue outraces the brain.  ~Author Unknown

The words you choose to say something are just as important as the decision to speak.  ~Author Unknown

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching.  I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.  ~Pubilius Syrus

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.  ~Walter Bagehot

It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.  ~Maurice Switzer, 1906 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

I am annoyed by individuals who are embarrassed by pauses in a conversation.  To me, every conversational pause refreshes.  ~George Sanders

Isn't it surprising how many things, if not said immediately, seem not worth saying ten minutes from now?  ~Arnot L. Sheppard, Jr.

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.  ~Karl Popper, Unended Quest

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.  ~Ambrose Bierce

If something goes without saying, let it.  ~Author Unknown

Drawing on my find command of language, I said nothing.  ~Robert Charles Benchley

Don't tell your friends about your indigestions:  "How are you!" is a greeting, not a question.  ~Arthur Guiterman, A Poet's Proverbs

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.  ~Horace

Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence.  ~Spanish Proverb

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.  ~Will Durant

If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.  ~Lemony Snicket

The man was on his knees, trying to retrieve each of his ugly words that were now scattered on the floor.  But, of course, it was too late.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving evidence of the fact.  ~George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879

Calvin:  Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts.  I wonder why we think faster than we speak.
Hobbes:  Probably so we can think twice.
~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

Not the fastest horse can catch a word spoken in anger.  ~Chinese Proverb

Never miss a good chance to shut up.  ~Will Rogers (verification of author per The Estate of Will Rogers, CMG Worldwide)

One way to prevent conversation from being boring is to say the wrong thing.  ~Frank Sheed

Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity.  A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence.  When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable.  But things said for conversation are chalk eggs.  Don't say things.  What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Letters and Social Aims," 1875, paraphrased over the years to the commonly quoted version "What you do speaks so loud, that I cannot hear what you say." (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance.  ~Robert Quillen

Coolidge was known for his terse speech and reticence.  A woman bet her friend that she could get Coolidge to speak to her, which was something he was reluctant to do.  She went up to him and said: "Hello, Mr. President, I bet my friend that I could get you to say three words to me."  "You lose," Coolidge replied dryly, and walked away.  ~Author Unknown

The difference between a smart man and a wise man is that a smart man knows what to say, a wise man knows whether or not to say it.  ~Frank M. Garafola

I just wish my mouth had a backspace key.  ~Author Unknown

No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next.  ~E.W. Howe

He's a wonderful talker, who has the art of telling you nothing in a great harangue.  ~Jean Baptiste Molière, Le Misanthrope

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.  ~George Bernard Shaw

If you keep your mouth shut you will never put your foot in it.  ~Austin O'Malley

If everybody thought before they spoke, the silence would be deafening.  ~George Barzan

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.  ~Adlai Stevenson

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't being said.  ~Author Unknown

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.  ~Winston Churchill

The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.  ~Napoleon I, Maxims

Keep your words soft and tender because tomorrow you may have to eat them.  ~Author Unknown

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.  ~Wendell Johnson

Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand.  ~Author Unknown

Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.  ~Author unknown, attributed to Mark Twain

When you're arguing with a fool, make sure he isn't doing the same thing.  ~Author Unknown

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk.  That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.  ~Ernest Hemingway

Why doesn't the fellow who says, "I'm no speechmaker," let it go at that instead of giving a demonstration?  ~Kin Hubbard

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave.  The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.  ~Dale Carnegie

Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth.  Don't whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want it to tingle.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

But I... never could make a good impromptu speech without several hours to prepare it.  ~Mark Twain, 1879 speech (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Be sincere; be brief; be seated.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt, on speechmaking

When a sermon at length comes to an end, people rise and praise God, and they feel the same way after many other speeches.  ~John Andrew Holmes

Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.  ~Sydney J. Harris

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep!  A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.  ~Peggy Noonan

The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters.  From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.  ~Aldous Huxley

Always be shorter than anybody dared to hope.  ~Lord Reading, on speechmaking

I sometimes marvel at the extraordinary docility with which Americans submit to speeches.  ~Adlai E. Stevenson

Oratory is the power to talk people out of their sober and natural opinions.  ~Joseph Chatfield

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1845

Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record.  ~Archibald Philip Primrose

His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.  ~Author Unknown

Political speeches are like steer horns.  A point here, a point there, and a lot of bull in between.  ~Alfred E. Neuman

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.  ~Evan Esar

Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.  ~Will Rogers

His speeches to an hour-glass
Do some resemblance show
Because the longer time they run
The shallower they grow.
~Author Unknown

The problem with speeches isn't so much not knowing when to stop, as knowing when not to begin.  ~Frances Rodman

A speech is like a woman's skirt: it needs to be long enough to cover the subject matter but short enough to hold the audience's attention.~Author Unknown

Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion.  Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.  ~Gore Vidal

Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.  ~G.B. Trudeau

The best way to sound like you know what you're talking about is to know what you're talking about.  ~Author Unknown

I always turn to the sports section first.  The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures.  ~Earl Warren

Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.  ~Alistair Cooke

If only Hitler and Mussolini could have a good game of bowls once a week at Geneva, I feel that Europe would not be as troubled as it is.  ~R.G. Briscow

The difference between the old ballplayer and the new ballplayer is the jersey.  The old ballplayer cared about the name on the front.  The new ballplayer cares about the name on the back.  ~Steve Garvey

Sports is human life in microcosm.  ~Howard Cosell

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.  ~Blaise Pascal

The fewer rules a coach has, the fewer rules there are for players to break.  ~John Madden

I don't believe professional athletes should be role models.  I believe parents should be role models.... It's not like it was when I was growing up.  My mom and my grandmother told me how it was going to be.  If I didn't like it, they said, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out."  Parents have to take better control.  ~Charles Barkley

I think my favorite sport in the Olympics is the one in which you make your way through the snow, you stop, you shoot a gun, and then you continue on.  In most of the world, it is known as the biathlon, except in New York City, where it is known as winter.  ~Michael Ventre, L.A. Daily News

We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.  ~Vince Lombardi

The trouble with referees is that they just don't care which side wins.  ~Tom Canterbury

When we played, World Series checks meant something.  Now all they do is screw up your taxes.  ~Don Drysdale, 1978

With the money I'm making, I should be playing two positions.  ~Pete Rose, 1977

Men forget everything; women remember everything.  That's why men need instant replays in sports.  They've already forgotten what happened.  ~Rita Rudner

Andre Dawson has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day.  Aren't we all?  ~Vin Scully

I don't know.  I never smoked AstroTurf.  ~Tug McGraw, when asked if he preferred grass or AstroTurf, April 1974

To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.  ~Jack Handey

Prize fighters can sometimes read and write when they start - but they can't when they finish.  ~Martin H. Fischer

October is not only a beautiful month but marks the precious yet fleeting overlap of hockey, baseball, basketball, and football.  ~Jason Love

I would have thought that the knowledge that you are going to be leapt upon by half-a-dozen congratulatory, but sweaty team-mates would be inducement not to score a goal.  ~Arthur Marshall

A player who conjugates a verb in the first person singular cannot be part of the squad, he has to conjugate the verb in the first person plural.  We.  We want to conquer.  We are going to conquer.  Using the word "I" when you're in a group makes things complicated.  ~Wanderley Luxemburgo, 1999

One day of practice is like one day of clean living.  It doesn't do you any good.  ~Abe Lemmons

The more you sweat in practice, the less you bleed in battle.  ~Author Unknown

I wanted to have a career in sports when I was young, but I had to give it up.  I'm only six feet tall, so I couldn't play basketball.  I'm only 190 pounds, so I couldn't play football.  And I have 20-20 vision, so I couldn't be a referee.  ~Jay Leno

To think of playing cricket for hard cash!  Money and gentility would ruin any pastime under the sun.  ~Mary Russell Mitford, 1823

It is all very well to say that a man should play for the pure love of the game.  Perhaps he ought, but to the working man it is impossible.  ~J.J. Bentley

I know we're meant to be these hard-headed, money-obsessed professionals but we're still little boys at heart.  Just ask our wives.  ~Rob Lee, 1998

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.  Shorn of the game's aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear.  ~Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch, 1992

Playing polo is like trying to play golf during an earthquake.  ~Sylvester Stallone, 1990

Professional wrestling's most mysterious hold is on its audience.  ~Luke Neely, 1953

As a manager, you always have a gun to your head.  It's a question of whether there is a bullet in the barrel.  ~Kevin Keegan, 1995

The breakfast of champions is not cereal, it's the opposition.  ~Nick Seitz

We are inclined that if we watch a football game or baseball game, we have taken part in it.  ~John F. Kennedy, 1961

Most people are in a factory from nine till five.  Their job may be to turn out 263 little circles.  At the end of the week they're three short and somebody has a go at them.  On Saturday afternoons they deserve something to go and shout about.  ~Rodney Marsh, 1969

I don't think the discus will ever attract any interest until they let us start throwing them at one another.  ~Al Oerter

The umpire... is like the geyser in the bathroom; we cannot do without it, yet we notice it only when it is out of order.  ~Neville Cardus

Most games are lost, not won.  ~Casey Stengel

It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.  ~George Bernard Shaw

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.  ~H.L. Mencken

The more I practice, the luckier I get.  ~Jerry Barber, about golf

Baseball and football are very different games.  In a way, both of them are easy.  Football is easy if you're crazy as hell.  Baseball is easy if you've got patience.  They'd both be easier for me if I were a little more crazy - and a little more patient.  ~Bo Jackson

There isn't a single professional sports season now that doesn't go on at least a month too long.  Baseball starts in football weather, and football in baseball weather, and basketball overlaps them both.  ~James Reston

Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park.  Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and the future can fuse with the present.  Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.  ~George A. Sheehan

I figure practice puts your brains in your muscles.  ~Sam Snead, about golf

There's nothing wrong with the Little League World Series that locking out the adults couldn't cure.  ~Mike Penner, Los Angeles Times

If you make every game a life-and-death thing, you're going to have problems.  You'll be dead a lot.  ~Dean Smith

I watched the Indy 500, and I was thinking that if they left earlier they wouldn't have to go so fast.  ~Steven Wright

Winning is overrated.  The only time it is really important is in surgery and war.  ~Al McGuire

I think you enjoy the game more if you don't know the rules.  Anyway you're on the same wavelength as the referees.  ~Jonathan Davies, 1995

If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls' sports, such as hot oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and such and such.  ~Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing your grandmother with her teeth out.  ~George Brett, 1986

Losing is the great American sin.  ~Jerome Holtzman

The essence of sports is that while you're doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it.  ~Roger Bannister

If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?  ~Vince Lombardi

An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets.  He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head.  ~Emil Zatopek

It's like going into a nuclear war with bows and arrows.  ~Joe Kinnear, comparing finances and resources in high-dollar and low-dollar sports teams

I thought lacrosse was what you find in la church.  ~Robin Williams, 1982

Officials are the only guys who can rob you and then get a police escort out of the stadium.  ~Ron Bolton

If you screw things up in tennis, it's 15-love.  If you screw up in boxing, it's your ass.  ~Randall "Tex" Cobb

I was called "Rembrandt" Hope in my boxing days, because I spent so much time on the canvas.  ~Bob Hope

To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.  ~Roland Barthes

Losing streaks are funny.  If you lose at the beginning, you get off to a bad start.  If you lose in the middle of the season, you're in a slump.  If you lose at the end, you're choking.  ~Gene Mauch

He has turned defensive boxing into a poetic art.  Trouble is, nobody ever knocked anybody out with a poem.  ~Eddie Shaw, referring to Herol "Bomber" Graham

It may be that all games are silly.  But then, so are humans.  ~Robert Lynd

In play there are two pleasures for your choosing -
The one is winning, and the other losing.
~Lord Byron

People understand contests.  You take a bunch of kids throwing rocks at random and people look askance, but if you go and hold a rock-throwing contest - people understand that.  ~Don Murray

All sports are games of inches.  ~Dick Ritger

Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through.  Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves.  ~Rita Mae Brown

When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested.  Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.  ~Fran Lebowitz

I cannot for the life of me see why the umpires, the only two people on a cricket field who are not going to get grass stains on their knees, are the only two people allowed to wear dark trousers.  ~Katharine Whitehorn

Many continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game.  ~George Mikes, How to Be an Alien, 1946

Cricket - a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity.  ~Lord Mancroft

Oh God, if there be cricket in heaven, let there also be rain.  ~Alec Douglas Home

Cricket is baseball on valium.  ~Robin Williams

Life is simply a cricket match, with temptation as the bowler.  ~Author Unknown

If horses can't eat it, I won't play on it.  ~Dick Allen

Pain heals.  Chicks dig scars.  Glory lasts forever.  ~Vince McKewin, from the movie The Replacements

Pain is nothing compared to what it feels like to quit.  ~Author Unknown

Losers quit when they're tired.  Winners quit when they've won.  ~Author Unknown

You're playing worse every day and right now you're playing like the middle of next week.

The ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel.  ~Robert Morley, 1965

Every day you guys look worse and worse.  And today you played like tomorrow.  ~John Mariucci

The Russians have a weapon that can wipe out two hundred eighty thousand Americans.  That puts them exactly ten years behind Howard Cosell.  ~Red Smith

Motor racing's less of a sport these days than a commercial break doing 150 mph.  ~Peter Dunne, 1992

Sport is a preserver of health.  ~Hippocrates

It is not how big you are, it's how big you play.  ~Author Unknown

A tough day at the office is even tougher when your office contains spectator seating.  ~Nik Posa

The key is not the "will to win" - everybody has that.  It is the will to prepare to win that is important.  ~Bobby Knight

You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go.  Don't ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.  ~Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

All a manager has to do is keep eleven players happy - the eleven in the reserves.  The first team are happy because they are in the first team.  ~Rodney Marsh, 1979

The Rock knew his wrestling career was over when he looked across the ring and saw his opponent... THE PAPER.  ~Jerry Thomas

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.  The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports.  It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see - not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.  ~Lewis H. Lapham, Money and Class in America, 1988

[T]he finish line is sometimes merely the symbol of victory.  All sorts of personal triumphs take place before that point, and the outcome of the race may actually be decided long before the end.  ~Laurence Malone

It's not whether you win or lose - but whether I win or lose.  ~Sandy Lyle

There's more to boxing than hitting.  There's not getting hit, for instance.  ~George Foreman

I'm fanatical about sport:  there seems to me something almost religious about the fact that human beings can organise play, the spirit of play.  ~Simon Gray, 1995

Squash is boxing with racquets.  ~Jonah Barrington

Crystallizing my feelings about the game, I find that squash is less frustrating than golf, less fickle than tennis.  It is easier than badminton, cheaper than polo.  It is better exercise than bowls, quicker than cricket, less boring than jogging, drier than swimming, safer than hang gliding.  ~John Hopkins, Squash: A Joyful Game, 1980

My only feeling about superstition is that it's unlucky to be behind at the end of the game.  ~Duffy Daugherty

If I lose at play, I blaspheme; if my fellow loses, he blasphemes.  So, God is always the loser.  ~John Donne, 1623

American professional athletes are bilingual; they speak English and profanity.  ~Gordie Howe, 1975

We have forty-four defenses for him, but he has forty-five ways to score.  ~Al Attles, on Nate Archibald

Winning isn't overrated - it's your acceptance of being rated.  ~Carrie Latet

Sports are too much with us.  Late and soon, sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes.  ~Roger Angell

Fans are the only ones who really care.  There are no free-agent fans.  ~Dick Young

When cerebral processes enter into sports, you start screwing up.  It's like the Constitution, which says separate church and state.  You have to separate mind and body.  ~Bill Lee

These are my new shoes.  They're good shoes.  They won't make you rich like me, they won't make you rebound like me, they definitely won't make you handsome like me.   They'll only make you have shoes like me.  That's it.  ~From a Charles Barkley commercial for basketball shoes, 1993

Just give me 25 guys on the last year of their contracts; I'll win a pennant every year.  ~Sparky Anderson

Finish last in your league and they call you Idiot.  Finish last in medical school and they call you Doctor.  ~Abe Lemons

I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.  ~Andrew Dickson White

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play.  It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence:  in other words, it is war minus the shooting... there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.  ~George Orwell

We can't win at home and we can't win on the road.  My problem as general manager is I can't think of another place to play.  ~Pat Williams

Springtime is the land awakening.  The March winds are the morning yawn.  ~Quoted by Lewis Grizzard in Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You

Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"  ~Robin Williams

Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer.  ~Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.  ~Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe

Hee that is in a towne in May loseth his spring.  ~George Herbert

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold:  when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.  ~Charles Dickens

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

It's spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!  ~Mark Twain

Hoe while it is spring, and enjoy the best anticipations.  It is not much matter if things do not turn out well.  ~Charles Dudley Warner

Awake, thou wintry earth -
Fling off thy sadness!
Fair vernal flowers, laugh forth
Your ancient gladness!
~Thomas Blackburn, "An Easter Hymn"

I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.  ~Ruth Stout

No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.  ~Proverb

Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.  ~Doug Larson

Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day.  ~W. Earl Hall

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.  ~Anne Bradstreet

The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven -
All's right with the world!
~Robert Browning

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.  ~Hal Borland

Spring shows what God can do with a drab and dirty world.  ~Virgil A. Kraft

April is a promise that May is bound to keep.  ~Hal Borland

Where man sees but withered leaves,
God sees sweet flowers growing.
~Albert Laighton

That God once loved a garden we learn in Holy writ.
And seeing gardens in the Spring I well can credit it.
~Winifred Mary Letts

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day.  No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.  ~Aldo Leopold

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.  ~Margaret Atwood

Indoors or out, no one relaxes in March, that month of wind and taxes, the wind will presently disappear, the taxes last us all the year.  ~Ogden Nash

And Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast
rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Sensitive Plant"

Every spring is the only spring - a perpetual astonishment.  ~Ellis Peters

Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men.  ~Chinese Proverb

The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's kiss glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze.
~Julian Grenfell

In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.  ~Mark Twain

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.  ~Pablo Neruda

[W]ell-apparell'd April on the heel
Of limping winter treads...
~William Shakespeare

I think that no matter how old or infirm I may become, I will always plant a large garden in the spring.  Who can resist the feelings of hope and joy that one gets from participating in nature's rebirth?  ~Edward Giobbi

Spring has returned.  The Earth is like a child that knows poems.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
~Robert Frost

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.  ~George Santayana

The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another.  The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.  ~Henry Van Dyke

Spring is not the best of seasons.
Cold and flu are two good reasons;
wind and rain and other sorrow,
warm today and cold tomorrow.
~Author Unknown

April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.  ~William Shakespeare

Out with the cold, in with the woo.  ~E. Marshall, "Spring Thought"

The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring.  ~Bern Williams

Yesterday the twig was brown and bare;
To-day the glint of green is there;
Tomorrow will be leaflets spare;
I know no thing so wondrous fair,
No miracle so strangely rare.
I wonder what will next be there!
~L.H. Bailey

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.  ~Nadine Stair

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!  ~Wallace Stevens

Hark! the hours are softly calling
Bidding Spring arise
To listen to the rain-drops falling
From the cloudy skies
To listen to Earth's weary voices
Louder every day
Bidding her no longer linger
On her charm'd way
But hasten to her task of beauty
Scarcely yet begun.
~Adelaide Anne Procter

The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow.  Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.  ~E.B. White, "Hot Weather," One Man's Meat, 1944

Now every field is clothed with grass, and every tree with leaves; now the woods put forth their blossoms, and the year assumes its gay attire.  ~Virgil

First a howling blizzard woke us,
Then the rain came down to soak us,
And now before the eye can focus -
Crocus.  ~Lilja Rogers

May is a pious fraud of the almanac.  ~James R. Lowell

You can't see Canada across lake Erie, but you know it's there.  It's the same with spring.  You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland.  ~Paul Fleischman

People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball.  I'll tell you what I do.  I stare out the window and wait for spring.  ~Rogers Hornsby

The seasons are what a symphony ought to be:  four perfect movements in harmony with each other.  ~Arthur Rubenstein

Thank you to Michael Garofalo of The Spirit of Gardening
for sharing some of these quotations!

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.  ~Gregg Easterbrook

98% of all statistics are made up.  ~Author Unknown

Statistics are like bikinis.  What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.  ~Aaron Levenstein

Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket.  According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable.  ~Bobby Bragan, 1963

Statistics can be made to prove anything - even the truth.  ~Author Unknown

Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.  ~Paul Brodeur, Outrageous Misconduct

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.  ~Author Unknown

Lottery:  A tax on people who are bad at math.  ~Author Unknown

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination.  ~Andrew Lang

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Statistics are like women; mirrors of purest virtue and truth, or like whores to use as one pleases.  ~Theodor Billroth

Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.  ~William W. Watt

Then there is the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches.  ~W.I.E. Gates

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.  ~Rex Stout, Death of a Doxy

I always find that statistics are hard to swallow and impossible to digest.  The only one I can ever remember is that if all the people who go to sleep in church were laid end to end they would be a lot more comfortable.  ~Mrs. Robert A. Taft

Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture....  ~H.G. Wells, The Undying Fire

The average human has one breast and one testicle.  ~Des McHale

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.  You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.  Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.  So says the statistician.  ~Arthur Conan Doyle

A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions.  ~M.J. Moroney

Statistics may be defined as "a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty."  ~W.A. Wallis

After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, "Lies - damned lies - and statistics," still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of.  ~Leonard Courtney, speech, August 1895, New York, "To My Fellow-Disciples at Saratoga Springs," printed in The National Review (London, 1895)  (Thanks, Mark)

Statistics are just a way for the mathematician to evangelize his faith.  ~Hunter Brinkmeier

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force:  "There are three kinds of lies:  lies, damned lies, and statistics."  ~Mark Twain, autobiography, 1904 (but, as yet no actual record of this under Disraeli's authorship)

The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus.  ~Laplace, Théorie analytique des probabilités, 1820

I abhor averages.  I like the individual case.  A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live.  ~Louis D. Brandeis

I could prove God statistically.  Take the human body alone - the chances that all the functions of an individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.  ~George Gallup

Stress should be a powerful driving force, not an obstacle.  ~Bill Phillips

The man who doesn't relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.  ~Elbert Hubbard

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.  ~Attributed to both Jim Goodwin and Sydney J. Harris

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.  ~Richard Carlson

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.  ~Margaret Fuller

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.  ~Ovid

For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.  ~Lily Tomlin

No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares.  They fatigued only the muscles, we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves.  ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Give your stress wings and let it fly away.  ~Terri Guillemets

Sometimes it's important to work for that pot of gold.  But other times it's essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow.  ~Douglas Pagels, These Are the Gifts I'd Like to Give to You

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it.  ~Author Unknown

Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.  ~Joshua L. Liebman

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.  ~Will Rogers, Autobiography, 1949

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.  ~Peter Drucker

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.  ~Bertrand Russell

Stress is an ignorant state.  It believes that everything is an emergency.  ~Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.  ~Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne

Some of the secret joys of living are not found by rushing from point A to point B, but by inventing some imaginary letters along the way.  ~Douglas Pagels, These Are the Gifts I'd Like to Give to You

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.  ~Milan Kundera

Sometimes it seems your ever-increasing list of things to do can leave you feeling totally undone.  ~Susan Mitchell and Catherine Christie, I'd Kill for a Cookie

I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.  ~Jennifer Yane

There is more to life than increasing its speed.  ~Mohandas K. Gandhi

The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.  ~H.L. Mencken

God didn't do it all in one day.  What makes me think I can?  ~Author Unknown

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.  ~William James

The field of consciousness is tiny.  It accepts only one problem at a time.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
~William Henry Davies

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.  ~Aesop, Fables

Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you.  ~John De Paola

Releasing the pressure, it's good for the teapot and the water.  Try it sometime.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterward.  ~Spanish Proverb

To be "on edge," you are literally not centered - not being in your spiritual center.  ~Carrie Latet

Each day should have a clearly marked emergency exit sign.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Stress is poison.  ~Agavé Powers

If your teeth are clenched and your fists are clenched, your lifespan is probably clenched.  ~Terri Guillemets

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral.  In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms.  This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.  ~Steven Halpern

Loafing needs no explanation and is its own excuse.  ~Christopher Morley

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.  ~Jerome K. Jerome, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

There is precious little hope to be got out of whatever keeps us industrious, but there is a chance for us whenever we cease work and become stargazers.  ~H.M. Tomlinson

If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles.  ~Doug Larson

The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge of appetite, his own little festival of Saturnalia, a brief excursion from his way of life.  ~Robert Maclver

Tension is who you think you should be.  Relaxation is who you are.  ~Chinese Proverb

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.  ~J. Lubbock

A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.  ~George Jean Nathan

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.  ~Etty Hillesum

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.  ~Albert Einstein

Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good.  ~Joe Paterno

If at first you don't succeed, do it like your mother told you.  ~Author Unknown

Eighty percent of success is showing up.  ~Woody Allen

As you climb the ladder of success, be sure it's leaning against the right building.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

If at first you don't succeed, you're running about average.  ~M.H. Alderson

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.  ~Winston Churchill

What is success?  It is a toy balloon among children armed with pins.  ~Gene Fowler

We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.  ~Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies, 1925

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.  ~Lily Tomlin

I couldn't wait for success... so I went ahead without it.  ~Jonathan Winters

There is no point at which you can say, "Well, I'm successful now.  I might as well take a nap."  ~Carrie Fisher

Don't aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.  ~David Frost

Some people dream of success... while others wake up and work hard at it.  ~Author Unknown

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.  ~Bessie Stanley, 1905, commonly misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Try to discover
The road to success
And you'll seek but never find,
But blaze your own path
And the road to success
Will trail right behind.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

In order to succeed you must fail, so that you know what not to do the next time.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

I dread success.  To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in courtship.  I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.  ~George Bernard Shaw, 28 August 1896

Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves.  ~Larry King

Success has made failures of many men.  ~Cindy Adams

Some aspects of success seem rather silly as death approaches.  ~Donald A. Miller

Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.  ~Author Unknown

That man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Success is more permanent when you achieve it without destroying your principles.  ~Walter Cronkite

The two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success.  ~Author Unknown

Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it.  ~Elbert Hubbard

The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS.  That - with the squalid interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease.  ~William James, 11 September 1906

The closer one gets to the top, the more one finds there is no "top."  ~Nancy Barcus

Something in human nature causes us to start slacking off at our moment of greatest accomplishment.  As you become successful, you will need a great deal of self-discipline not to lose your sense of balance, humility, and commitment.  ~Ross Perot

What will matter is not your success but your significance.... ~Michael Josephson, from "What Will Matter" (poem), 2003, whatwillmatter.com

Smarts and action are on the same side of the equation where the sum is success.  ~Garrett Hazel

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it.... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.  ~Tennessee Williams

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

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.  ~Christopher Morley

How do you achieve success?  Well, for one thing, you don't define it before you achieve it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success.  ~Irving Berlin

Success is simply a matter of luck.  Ask any failure.  ~Earl Wilson

Success will never be a big step in the future, success is a small step taken just now.  ~Jonatan Mårtensson

Some people succeed because they are destined to, but most people succeed because they are determined to.  ~Author Unknown

Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.  ~Dale Carnegie

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.  ~Dale Carnegie

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.  ~Booker T. Washington

Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.  ~George Smith Patton

It is wise to keep in mind that no success or failure is necessarily final.  ~Author Unknown

How can they say my life is not a success?  Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?  ~Logan Smith

Success and failure.  We think of them as opposites, but they're really not.  They're companions - the hero and the sidekick.  ~Laurence Shames

The man who has done his level best, and who is conscious that he has done his best, is a success, even though the world may write him down as a failure.  ~B.C. Forbes

Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.  ~Al Bernstein

The road to success is wherever people need another road.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.  ~Arthur McAuliff (Thanks, Fernanda)

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.  ~Quentin Crisp

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.  ~Author Unknown

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.  Then give up.  There's no use in being a damn fool about it.  ~W.C. Fields

If at first you do succeed - try to hide your astonishment.  ~Author Unknown



I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.  My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music.  It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.  ~Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit


Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.  ~Russel Baker


A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.  ~James Dent


If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.  ~Bern Williams


Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
~Francis Thompson


To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson


What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.  ~Gertrude Jekyll


In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way
I have to go to bed by day.
~Robert Louis Stevenson


In June, as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day.  No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.  ~Aldo Leopold


I question not if thrushes sing,
If roses load the air;
Beyond my heart I need not reach
When all is summer there.
~John Vance Cheney


Oh, the summer night
Has a smile of light
And she sits on a sapphire throne.
~Barry Cornwall


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


There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.  ~Celia Thaxter


The summer night is like a perfection of thought.  ~Wallace Stevens


In summer, the song sings itself.  ~William Carlos Williams


Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.  ~Sam Keen


Summer has set in with its usual severity.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.  ~Anton Chekhov


A life without love is like a year without summer.  ~Swedish Proverb


Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing Night!
Night of south winds!  Night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding Night!  Mad, naked, Summer Night!
~Walt Whitman


Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation.  If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.  ~Erma Bombeck


The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.  ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Mark Twain


Do what we can, summer will have its flies.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Heat, ma'am! it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.  ~Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's Memoir


Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.  ~John Lubbock


Each fairy breath of summer, as it blows with loveliness, inspires the blushing rose.  ~Author Unknown


No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.
~James Russell Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848


Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.  ~Henry James


Love is to the heart what the summer is to the farmer's year - it brings to harvest all the loveliest flowers of the soul.  ~Author Unknown


Then followed that beautiful season... Summer....
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit.  A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.  ~Ada Louise Huxtable


This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.  ~Sarah Orne Jewett


More Season Quotes:  The Spirit of Gardening




You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.  ~John Wooden


The best portion of a good man's life - his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.  ~William Wordsworth


Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.  ~Leo Buscaglia


Kindness is the greatest wisdom.  ~Author Unknown


The first and highest law must be the love of man to man.  Homo homini Deus est - this is the supreme practical maxim, this is the turning point of the world's History.  ~Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity


The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.  ~Nelson Henderson


In about the same degree as you are helpful, you will be happy.  ~Karl Reiland


I expect to pass through life but once.  If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.  ~William Penn


A hug is a great gift - one size fits all, and it's easy to exchange.  ~Author Unknown


How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
~William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, much later adapted to "So shines a good deed in a weary world" by David Seltzer for the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory


The best things in life are nearest:  Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.  Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson


How beautiful a day can be
When kindness touches it!
~George Elliston


If you haven't any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.  ~Bob Hope


Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up.  ~Jesse Jackson


A good character is the best tombstone.  Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered.  Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.  ~Charles H. Spurgeon


It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.  ~Author Unknown


Today, give a stranger one of your smiles.  It might be the only sunshine he sees all day.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion.  ~Dalai Lama


Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.  ~Mark Twain


Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.  ~Seneca


Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.
~Adam Lindsay Gordon


How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong.  Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.  ~George Washington Carver


You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses.  ~Chinese Proverb


Open your heart - open it wide; someone is standing outside.  ~Quoted in Believe: A Christmas Treasury by Mary Engelbreit


Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight.  Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward.  Your life will never be the same again.  ~Og Mandino


Real charity doesn't care if it's tax-deductible or not.  ~Dan Bennett


Act as if what you do makes a difference.  It does.  ~William James


Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.  It's not.  ~Dr. Seuss


Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful.  ~Author Unknown


It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little - do what you can.  ~Sydney Smith


You give but little when you give of your possessions.  It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.  ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet


While earning your daily bread, be sure you share a slice with those less fortunate.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.  ~Winston Churchill


Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.  ~Mohammed Ali


Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives.  Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself.  For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.  ~Daniel Berrigan


Trees outstrip most people in the extent and depth of their work for the public good.  ~Sara Ebenreck, American Forests


Find a need and fill it.  ~Ruth Stafford Peale


I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catchers mitt on both hands.  You need to be able to throw something back.  ~Maya Angelou


A handful of pine-seed will cover mountains with the green majesty of a forest.  I too will set my face to the wind and throw my handful of seed on high.  ~Fiona MacLeod


If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.  ~Lucy Larcom


Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.  ~Lowell


Don't wait for your ship to come in - swim out to it.  ~Author Unknown

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim.  And I'd despise the one who gave up.  ~Abraham Maslow

The water is your friend.  You don't have to fight with water, just share the same spirit as the water, and it will help you move.  ~Aleksandr Popov

H2O:  two parts Heart and one part Obsession.  ~Author Unknown

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

No man drowns if he perseveres in praying to God, and can swim.  ~Russian Proverb

Chlorine is my perfume.  ~Author Unknown

If the world was flat I'd probably swim off it.  ~Author Unknown

It's a good idea to begin at the bottom in everything except in learning to swim.  ~Author Unknown

If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?  ~Steven Wright

Sometimes God calms the storm.  At other times, he calms the sailor.  And sometimes he makes us swim.  ~Author Unknown

Seventy-five percent of our planet is water - can you swim?  ~Author Unknown

What goes around comes around, just like a flip turn.  ~Author Unknown

Seven days of no swimming makes one weak.  ~Author Unknown

If you want to learn to swim jump into the water.  On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.  ~Bruce Lee

When the earth floods from global warming, the swimmers will rule the world.  ~Author Unknown

If you have a lane, you have a chance.  ~Author Unknown

Swimming:  From the outside looking in, you cant understand it.  From the inside looking out, you cant explain it.  ~Author Unknown

Oxygen is overrated.  ~Author Unknown

Swimming - what real men do while boys play football.  ~Author Unknown

He who burns his bridges better be a damn good swimmer.  ~Author Unknown

Chlorine:  the breakfast of champions!  ~Author Unknown

Do men who have got all their marbles go swimming in lakes with their clothes on?  ~P.G. Wodehouse

We swim because we are too sexy for a sport that requires clothes.  ~Author Unknown

I simply can't understand
Why swimsuits are in such demand
They're soggy and damp,
Bind like a clamp,
And hold about three pounds of sand!
~D.R. Benson

I always wanted to be Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up.  I can't fly, but swimming is the next best thing.  It's harmony and balance.  The water is my sky.  ~Clayton Jones

Most of us, swimming against the tides of trouble the world knows nothing about, need only a bit of praise or encouragement - and we will make the goal.  ~Jerome Fleishman

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.  ~Mark Twain

Breaststroke is an athletic event; butterfly is a political statement.  ~Paul Tsongas

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.  ~Author Unknown

Well, me don't swim too tough so me don't go in the water too deep.  ~Bob Marley

On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.  ~Thomas Jefferson

It's been told that swimming is a wimp sport, but I don't see it.  We don't get timeouts, in the middle of a race we can't stop and catch our breath, we can't roll on our stomachs and lie there, and we can't ask for a substitution.  ~Dusty Hicks

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom.  The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.  ~Thomas Macaulay

Fish, to taste good, must swim three times: in water, in butter, and in wine.  ~Proverb

In my retirement I go for a short swim at least once or twice every day.  It's either that or buy a new golf ball.  ~Gene Perret

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry.  Most people do.  ~Author Unknown

If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn't open, and you friends are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were swimming.  ~Jack Handey

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.  ~Woodrow T. Wilson

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.  ~Edsger Dijkstra

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim."  ~Lyndon B. Johnson



If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don't get wet you can keep.  ~Will Rogers


When there's a single thief, it's robbery.  When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation.  ~Vanya Cohen


Taxation with representation ain't so hot either.  ~Gerald Barzan


Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt


The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.  ~Ronald Reagan


America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.  ~Laurence J. Peter


I'm proud to pay taxes in the United States; the only thing is, I could be just as proud for half the money.  ~Arthur Godfrey


The United States has a system of taxation by confession.  ~Hugo Black


Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?  ~Peg Bracken


The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.  Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr.  ~Will Rogers


Unquestionably, there is progress.  The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.  ~H.L. Mencken


The nation should have a tax system that looks like someone designed it on purpose.  ~William Simon


We must care for each other more, and tax each other less.  ~Bill Archer


The expenses of government, having for their object the interest of all, should be borne by everyone, and the more a man enjoys the advantages of society, the more he ought to hold himself honored in contributing to those expenses.  ~Anne Robert Jacques Turgot


Be wary of strong drink.  It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.  ~Robert Heinlein


The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing.  ~Jean Baptist Colbert, attributed


What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.  ~Thomas Paine


Did you ever notice that when you put the words "The" and "IRS" together, it spells "THEIRS?"  ~Author Unknown


We have long had death and taxes as the two standards of inevitability.  But there are those who believe that death is the preferable of the two.  "At least," as one man said, "there's one advantage about death; it doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." ~Erwin N. Griswold


Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.  ~Herman Wouk


Capital punishment:  The income tax.  ~Jeff Hayes


If the Lord loveth a cheerful giver, how he must hate the taxpayer!  ~John Andrew Holmes


Of course the truth is that the congresspersons are too busy raising campaign money to read the laws they pass.  The laws are written by staff tax nerds who can put pretty much any wording they want in there.  I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the U.S. Tax Code, you'd find at least one sex scene ("'Yes, yes, YES!' moaned Vanessa as Lance, his taut body moist with moisture, again and again depreciated her adjusted gross rate of annualized fiscal debenture").  ~Dave Barry


People who complain about taxes can be divided into two classes:  men and women.  ~Author Unknown


Taxes:  Of life's two certainties, the only one for which you can get an automatic extension.  ~Author Unknown


Indoors or out, no one relaxes in March, that month of wind and taxes, the wind will presently disappear, the taxes last us all the year.  ~Ogden Nash


It's income tax time again, Americans:  time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta.  ~Dave Barry


Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant:  animals have instincts, we have taxes.  ~Erving Goffman


The purse of the people is the real seat of sensibility.  Let it be drawn upon largely, and they will then listen to truths which could not excite them through any other organ.  ~Thomas Jefferson


To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.  ~Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book






Today, it takes more brains and effort to make out the income-tax form than it does to make the income.  ~Alfred E. Neuman


A person doesn't know how much he has to be thankful for until he has to pay taxes on it.  ~Author Unknown


Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labors.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt


I am thankful for the taxes I pay because it means that I'm employed.  ~Nancie J. Carmody


The point to remember is that what the government gives it must first take away.  ~John S. Coleman, address, Detroit Chamber of Commerce, 1956


Philosophy teaches a man that he can't take it with him; taxes teach him he can't leave it behind either.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


It was as true... as taxes is.  And nothing's truer than them.  ~Charles Dickens


Death and taxes may be inevitable, but they shouldn't be related.  ~J.C. Watts, Jr.


The best things in life are free, but sooner or later the government will find a way to tax them.  ~Author Unknown


The governments view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases:  If it moves, tax it.  If it keeps moving, regulate it.  And if it stops moving, subsidize it.  ~Ronald Reagan


I like to pay taxes.  With them I buy civilization.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes.  ~Mark Twain


Our tax code is so long it makes War and Peace seem breezy.  ~Steven LaTourette


The wages of sin are death, but after they take the taxes out, it's more like a tired feeling, really.  ~Paula Poundstone


We are told that this is an odious and unpopular tax.  I never knew a tax that was not odious and unpopular with the people who paid it.  ~John Sherman


You must pay taxes.  But there's no law that says you gotta leave a tip.  ~Morgan Stanley advertisement


This is a question too difficult for a mathematician.  It should be asked of a philosopher.  ~Albert Einstein, about filling out his income tax form, 1944


Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.  ~Will Rogers


U.S. Internal Revenue Service: an agency modeled after the revenue raising concepts of the 19th century economist, Jesse James.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grassockg the spoil of the multitude.  Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation.  It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute.  ~Thomas Paine


Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund.  ~F.J. Raymond


There's nothing wrong with the younger generation that becoming taxpayers won't cure.  ~Dan Bennett


Pothinus:  "Is it possible that Caesar, the conqueror of the world, has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes?"
Caesar:  "My friend, taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world."
~George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"


There may be liberty and justice for all, but there are tax breaks only for some.  ~Martin A. Sullivan


The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.  ~Barry Goldwater


Taxes grow without rain.  ~Jewish Proverb


I don't know if I can live on my income or not - the government won't let me try it.  ~Bob Thaves, "Frank & Ernest"


Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us.  We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.  ~Benjamin Franklin


Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Question:  " I understand that Congress is considering a so-called 'flat' tax system.  How would this work?"  Answer:  "If Congress were to pass a 'flat' tax, you'd simply pay a fixed percentage of your income, and you wouldn't have to fill out any complicated forms, and there would be no loopholes for politically connected groups, and normal people would actually understand the tax laws, and giant talking broccoli stalks would come around and mow your lawn for free, because Congress is NOT going to pass a flat tax, you pathetic fool."  ~Dave Barry


The flat tax would be so simple, you could fill it out on a post card.  A post card that would say, in effect, having a wonderful time; glad most of my money is here.  ~Steve Forbes


A fine is a tax for doing something wrong.  A tax is a fine for doing something right.  Author Unknown


Count the day won when, turning on its axis,
This earth imposes no additional taxes.
~Franklin P. Adams


Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories.  ~H.L. Mencken


Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.  ~Calvin Coolidge


It's about ten times the size of the Bible - and unlike the Bible, contains no good news.  ~Don Nickles, about the Internal Revenue Code


The payment of taxes gives a right to protection.  ~James M. Wayne


If we don't do something to simplify the tax system, we're going to end up with a national police force of internal revenue agents.  ~Leon Panetta


What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector?  The taxidermist takes only your skin.  ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1902


The sales tax seems to be more politically acceptable than the income tax.  ~Raymond C. Scheppach


There is an ancient belief that the gods love the obscure and hate the obvious.  Without benefit of divinity, modern men of similar persuasion draft provisions of the Internal Revenue Code.  Section 341 is their triumph.  ~Martin D. Ginsburg


All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.  ~Walter B. Wriston


The politicians say "we" can't afford a tax cut.  Maybe we can't afford the politicians.  ~Steve Forbes



The more you earn, the less you keep,
And now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to take,
If the tax-collector hasn't got it before I wake.
~Ogden Nash


Intaxication:  Euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.  ~Author unknown, from a Washington Post word contest


You don't pay taxes - they take taxes.  ~Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker


People try to live within their income so they can afford to pay taxes to a government that can't live within its income.  ~Robert Half


Tax complexity itself is a kind of tax.  ~Max Baucus


He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation... For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.... We, therefore... solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.  ~The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies, 1776


I can give you 1040 good reasons why I hate the government.  ~The Quote Garden


Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.  ~Henry Fielding, "Love in Several Masques"

Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world.  ~T'ien Yiheng

There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims

Strange how a teapot can represent at the same time the comforts of solitude and the pleasures of company.  ~Author Unknown

Each cup of tea represents an imaginary voyage.  ~Catherine Douzel

I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.  ~Sydney Smith

Drinking a daily cup of tea will surely starve the apothecary.  ~Chinese Proverb

There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.  ~Bernard-Paul Heroux

Bread and water can so easily be toast and tea.  ~Author Unknown

If you are cold, tea will warm you.  If you are too heated, it will cool you.  If you are depressed, it will cheer you.  If you are excited, it will calm you.  ~Gladstone, 1865

We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven't had any tea for a week...
The bottom is out of the Universe.
~Rudyard Kipling

Is there no Latin word for Tea?  Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.  ~Hilaire Belloc

Tea is a cup of life.  ~Author Unknown

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.  ~Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

Another novelty is the tea-party, an extraordinary meal in that, being offered to persons that have already dined well, it supposes neither appetite nor thirst, and has no object but distraction, no basis but delicate enjoyment.  ~Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste

The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.  ~George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Tea should be taken in solitude.  ~C.S. Lewis

If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty.  ~Japanese Proverb

Tea is liquid wisdom.  ~Anonymous

Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you.  Now tell me about hundreds of things.  ~Saki

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.  ~Alice Walker

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.  ~Honoré de Balzac

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.  ~Thich Nat Hahn

Tea's proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.  ~Samuel Johnson

O' peppermint tea -
two delights per sip
as steamy hot as passion
cool as a wintry lake dip
~Terri Guillemets

Iced tea may not have as much wisdom as hot tea, but in the summer better a cool and refreshed dullard than a steamy sweat-drenched sage - leave sagacity to the autumn!  ~Linda Solegato

Iced tea is too pure and natural a creation not to have been invented as soon as tea, ice, and hot weather crossed paths.  ~John Egerton

American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot, sunny day.  It's never really caught on in the UK, probably because the last time we had a hot, sunny day was back in 1957.  ~Tom Holt

Our trouble is that we drink too much tea.  I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.  ~J.B. Priestley

Tea...is a religion of the art of life.  ~Okakura

All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.  ~George Orwell, "A Nice Cup of Tea"

Tea does our fancy aid,
Repress those vapours which the head invade
And keeps that palace of the soul serene.
~Edmund Waller, "Of Tea"

A Proper Tea is much nicer than a Very Nearly Tea, which is one you forget about afterwards.  ~A.A. Milne

The first cup moistens my lips and throat.  The second cup breaks my loneliness.  The third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some thousand volumes of odd ideographs.  The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration - all the wrongs of life pass out through my pores.  At the fifth cup I am purified.  The sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals.  The seventh cup - ah, but I could take no more!  I only feel the breath of the cool wind that raises in my sleeves.  Where is Elysium?  Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.  ~Lu Tung, "Tea-Drinking"

Coffee is not my cup of tea.  ~Author Unknown

tea leaves
tea loves
loves tea
lives tea
leaves tea?
never.
~Uniek Swain

The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.  ~Lu Yu

Top off the tea... it lubricates the grey matter.  ~Good Neighbors, quoted from stashtea.com

Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
~Rupert Brooke, "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," 1912
(Thanks, Helen)

As the centerpiece of a cherished ritual, it's a talisman against the chill of winter, a respite from the ho-hum routine of the day.  ~Sarah Engler, "Tea Up," Real Simple magazine, February 2006

The perfect temperature for tea is two degrees hotter than just right.  ~Terri Guillemets

It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs.  We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so.  It dictates to us our emotions, our passions.  After eggs and bacon it says, "Work!"  After beefsteak and porter, it says, "Sleep!"  After a cup of tea (two spoonfuls for each cup, and don't let it stand for more than three minutes), it says to the brain, "Now rise, and show your strength.  Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature, and into life:  spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!"  ~Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Remember the tea kettle - it is always up to its neck in hot water, yet it still sings!  ~Author Unknown

Tea, although an Oriental
Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast.
~G.K. Chesterton, "The Song of Right and Wrong"

Tea is instant wisdom - just add water!  ~Astrid Alauda

When the news reporter said "Shopkeepers are opening their doors bringing out blankets and cups of tea" I just smiled.  It's like yes.  That's Britain for you.  Tea solves everything.  You're a bit cold?  Tea.  Your boyfriend has just left you?  Tea.  You've just been told you've got cancer?  Tea.  Coordinated terrorist attack on the transport network bringing the city to a grinding halt?  Tea dammit!  And if it's really serious, they may bring out the coffee.  The Americans have their alert raised to red, we break out the coffee.  That's for situations more serious than this of course.  Like another England penalty shoot-out.   ~Jslayeruk, as posted on Metaquotes Livejournal, in response to the July 2005 London subway bombings

The first sip of tea is the always the best... you cringe as it burns the back of your throat, knowing you just had the hottest carpe-diem portion.  ~Terri Guillemets

Harry found the [tea]... seemed to burn away a little of the fear fluttering in his chest.  ~J.K. Rowling

Tea! thou soft, thou sober, sage, and venerable liquid,... thou female tongue-running, smile-smoothing, heart-opening, wind-tippling cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moment of my life, let me fall prostrate.  ~Colley Cibber, Lady's Last Stake

Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cozy, doesn't try it on.  ~Billy Connolly

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.  ~C.S. Lewis



I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.  ~Lily Tomlin as "Edith Ann"


The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called "truth."  ~Dan Rather


In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work.  It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.  ~Jacques Barzun


Teaching creates all other professions.  ~Author Unknown


If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.  ~Donald D. Quinn


Modern cynics and skeptics... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.  ~John F. Kennedy


A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. ~Thomas Carruthers


Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.  ~Gail Godwin


A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.  ~Horace Mann


Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom.  To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.  ~Tracy Kidder


A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.  ~Henry Brooks Adams


A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others.  ~Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, translated from Turkish


If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.  ~Margaret Fuller


The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.  He inspires self-distrust.  He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him.  He will have no disciple.  ~Amos Bronson Alcott


A good teacher is a master of simplification and an enemy of simplism.  ~Louis A. Berman


We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family.  Then we expect them to educate our children.  ~John Sculley


Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more.  ~Bob Talbert


The mediocre teacher tells.  The good teacher explains.  The superior teacher demonstrates.  The great teacher inspires.  ~William Arthur Ward


The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.  ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton


A teacher's purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image.  ~Author Unknown


What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.  ~Karl Menninger


Teaching should be full of ideas instead of stuffed with facts.  ~Author Unknown


A cross-eyed teacher can keep twice the number of children in order than any other, because the pupils do not know who she's looking at.  ~Four Hundred Laughs: Or, Fun Without Vulgarity, compiled and edited by John R. Kemble, 1902


Teaching is leaving a vestige of one self in the development of another.  And surely the student is a bank where you can deposit your most precious treasures.  ~Eugene P. Bertin






Teachers who inspire know that teaching is like cultivating a garden, and those who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.  ~Author Unknown


Teachers who inspire realize there will always be rocks in the road ahead of us.  They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how we use them.  ~Author Unknown


Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.  ~Jacques Barzun


One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings.  The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.  ~Carl Jung


A teacher's job is to take a bunch of live wires and see that they are well-grounded.  ~D. Martin


What a teacher writes on the blackboard of life can never be erased.  ~Author Unknown


The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.  ~Kahlil Gibran


Discover wildlife:  be a teacher!  ~Author Unknown


The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "apparently ordinary" people to unusual effort.  The tough problem is not in identifying winners:  it is in making winners out of ordinary people.  ~K. Patricia Cross


When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.  ~The Talmud


The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.  ~Author Unknown


The average teacher explains complexity; the gifted teacher reveals simplicity.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher.  That is, I used to, until she got an unlisted number.  ~Author Unknown


2  Teach is
2  Touch lives
4  Ever
~Author Unknown


Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.  ~John Cotton Dana


There are three good reasons to be a teacher - June, July, and August.  ~Author Unknown


A truly special teacher is very wise, and sees tomorrow in every child's eyes.  ~Author Unknown


A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.  ~Thomas Szaz


To teach is to learn twice.  ~Joseph Joubert, Pensées, 1842


The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you just learned this morning.  ~Author Unknown


Teachers touch the future.  ~Author Unknown


Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first.  The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior.  When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.  ~Marva Collins


The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance.  In teaching we rely on the "naturals," the ones who somehow know how to teach.  ~Peter Drucker


Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools.  The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.  ~Haim G. Ginott


The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.  ~Mark Van Doren


Quotations From Teachers:


The only reason I always try to meet and know the parents better is because it helps me to forgive their children.  ~Louis Johannot


If you promise not to believe everything your child says happens at school, I'll promise not to believe everything he says happens at home.  ~Anonymous Teacher




Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success.  ~Author Unknown


No one can whistle a symphony.  It takes a whole orchestra to play it.  ~H.E. Luccock


Teamwork is the ability to work as a group toward a common vision, even if that vision becomes extremely blurry.  ~Author Unknown


Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.  ~Vince Lombardi


The nice thing about teamwork is that you always have others on your side.  ~Margaret Carty


Many hands make light work.  ~John Heywood


One piece of log creates a small fire, adequate to warm you up, add just a few more pieces to blast an immense bonfire, large enough to warm up your entire circle of friends; needless to say that individuality counts but team work dynamites.  ~Jin Kwon


No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.  ~John Donne


Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.  ~Virginia Burden


Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.  ~Kenyan Proverb


Coming together is a beginning.  Keeping together is progress.  Working together is success.  ~Henry Ford


None of us is as smart as all of us.  ~Ken Blanchard


A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.  ~Father Strickland, 1863 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


Team means Together Everyone Achieves More!  ~Author Unknown


Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision.  The ability to direct individual accomplishment toward organizational objectives.  It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.  ~Andrew Carnegie


Regardless of differences, we strive shoulder to shoulder... [T]eamwork can be summed up in five short words:  "We believe in each other."  ~Author Unknown


A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  ~Author Unknown


Contrary to popular belief, there most certainly is an "I" in "team."  It is the same "I" that appears three times in "responsibility."  ~Amber Harding


We must all hang together or most assuredly we shall hang separately.  ~Benjamin Franklin


Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.  ~Margaret Meade


A single leaf working alone provides no shade.  ~Chuck Page


The way a team plays as a whole determines its success.  You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime.  ~Babe Ruth


If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.  ~Henry Ford


Teamwork is essential - it allows you to blame someone else.  ~Author Unknown


The ratio of We's to I's is the best indicator of the development of a team.  ~Lewis B. Ergen


Respect your fellow human being, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal and help one another achieve it.  ~Bill Bradley


I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.  ~Mia Hamm


Teamwork is so important that it is virtually impossible for you to reach the heights of your capabilities or make the money that you want without becoming very good at it.  ~Brian Tracy


No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A snowflake is one of God's most fragile creations, but look what they can do when they stick together!  ~Author Unknown


In union there is strength.  ~Aesop


Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.  ~Alexander the Great


If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


A group becomes a team when each member is sure enough of himself and his contribution to praise the skills of the others.  ~Norman Shidle


Gettin' good players is easy.  Gettin' 'em to play together is the hard part.  ~Casey Stengel


It is a fact that in the right formation, the lifting power of many wings can achieve twice the distance of any bird flying alone.  ~Author Unknown


Sure there's no "I" in "team," but there is a "ME"!  ~Author Unknown




All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.  ~Mark Kennedy


Inventor:  A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


Modern technology
Owes ecology
An apology.
~Alan M. Eddison


It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.  ~Albert Einstein


One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.  No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923


For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.  ~Richard P. Feynman


If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.  ~Frank Lloyd Wright


Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.  ~Jean Arp


Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.  ~Aldous Huxley


Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.  ~Max Frisch


Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?  ~Al Boliska


Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo:  not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.  ~Lewis Mumford



God never made his work for man to mend.
~John Dryden


It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.  ~T.S. Eliot, about radio


Technology... is a queer thing.  It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.  ~C.P. Snow, New York Times, 15 March 1971


Don't get smart alecksy
With the galaxy
Leave the atom alone.
~E.Y. Harburg, "Leave the Atom Alone," 1957


The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith


The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing.  Not so with technology.  ~E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973


I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.  ~John F. Kennedy


The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.  ~Dennis Gabor, Innovations:  Scientific, Technological and Social, 1970


This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.  ~Jonas Salk


Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.  ~J.K. Rowling


As far as I'm concerned, progress peaked with frozen pizza.  ~From the movie Die Hard 2, spoken by the character John McClane regarding technological advances, screenplay by Steven E. de Souza and Doug Richardson, based on the novel 58 Minutes by Walter Wager






I like my new telephone, my computer works just fine, my calculator is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind!  ~Author Unknown


The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.  ~Karl Marx


The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.  ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988


When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it - whether it be a factory or a government.  ~Alexander Chase, Perspectives, 1966


We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith


Man is a slow, sloppy and brilliant thinker; the machine is fast, accurate and stupid.  ~William M. Kelly


I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.  The transfer is not paying off.  Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.  ~Brian Eno, Wired, January 1999


Use of advanced messaging technology does not imply an endorsement of western industrial civilization.  ~Anonymous email sig line


Once upon a time we were just plain people.  But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems.  Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.  ~Ellen Goodman, "The Human Factor," The Washington Post, January 1987


I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.  ~E.F. Schumacher


Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.  ~Robert M. Pirsig


It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.  ~Pearl S. Buck


The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.  ~B.F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement, 1969


The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.  ~Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939


What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions.  ~Arnold Glasow


Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.  ~R. Buckminster Fuller


The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.  ~Havelock Ellis


The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog.  The man will be there to feed the dog.  The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.  ~Warren G. Bennis


It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.  ~John Stuart Mill


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


You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.  ~Walter Lippmann


We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.  ~Carl Sagan


Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.  ~Eric Hoffer


We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.  We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology.  This is a prescription for disaster.  We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.  ~Carl Sagan


Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.  ~Alfred North Whitehead


Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.  ~Erich Fromm


Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.  ~Alan C. Kay


Lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.  ~Henry David Thoreau


For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.  ~Alice Kahn


The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.  ~Sydney J. Harris


The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time.  They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.  ~Quentin Crisp

Little children, headache; big children, heartache.  ~Italian Proverb

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.  ~Laurence J. Peter

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "Age and Death," Afterthoughts, 1931

If you want to recapture your youth, just cut off his allowance.  ~Al Bernstein

When buying a used car, punch the buttons on the radio.  If all the stations are rock and roll, there's a good chance the transmission is shot.  ~Larry Lujack

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.  ~Dorothy Parker

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.  ~Erma Bombeck

Adolescence is perhaps nature's way of preparing parents to welcome the empty nest.  ~Karen Savage and Patricia Adams, The Good Stepmother

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals.  If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.  ~Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies

Too many of today's children have straight teeth and crooked morals.  ~Unknown high school principal

Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own.  ~Doug Larson

Adolescence: A stage between infancy and adultery.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Mother Nature is providential.  She gives us twelve years to develop a love for our children before turning them into teenagers.  ~William Galvin

The best substitute for experience is being sixteen.  ~Raymond Duncan

When the boy is growing he has a wolf in his belly.  ~German Proverb

In the time it takes you to understand a 14-year-old, he turns 15.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Violet will be a good color for hair at just about the same time that brunette becomes a good color for flowers.  ~Fran Lebowitz

The teenager seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.  ~Edgar Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent

The invention of the teenager was a mistake.  Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, no one wants to live any other way.  ~Judith Martin

There's nothing wrong with the younger generation that becoming taxpayers won't cure.  ~Dan Bennett

Adolescence is a period of rapid changes.  Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.  ~Author Unknown

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Mark Twain but no evidence has yet been found for this (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

Chaperons don't enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet.  ~Judith Martin

Teenagers complain there's nothing to do, then stay out all night doing it.  ~Bob Phillips

The average income of the modern teenager is about 2 a.m.  ~Author Unknown

Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath.  ~Arnold H. Glasow

There isn't a child who hasn't gone out into the brave new world who eventually doesn't return to the old homestead carrying a bundle of dirty clothes.  ~Art Buchwald

It's difficult to decide whether growing pains are something teenagers have - or are.  ~Author Unknown

A baby-sitter is a teenager acting like an adult while the adults are out acting like teenagers.  ~Author Unknown

The average teenager still has all the faults his parents outgrew.  ~Author Unknown

A baby-sitter is a teenager who gets two dollars an hour to eat five dollars' worth of your food.  ~Henny Youngman

There is nothing wrong with today's teenager that twenty years won't cure.  ~Author Unknown

What a shame that allowances have to stop with the teens:  both those that are paid to us and those that are made for us.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory:  an empty gin bottle.  ~Erma Bombeck

You don't have to suffer to be a poet.  Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.  ~John Ciardi, Simmons Review, Fall 1962

I tell my child, if I seem obsessed to always know where you've been, it is because my DNA will be found at the scene.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A boy becomes an adult three years before his parents think he does, and about two years after he thinks he does.  ~Lewis B. Hershey, News summaries, 31 December 1951

You can tell a child is growing up when he stops asking where he came from and starts refusing to tell where he is going.  ~Author Unknown

How strange that the young should always think the world is against them - when in fact that is the only time it is for them.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.  ~Jessamyn West

It is hard to convince a high-school student that he will encounter a lot of problems more difficult than those of algebra and geometry.  ~Edgar W. Howe

Adolescents are not monsters.  They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.  ~Virginia Satir, The New Peoplemaking, 1988

The troubles of adolescence eventually all go away - it's just like a really long, bad cold.  ~Dawn Ruelas

Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough.  ~Earl Wilson

Why do children want to grow up?  Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity.  But what is there today, in America, that very poor and very rich adolescents want to do but cannot do?  Not much:  they can "do" drugs, "have" sex, "make" babies, and "get" money (from their parents, crime, or the State).  For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty.  Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?  ~Thomas Szasz

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do now.  ~Will Rogers

Small children disturb your sleep, big children your life.  ~Yiddish Proverb

My adolescence progressed normally:  enough misery to keep the death wish my usual state, an occasional high to keep me from actually taking the gas-pipe.  ~Faye Moskowitz

Helping your eldest to pick a college is one of the greatest educational experiences of life - for the parents.  Next to trying to pick his bride, it's the best way to learn that your authority, if not entirely gone, is slipping fast.  ~Sally and James Reston

The bathtub was invented in 1850 and the telephone in 1875.  In other words, if you had been living in 1850, you could have sat in the bathtub for 25 years without having to answer the phone.  ~Bill DeWitt, 1972

The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.  ~Fran Lebowitz

Middle age:  When you're sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.  ~Ogden Nash

I like my new telephone, my computer works just fine, my calculator is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind!  ~Author Unknown

I'd rather sit down and write a letter than call someone up.  I hate the telephone.  ~Henry Miller

Telephone, n.  An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.  ~Ambrose Bierce

A woman is a person who reaches for a chair when she answers the telephone.  ~Milton Wright

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say?  And why are you waiting?  ~Stephen Levine

Cell phones are the latest invention in rudeness.  ~Terri Guillemets

Some one invented the telephone,
And interrupted a nation's slumbers,
Ringing wrong but similar numbers.
~Ogden Nash, Look What You Did, Christopher

How come wrong numbers are never busy?  ~Author Unknown

I'd play every day if I could.  It's cheaper than a shrink and there are no telephones on my golf cart.  ~Brent Musburger

I keep the telephone of my mind open to peace, harmony, health, love and abundance.  Then, whenever doubt, anxiety or fear try to call me, they keep getting a busy signal - and soon they'll forget my number.  ~Edith Armstrong

Words from the past: "It's a clever idea, Mr. Bell, but don't wire us, we'll wire you."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.  ~Mark Twain, Christmas greeting, 1890

If The Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me.  ~Song title by Jimmy Buffet

I don't answer the phone.  I get the feeling whenever I do that there will be someone on the other end.  ~Fred Couples

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.  ~Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies

Marriage is like a phone call in the night: first the ring, and then you wake up.  ~Evelyn Hendrickson

All television is educational television.  The question is:  what is it teaching?  ~Nicholas Johnson

I wish there was a knob on the TV so you could turn up the intelligence.  They got one marked "brightness" but it don't work, does it?  ~Leo Anthony Gallagher

How can you put on a meaningful drama when, every fifteen minutes, proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?  ~Rod Serling, quoted in Submitted for Your Approval, Public Broadcasting Station, 1995

Sex on television can't hurt you unless you fall off.  ~Author Unknown

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.  ~Ann Landers

I find television to be very educating.  Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.  ~Groucho Marx

Television has changed a child from an irresistible force to an immovable object.  ~Author Unknown

We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores.  When our kids come home from school do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos?  Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learns between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.  ~George Bush

If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it.  ~Jerome Singer

Television:  A medium - so called because it is neither rare nor well done.  ~Ernie Kovacs

Today, watching television often means fighting, violence and foul language - and that's just deciding who gets to hold the remote control.  ~Donna Gephart

[Television is] an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.  ~David Frost

Television!  Teacher, mother, secret lover.  ~Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

Television is simply automated day-dreaming.  ~Lee Lovinger

They say that ninety percent of TV is junk.  But, ninety percent of everything is junk.  ~Gene Roddenberry

The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV.  The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.  ~Raymond Chandler, 1946

It's the menace that everyone loves to hate but can't seem to live without.  ~Paddy Chayevsky

What is being lost is the magic of the word.  I am not an image person.  Imagery belongs to another civilization:  the caveman.  Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.  ~Elie Wiesel, 1995

Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies.  Nothing is just for the mind.  The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.  ~Fred Allen

Time has convinced me of one thing.  Television is for appearing on, not looking at.  ~Noel Coward, attributed

We can put it in its proper perspective by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.  ~Robert M. Hutchins, News Summaries, 31 December 1977

TV.  If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six.  Open your child's imagination.  Open a book.  ~Author Unknown

Each day, the American housewife turns toward television as toward a lover.  She feels guilty about it, and well she might, for he's covered with warts and is only after her money.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

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.  ~Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun

Television:  chewing gum for the eyes.  ~Frank Lloyd Wright

Television keeps the masses occupied.  What if everyone decided they wanted to make something of their lives?  Television keeps the competition down and keeps more criminals off the street.  What if everyone decided to go to law school or medical school?  It would sure make it tough on the rest of us.  ~Jim Urbanovich

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.  ~Alfred Hitchcock

Television - the drug of the nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation...
~The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, "Television, the Drug of the Nation" (song)

So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.  ~Roald Dahl

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

If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all.  ~Joey Adams

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.  ~Alan Kay

Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new type program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was.  ~Art Buchwald, "Adding Insult to Injury," Have I Ever Lied to You?, 1966

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.  ~Malcolm Muggeridge

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.  ~Edward R. Murrow

Television is an anesthetic for the pain of the modern world.  ~Astrid Alauda

TV will never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it.  ~Author Unknown, from New York Times, 1939

Ninety-eight percent of American homes have TV sets, which means the people in the other 2% have to generate their own sex and violence.  ~Attributed to Gene Baylos

Television is more interesting than people.  If it were not, we should have people standing in the corners of our rooms.  ~Alan Coren

Your cable television is experiencing difficulties.  Please do not panic.  Resist the temptation to read or talk to loved ones.  Do not attempt sexual relations, as years of TV radiation have left your genitals withered and useless.  ~Matt Groening, The Simpsons

Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms.  And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.  ~Alfred Hitchcock

What compels you to stare, night after night, at all the glittering hokum that has been deliberately put together for you?  ~J.B. Priestley, about Americans

So long as there's a jingle in your head, television isn't free.  ~Jason Love

I hate television.  I hate it as much as peanuts.  But I can't stop eating peanuts.  ~Orson Welles

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.  ~Andrew Ross

Television has raised writing to a new low.  ~Samuel Goldwyn

Why are sex and violence always linked?  I'm afraid they'll blur together in people's minds - sexandviolence - until we can't tell them apart.  I expect to hear a newscaster say, "The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex."  ~Dick Cavett, 1978

Theatre is life.  Cinema is art.  Television is furniture.  ~Author Unknown

TV is the place where the pursuit of happiness has become the pursuit of trivia
Where toothpaste and cars have become sex objects
Where imagination is sucked out of children by a cathode ray nipple...
~The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, "Television, the Drug of the Nation" (song)

I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover a new and unbearable disturbance of the modern peace, or a saving radiance in the sky.  We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure.  ~E.B. White

I could have been a doctor, but there were too many good shows on TV.  ~Jason Love

Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?  ~Al Boliska

Television is not the Truth.  Television is god-damned amusement park.  Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players.  We're in the boredom killing business.  ~Paddy Chayevsky

I have had my television aerials removed.  It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.  ~Malcolm Muggeridge

The cable TV sex channels don't expand our horizons, don't make us better people, and don't come in clearly enough.  ~Bill Maher

[T]elevision's perfect.  You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought.  And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze.  You don't have to concentrate.  You don't have to react.  You don't have to remember.  You don't miss your brain because you don't need it.  Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally.  Apart from that, all is peace and quiet.  You are in the man's nirvana.  And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and say you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind.  He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.  ~Raymond Chandler

If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons.  ~Daniel Marsh, 1950

Television is a gold goose that lays scramble eggs; and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar.  ~Lee Loevinger

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.  ~Gore Vidal

On cable TV they have a weather channel - 24 hours of weather.  We had something like that where I grew up.  We called it a window.  ~Dan Spencer

All television is children's television.  ~Richard P. Adler

Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere.  If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.  ~E.B. White

The marvels - of film, radio, and television - are marvels of one-way communication, which is not communication at all.  ~Milton Mayer

Back again, new and improved
We return to our irregularly programmed schedule
hidden cleverly between heavy breasted beer and car commercials...
~The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, "Television, the Drug of the Nation" (song)

Whenever it's on it's like having somebody in my house that I want to get rid of and they won't leave.  I hate the sound of it.  All that noise and light coming from a piece of furniture.  ~John Waters

Philo began laying out his vision for what television could become.  Above all else... television would become the world's greatest teaching tool.  Illiteracy would be wiped out.  The immediacy of television was the key.  As news happened viewers would watch it unfold live; no longer would we have to rely on people interpreting and distorting the news for us.  We would be watching sporting events and symphony orchestras.  Instead of going to the movies, the movies would come to us.  Television would also bring about world peace.  If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings?  War would be a thing of the past.  ~Evan I. Schwartz, The Last Lone Inventor, about Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television

The great thing about television is that if something important happens anywhere in the world, day or night, you can always change the channel.  ~Author Unknown

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.  ~Peter De Vries

Art is moral passion married to entertainment.  Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.  ~Rita Mae Brown

Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good.  It would be the end of everything we know.  ~Marvin Minksy

In Beverley Hills, they don't throw their garbage away - they make it into television shows.  ~Woody Allen

MTV is the lava lamp of the 1980s.  ~Doug Ferrari

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth and fresher breath.  ~Dave Barry

If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read.  But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.  ~Lily Tomlin

CNN, ESPN, ABC, TNT but mostly B.S... ~The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, "Television, the Drug of the Nation" (song)

Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want.  The most terrifying thing is what people do want.  ~Clive Barnes

I suppose I should get a VCR, but the only thing I like about television is its ephemerality.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.  ~Dave Barry

Television?  No good will come of this device.  The word is half Greek and half Latin.  ~Author Unknown

The same media people that claim violence on TV doesn't influence people, are perfectly willing to sell you advertising time.  ~Author Unknown

TV a clever contraction derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville.  ~Goodman Ace

I have come to the feeling about television the way I do about hamburgers:  I eat a lot of hamburgers and I don't remember a single one of them.  ~John Barrow, 1973

The triumph of machine over people.  ~Fred Allen, about television

The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.  ~David Brinkley

I have never seen a bad television program, because I refuse to.  God gave me a mind, and a wrist that turns things off.  ~Jack Paar

If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.  ~Johnny Carson

If any reader of this book is in the grip of some habit of which he is deeply ashamed, I advise him not to give way to it in secret but to do it on television.  No-one will pass him with averted gaze on the other side of the street.  People will cross the road at the risk of losing their own lives in order to say "We saw you on the telly."  ~Quentin Crisp

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.  ~Woody Allen

There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, seems to offer more entertainment possibilities than the TV set.  ~Harriet van Horne

When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio.  And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio "because the pictures were better." ~Alistair Cooke



Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.  ~Jacques Barzun


I have always considered tennis as a combat in an arena between two gladiators who have their racquets and their courage as their weapons.  ~Yannick Noah


Love is nothing in tennis, but in life it's everything.  ~Author Unknown


Tennis is an addiction that once it has truly hooked a man will not let him go.  ~Russell Lynes


Ladies, here's a hint.  If you're up against a girl with big boobs, bring her to the net and make her hit backhand volleys.  That's the hardest shot for the well-endowed.  ~Billie Jean King


Good shot, bad luck, and hell are the five basic words to be used in a game of tennis, though these, of course, can be slightly amplified.  ~Virginia Graham, Say Please, 1949


When I was 40, my doctor advised me that a man in his 40s shouldn't play tennis.  I heeded his advice carefully and could hardly wait until I reached 50 to start again.  ~Hugo L. Black


An otherwise happily married couple may turn a mixed doubles game into a scene from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  ~Rod Laver


The serve was invented so that the net could play.  ~Bill Cosby


Though your game is hardly the best
You can fray your opponent's nerves
By methodically bouncing the ball
At least ten times before your serves.
~Arnold J. Zarett


Why has slamming a ball with a racquet become so obsessive a pleasure for so many of us?  It seems clear to me that a primary attraction of the sport is the opportunity it gives to release aggression physically without being arrested for felonious assault.  ~Nat Hentoff


But that won't give me a free hand to hold the beer.  ~Billy Carter, while being taught a two-handed backhand shot


The primary conception of tennis is to get the ball over the net and at the same time to keep it within bounds of the court; failing this, within the borders of the neighborhood.  ~Elliot Chaze


A perfect combination of violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquility.  ~Billie Jean King, about tennis


Tennis begins with love.  ~Author Unknown


What a polite game tennis is.  The chief word in it seems to be "sorry" and admiration of each other's play crosses the net as frequently as the ball.  ~J.M. Barrie


Tennis is not a gentle game.  Psychologically, it is vicious.  That people are only just beginning to come to terms with this fact illustrates just how big a con trick has been perpetrated on the non-playing tennis public - and even a few players, usually losing players - for decades.  ~Richard Evans


The cunning competitor plays on the other party's guilt.  Continuously praise your opponent's shots, and you'll notice how he begins to press.  Self-beratement also serves to balance a guilty conscience for being successful and makes your opponent disturbed for upsetting you so.  If on occasion you call one of your opponent's "out" shots "in," then later on you can innocently call an "in" shot "out" on a crucial play.  Practice saying "Good try," sincerely; then you can call a lot of close shots "out" and get away with it.  ~Theodor Saretsky


Speed in tennis is a strange mixture of intuition, guesswork, footwork and hair-trigger reflexes.  Many of the players famed for quickness on court would finish dead last in a field of schoolgirls in a race over any distance more than ten yards.  ~Eugene Scott


In tennis the addict moves about a hard rectangle and seeks to ambush a fuzzy ball with a modified snow-shoe.  ~Elliot Chaze


It's difficult for most people to imagine the creative process in tennis.  Seemingly it's just an athletic matter of hitting the ball consistently well within the boundaries of the court.  That analysis is just as specious as thinking that the difficulty in portraying King Lear on stage is learning all the lines.  ~Virginia Wade


It's one-on-one out there, man.  There ain't no hiding.  I can't pass the ball.  ~Pete Sampras


Saying thank you is more than good manners.  It is good spirituality.  ~Alfred Painter

One can pay back the loan of gold, but one dies forever in debt to those who are kind.  ~Malayan Proverb

Unselfish and noble actions are the most radiant pages in the biography of souls.  ~David Thomas

Not what we give,
But what we share,
For the gift
without the giver
Is bare.
~James Russell Lowell

Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.  ~G.B. Stern

I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks.  ~William Shakespeare

The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.  ~John E. Southard

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.  ~G.K. Chesterton

I would thank you from the bottom of my heart, but for you my heart has no bottom.  ~Author Unknown

Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.  ~Confucius

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.  ~Oscar Wilde

Gratitude is the memory of the heart.  ~Jean Baptiste Massieu, translated from French

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
~William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, much later adapted to "So shines a good deed in a weary world" by David Seltzer for the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.  ~Author Unknown

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.  ~Mark Twain

How beautiful a day can be
When kindness touches it!
~George Elliston

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.  ~Thornton Wilder

I feel a very unusual sensation - if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don't unravel.  ~Author Unknown

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim.  ~William Feather

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.  ~Voltaire

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.  ~Edmund Burke

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.  ~Carl G. Jung

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.  ~Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.  ~Terry Josephson

You and I are not what we eat; we are what we think.  ~Walter Anderson, The Confidence Course, 1997

Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?  ~Winnie the Pooh

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.  ~John F. Kennedy

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.  ~Will Durant

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

I like to think of thoughts as living blossoms borne by the human tree.  ~James Douglas

The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.  ~H.G. Wells

Our minds are lazier than our bodies.  ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1678

Invest a few moments in thinking.  It will pay good interest.  ~Author Unknown

Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar territory.  ~G. Behn

Thinking is like loving and dying.  Each of us must do it for himself.  ~Josiah Royce

It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean.  ~Luther Burbank

Physiological response to thinking and to pain is the same; and man is not given to hurting himself.  ~Martin H. Fischer

We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.  ~L'Estrange

Our job is not to make up anybody's mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of the decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking.  ~Author Unknown 

Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.  ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life.  The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.  ~H.L. Mencken, Prejudices, 1925

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once a week.  ~George Bernard Shaw

...the thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it...  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Belief is when someone else does the thinking.  ~Buckminster Fuller, 1972

Irons rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.  ~Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, 1508

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man.  But they don't bite everybody.  ~Stanislaw Lec, Unkempt Thoughts, 1962

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.  ~G.C. Lichtenberg

The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.  ~Albert Einstein

Brain, n.  An apparatus with which we think that we think.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

At a certain age some people's minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.  ~William Lyon Phelps

It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.  ~Stanley Kubrick

We are dying from overthinking.  We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything.  Think.  Think.  Think.  You can never trust the human mind anyway.  It's a death trap.  ~Anthony Hopkins

One cannot think crooked and walk straight.  ~Author Unknown

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

No amount of energy will take the place of thought.  A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.  ~Henry Van Dyke

Tell your friends not to think aloud
Until they swallow.
~Nickelback, "Leader of Men," The State

Believing is easier than thinking.  Hence so many more believers than thinkers.  ~Bruce Calvert

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought.  There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor  ~Victor Hugo

Sometimes I think and other times I am.  ~Paul Valéry, Variété: Cantiques spirituels, 1924

Few minds wear out; more rust out.  ~Christian N. Bovee

From restless thoughts, that, like a deadly swarm
Of hornets arm'd, no sooner found alone,
But rush upon me thronging.
~John Milton

What a blessing it is to be alone with your thoughts when so many are alone with their inability to think.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We use 10% of our brains.  Imagine how much we could accomplish if we used the other 60%.  ~Ellen Degeneres

Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information.  ~John Erskine

Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Men can live without air a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months - and without a new thought for years on end.  ~Kent Ruth

The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.  ~John Locke, 16 May 1699

Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.  ~George Savile, Marquess de Halifax, Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections

A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Chi Wen Tzu always thought three times before taking action.  Twice would have been quite enough.  ~Confucius, Analects

Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew.  They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers, and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming.  But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking.  ~Steve Allen

What luck for rulers, that men do not think.  ~Adolph Hitler

Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.  ~Voltaire, 1767

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.  Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.  Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.  Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.  ~Bertrand Russell

[Thinking is] what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.  ~William James

For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.  ~Luther Burbank

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox.  Now we have some hope of making progress.  ~Niels Bohr

You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.  ~Author Unknown

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

Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.  ~Howard Mumford Jones



Thrift is not an affair of the pocket, but an affair of character.  ~S.W. Straus


Thrift comes too late when you find it at the bottom of your purse.  ~Seneca


Thrift was never more necessary in the world's history than it is today.  ~Francis H. Sisson


Whatever thrift is, it is not avarice.  Avarice is not generous; and, after all, it is the thrifty people who are generous.  ~Lord Rosebery


The thrift that does not make a man charitable sours into avarice.  ~M.W. Harrison


Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.  ~Calvin Coolidge


A bargain ain't a bargain unless it's something you need.  ~Sidney Carroll, A Big Hand for the Little Lady


Be thrifty, but not covetous.  ~George Herbert


By sowing frugality we reap liberty, a golden harvest.  ~Agesilaus


I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living.  ~John D. Rockefeller


Cannot people realize how large an income is thrift?  ~Cicero


Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of Temperance, and the parent of Liberty.  ~Samuel Johnson


Thrift means that you should always have the best you can possibly afford, when the thing has any reference to your physical and mental health, to your growth in efficiency and power.  ~Orison Swett Marden


He who does not economize will have to agonize.  ~Confucius


Frugality is misery in disguise.  ~Publilius Syrus


Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.  ~Benjamin Franklin


We are not to judge thrift solely by the test of saving or spending.  If one spends what he should prudently save, that certainly is to be deplored.  But if one saves what he should prudently spend, that is not necessarily to be commended.  A wise balance between the two is the desired end.  ~Owen Young


Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.  ~William Faulkner

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.  ~John Archibald Wheeler

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.  ~Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden, 1854

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror.  It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.  ~Martin Amis, Money

The clock talked loud.  I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.  ~Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.  ~Dion Boucicault

In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us.  ~Osbert Sitwell

For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.  ~Doug Larson

But what minutes!  Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

Time goes, you say?  Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.
~Henry Austin Dobson

Old Time, that greatest and longest established ssockner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes.  ~Charles Dickens

Time wastes our bodies and our wits, but we waste time, so we are quits.  ~Author Unknown

Time is the fire in which we burn.  ~Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day," 1937  (Thanks, George)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
~William Shakespeare

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.  ~James Matthew Barrie

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.  ~John B. Priestly

It strikes! one, two,
Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch,
Thy pulse hath beat enough. Now sleep and rest;
Would thou could'st make the time to do so too;
I'll wind thee up no more.
~Ben Jonson

The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

It's a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.  ~J.K. Rowling, "The Hungarian Horntail," Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000

Who forces time is pushed back by time; who yields to time finds time on his side.  ~The Talmud

Old Time, in whose banks we deposit our notes
Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats;
He keeps all his customers still in arrears
By lending them minutes and charging them years.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Time is like the wind, it lifts the light and leaves the heavy.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada

Time is making fools of us again.  ~J.K. Rowling

El tiempo da buen consejo.  ~Proverb

There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men:  time.  ~Napoleon I, Maxims, 1815

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.  ~Faith Baldwin

When told the reason for Daylight Saving time the old Indian said, "Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket."  ~Author Unknown

Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time?  I want an interregnum.  The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?  ~John Dos Passos, 1917

How long a minute is, depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on.  ~Zall's Second Law

The years like great black oxen tread the world
And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
~William Butler Yeats, The Countess Cathleen

Time! the corrector when our judgments err.  ~Lord Byron

The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not.... ~Thomas Carlyle

Time is the coin of your life.  It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.  Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.  ~Carl Sandburg

Time is a figure eight, at its center the city of Deja Vu.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Time heals what reason cannot.  ~Seneca

I am tired of the imposed rhythms of men,
Tethered time, restrained and trained
To a monotonous beat
Digital time blinking exactness
Unliving.
~Phillip Pulfrey, "Conjecture," Beyond Me, www.originals.net

If you want work well done, select a busy man - the other kind has no time.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Darn the wheel of the world!  Why must it continually turn over?  Where is the reverse gear?  ~Jack London

Time flies on restless pinions - constant never.  ~Friedrich Schiller

The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.  ~C.S. Lewis

Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new... but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design?  ~Paracelsus

What then is time?  If no one asks me, I know what it is.  If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.  ~Saint Augustine

Time is a very healing place, one in which you can grow.  ~Denise Tanner

Each moment has its sickle, emulous
Of Time's enormous scythe, whose ample sweep
Strikes empires from the root.
~Edward Young

The inertia hardest to overcome is that of perfectly good seconds.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Time is the wisest counsellor of all.  ~Pericles

A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

There are whole years for which I hope I'll never be cross-examined, for I could not give an alibi.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The clocks are all turned forward from Funny Time to Right Time.  I always remember, "Spring back or Fall in."  ~Dave Beard (@Raqhun)

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

Time is neither friend nor enemy it's just a measurement.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Time is what we want most, but... what we use worst.  ~Willaim Penn

Time is the longest distance between two places.  ~Tennessee Williams

Among life's regrets is all the time wasted being early for everything.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right - it holds my golden time!  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man goes nowhere.  Everything comes to man, like tomorrow.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Whether we wake or we sleep,
Whether we carol or weep,
The Sun with his Planets in chime,
Marketh the going of Time.
~Edward Fitzgerald

For centuries, man believed that the sun revolves around the earth.  Centuries later, he still thinks that time moves clockwise.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it:  he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The Present is a Point just passed.  ~David Russell

Methinks I see the wanton hours flee,
And as they pass, turn back and laugh at me.
~George Villiers

Time is an equal opportunity employer.  Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day.  Rich people can't buy more hours.  Scientists can't invent new minutes.  And you can't save time to spend it on another day.  Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving.  No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.  ~Denis Waitely

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

One must learn a different... sense of time, one that depends more on small amounts than big ones.  ~Sister Mary Paul

Day, n.  A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.  ~Ambrose Bierce

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.  ~Louis Hector Berlioz

Let not the sands of time get in your lunch.  ~Tony Hendra, "Deteriorata" (Thanks Tom)





Other than a dimple in a cute little chin,
What's more adorable than a toothless grin?
~Azu "Betty" Espezia


In this pocket you will find
A teensy, tiny tooth of mine.
So while I sleep where dreams are made,
Let's see if you can make a trade.
~Author Unknown


Every tooth in a man's head is more valuable than a diamond.  ~Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605


You don't have to brush your teeth - just the ones you want to keep.  ~Author Unknown


The tongue is ever turning to the aching tooth.  ~Thomas Fuller


Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


The tooth fairy teaches children that they can sell body parts for money.  ~David Richerby


Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.  ~Peter Ustinov


But no one ever is allowed in Sleepytown, unless
He goes to bed in time to take the Sleepytown Express!
~James Jackson Montague, The Sleepytown Express


Listen to the wisdom of the toothless ones.  ~Fijian Proverb


When one of Lisa's baby teeth fell out here, the tooth fairy left her 50 cents.  Another tooth fell out when she was with her father in Las Vegas, and that tooth fairy left her $5.  When I told Elvis that 50 cents would be more in line, he laughed.  He knew I was not criticizing him; how would Elvis Presley know the going rate for a tooth?  ~Priscilla Presley


Losing baby teeth were a part and parcel of one's life - a symbol of growing up, and it is the tooth-fairy that makes this otherwise dreaded and painful process an exciting one - something to look forward to.  ~Mansi Maheshwari


A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.  ~Yogi Berra


The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


The little Plumpuppets are fairies of beds;
They have nothing to do but watch sleepyheads;
They turn down the sheets and they tuck you in tight,
And dance on your pillow to wish you good night!
~Christopher Morley


What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.  ~Cynthia Ozick


There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


I got rid of my teeth at a young age because I'm straight.  Teeth are for gay people.  That's why fairies come and get them.  ~Dana Snyder


Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.  ~Mark Twain


The only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child.  ~Joe Houldsworth


Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.  ~Elizabeth Drew

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.  ~St. Augustine

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel's sake.  The great affair is to move.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money.  Then take half the clothes and twice the money.  ~Susan Heller

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.  ~Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt

I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full.  ~Lord Dunsany

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.  ~Lao Tzu

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.  ~Anatole France

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.  ~Lin Yutang

Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.  ~Seneca

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience.  The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him.  He goes "sight-seeing."  ~Daniel J. Boorstin

It is not down in any map; true places never are.  ~Herman Melville

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds.  When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then.  People don't have your past to hold against you.  No yesterdays on the road.  ~William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.  ~G.K. Chesterton

To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.  ~Charles Horton Cooley

And that's the wonderful thing about family travel:  it provides you with experiences that will remain locked forever in the scar tissue of your mind.  ~Dave Barry

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners.  ~Mason Cooley

Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.  ~Regina Nadelson

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.  ~Lillian Smith

Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.  ~Ray Bradbury

There are only two emotions in a plane:  boredom and terror.  ~Orson Welles

Now I know why they tell you to put your head between your knees on crash landings.  You think you're going to kiss your ass good-bye.  ~Terry Hanson

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.  ~Mark Twain

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.  ~Jean Kerr, "Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall," The Snake Has All the Lines, 1958

In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.  ~Robert Benchley

Just get on any major highway, and eventually it will dead-end in a Disney parking area large enough to have its own climate, populated by large nomadic families who have been trying to find their cars since the Carter administration.  ~Dave Barry

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.  ~James Michener

If God had really intended men to fly, he'd make it easier to get to the airport.  ~George Winters

I met a lot of people in Europe.  I even encountered myself.  ~James Baldwin

Whenever we safely land in a plane, we promise God a little something.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The only way of catching a train I ever discovered is to miss the train before.  ~G.K. Chesterton

There's a book that tells you where you should go on your vacation.  It's called your checkbook.  ~Author Unknown

The time to enjoy a European trip is about three weeks after unpacking.  ~George Ade, Forty Modern Fables

I did not fully understand the dread term "terminal illness" until I saw Heathrow for myself.  ~Dennis Potter, 1978

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.  ~Mark Twain

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.  ~George Bernard Shaw

I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.  ~Caskie Stinnett

A passport, as I'm sure you know, is a document that one shows to government officials whenever one reaches a border between countries, so the officials can learn who you are, where you were born, and how you look when photographed unflatteringly.  ~Lemony Snicket

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.  ~Aldous Huxley

The traveler sees what he sees.  The tourist sees what he has come to see.  ~G.K.
Chesterton

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.  ~Hilaire Belloc

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway.  ~Henry Boye

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer.  But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.  ~Henry David Thoreau

You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.  ~Denise Levertov

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.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The trees are God's great alphabet:
With them He writes in shining green
Across the world His thoughts serene.
~Leonora Speyer

I never saw a discontented tree.  They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.  They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!  ~John Muir

Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,
Unnerves his strength, invites his end.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Woodnotes"

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods.  But he cannot save them from fools.  ~John Muir

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.  ~Willa Cather, 1913

Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing "Embraceable You" in spats.  ~Woody Allen

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?  We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.  ~Jack Handey

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.
~Ogden Nash, "Song of the Open Road," 1933

The groves were God's first temples.  ~William Cullen Bryant, "A Forest Hymn"

Trees are your best antiques.  ~Alexander Smith

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship.  But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.  Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves.  No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.  ~John Muir

A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible.  ~Welsh Proverb

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.  ~Martin Luther

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.  ~Minnie Aumonier

It is difficult to realize how great a part of all that is cheerful and delightful in the recollections of our own life is associated with trees.  ~Wilson Flagg

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.  ~William Shakespeare

We all travel the milky way together, trees and men... trees are travellers, in the ordinary sense.  They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true:  but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings - many of them not so much.  ~John Muir, Scribner's Monthly, November 1878

The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber.  The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert

Alone with myself
The trees bend to caress me
The shade hugs my heart.
~Candy Polgar

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved.  You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?  ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

He who plants a tree
Plants a hope.
~Lucy Larcom, "Plant a Tree"

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.  ~J. Lubbock

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
~Kahlil Gibran

To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong.  We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them - the whole leaf and root tribe.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree.  ~Terri Guillemets

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods -
~Robert Frost

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.  The next best time is now.  ~Chinese Proverb

I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.  ~James Russell Lowell

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.  ~Nelson Henderson

No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.  ~Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs, 1887

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.  ~Bill Vaughn

If I knew I should die tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.  ~Stephen Girard

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.  ~Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies, 1928

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in their way.  ~William Blake

Trees outstrip most people in the extent and depth of their work for the public good.  ~Sara Ebenreck, American Forests

Why are there trees I never walk under
But large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892

The oaks and the pines, and their brethren of the wood, have seen so many suns rise and set, so many seasons come and go, and so many generations pass into silence, that we may well wonder what "the story of the trees" would be to us if they had tongues to tell it, or we ears fine enough to understand.  ~Author Unknown, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren, 1938

There are rich counsels in the trees.  ~Herbert P. Horne

God in the whizzing of a pleasant wind
Shall march upon the tops of mulberry trees.
~George Peele, David and Fair Bathsabe, 1599

The trees are whispering to me, reminding me of my roots, and my reach... shhhhhh... can you hear them?  Selflessly sharing their subtle song.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

The best part of happiness is the pines.  ~Terri Guillemets

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.  ~Cree Indian Proverb

To heal mine aching moods,
Give me God's virgin woods.
~Clinton Scollard

Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing.  It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.  ~Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.  ~John Muir

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.  ~Hal Borland

It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation's need of trees will become serious. We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.  ~Theodore Roosevelt, 1907 Arbor Day Message

Oaks are the true conservatives;
They hold old leaves till summer gives
A green exchange.
~Roy Helton, Come Back to Earth

A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense.  ~American Proverb

Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees
Bending to counterfeit a breeze.
~James R. Russell

Trees are much like human beings and enjoy each other's company.  Only a few love to be alone.  ~Jens Jensen, Siftings, 1939

Newspapers:  dead trees with information smeared on them.  ~Horizon, "Electronic Frontier"

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.  ~James G. Watt, quoted in Newsweek, 8 March 1982

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.  ~Henry David Thoreau, "Chesuncook," The Maine Woods, 1848

A tree which has lost its head will never recover it again, and will survive only as a monument of the ignorance and folly of its Tormentor.  ~George William Curtis

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful.  Everything is simply happy.  Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance.  Look at the flowers - for no reason.  It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.  ~Osho

I hear the wind among the trees
Playing the celestial symphonies;
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature?  Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window?  When the only wild animal he knows is a rat - glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum?  When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?  ~Frank N. Ikard, North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Houston, March 1968

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.  ~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964

Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Second Series, 1844

Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees.  ~J.J. Furnas

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
~Joyce Kilmer, "Trees," 1914

Climb a tree - it gets you closer to heaven.  ~Author Unknown

We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them.  We say we love trees, yet we cut them down.  And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are loved.  ~Author Unknown

Save a tree.  Eat a beaver.  ~Author Unknown

Bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eating under a tree.  ~Elizabeth Russell

As the poet said, "only God can make a tree" - probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.  ~Woody Allen

Acknowledgment:
Thanks to Michael P. Garofalo of The Spirit of Gardening
for sharing some of these wonderful quotes with me!

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.  ~E.M. Forster

I think we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Our distrust is very expensive.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment unless you trust enough.  ~Frank Crane

The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.  ~Henry L. Stimson

We're all born brave, trusting, and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.  ~Booker T. Washington

I trust everyone.  I just don't trust the devil inside them.  ~Troy Kennedy-Martin, The Italian Job

You can as easily love without trusting as you can hug without embracing.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else.  ~Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence.  Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.  ~William E. Gladstone, 1866

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.  ~Charles Krauthammer

Trust your own instinct.  Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.  ~Billy Wilder

Trust is letting go of needing to know all the details before you open your heart.  ~Author Unknown

There comes a point in a relationship when you realize that you trust someone enough to let them keep their secrets.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Trust only movement.  Life happens at the level of events, not of words.  Trust movement.  ~Alfred Adler

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.  ~William Shakespeare

A skeptic is a person who would ask God for his ID card.  ~Edgar A. Shoaff

You can only trust yourself... and barely that.  ~Paige Wilson

Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree, because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch, or you might simply get covered in sap, and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors, where it is harder to get a splinter.  ~Lemony Snicket

Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.  ~George MacDonald

Government is an unnecessary evil.  Human beings, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior, can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness.  ~Fred Woodworth, The Match!, No. 79

A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity.  The order varies for any given year.  ~Paul Sweeney

In God we trust, all others we virus scan.  ~Author Unknown

Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near.  ~Helen Rowland

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.  Take which you please - you can never have both.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.  ~Aldous Huxley

Truth, like milk, arrives in the dark
But even so, wise dogs don't bark.
Only mongrels make it hard
For the milkman to come up the yard.
~Christopher Morley, Dogs Don't Bark at the Milkman

It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can stand by itself.  ~Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

I never dreamed of being Shakespeare or Goethe, and I never expected to hold the great mirror of truth up before the world; I dreamed only of being a little pocket mirror, the sort that a woman can carry in her purse; one that reflects small blemishes, and some great beauties, when held close enough to the heart.  ~Peter Altenberg

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.  ~William James

Men ardently pursue truth, assuming it will be angels' bread when found.  ~W. MacNeile Dixon

There is no god higher than truth.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The trouble about man is twofold.  He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.  ~Rebecca West

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.  ~Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy

Truth is rarely writ in ink; it lives in nature.  ~Martin H. Fischer

When I tell any truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.  ~William Blake

Truth only reveals itself when one gives up all preconceived ideas.  ~Shoseki

Without faith there is no truth, for that is all the truth is or ever was.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

If there be no God, then what is truth but the average of all lies.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There is no Truth.  There is only the truth within each moment.  ~Ramana Maharshi, attributed

Truth is after all a moving target
Hairs to split,
And pieces that don't fit
How can anybody be enlightened?
Truth is after all so poorly lit.
~Neil Peart, Turn the Page
(Thank you, Ryan)

Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.  ~Oscar Wilde

My truths do not last long in me.  Not as long as those that are not mine.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Truth breeds hatred.  ~Bias of Priene, Maxims

If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?  ~Dogen

One of life's regrets is that you didn't always tell the truth, and now it's too late, because the truth has changed.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

People always think something's all true.  ~J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Truth is tough.  It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch, nay, you may kick it all about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.  ~Leo Tolstoy

Truth is the breath of life to human society.  It is the food of the immortal spirit.  Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Seek truth and you will find a path.  ~Frank Slaughter

I am the fellow citizen of every being that thinks; my country is Truth.  ~Alphonse de Lamartine, "Marseillaise of Peace," 1841

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.  ~Jean-Paul Sartre

There are more martyrs to nonsense than truth, truth preferring missionaries.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Truth is a great flirt.  ~Franz Liszt

I am of the Buddhists.  The great Teacher comes periodically.  He is followed by pupils who corrupt the texts and then a new Buddha must be born to restablish the truth.  ~Martin H. Fischer

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.  ~Denis Diderot

All great truths begin as blasphemies.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Annajanska, 1919

...Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it:  consider what an explosion
Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world
If any mind for a moment touch truth.
~Robinson Jeffers, "The Silent Shepherds," The Beginning & the End

The greatest truths are the simplest: so likewise are the greatest men.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.  ~Simone de Beauvoir

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage.  He lives... by make-believe.  ~W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938

When one has one's hand full of truth it is not always wise to open it.  ~French Proverb

Once an absurdity is accepted as truth, it will seem truer the more absurd it is shown to be.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Truth is no Doctoresse, she takes no degrees at Paris or Oxford... but oftentimes to such an one as myself, an Idiota or common person, no great things, melancholizing in woods where waters are, quiet places by rivers, fountains, whereas the silly man expecting no such matter, thinketh only how best to delectate and refresh his mynde continually with Natura her pleasaunt scenes, woods, water-falls, or Art her statelie gardens, parks, terraces, Belvideres, on a sudden the goddesse herself Truth has appeared, with a shyning lyghte, and a sparklyng countenance, so as yee may not be able lightly to resist her.  ~Charles Lamb

We do not err because truth is difficult to see.  It is visible at a glance.  We err because this is more comfortable.  ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.  ~Attributed to James A. Garfield

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized.  In the first, it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

There is no truth.  There is only perception.  ~Gustave Flaubert

If a thousand old beliefs were ruined in our march to truth we must still march on.  ~Stopford Brooke



There are two things in life for which we are never truly prepared:  twins.  ~Josh Billings


It's double the giggles and double the grins, and double the trouble if you're blessed with twins.  ~Author Unknown


My sister and I, you will recollect, were twins, and you know how subtle are the links which bind two souls which are so closely allied.  ~Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Speckled Band


A good neighbor will babysit.  A great neighbor will babysit twins.  ~Author Unknown


Twice as much to love, two blessings from above.  ~Author Unknown


God touched our hearts so deep inside, our special blessing multiplied.  ~Author Unknown


It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins.  ~Chinese Proverb


Life is two-riffic with twins.  ~Author Unknown


Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?  ~Herman Melville, Redburn. His First Voyage, 1849


...So we grew together
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem...
~William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
(Note: This isn't actually about twins)


You can spend too much time wondering which of identical twins is the more alike.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother:
I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.
~William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors


Constant togetherness is fine - but only for Siamese twins.  ~Victoria Billings


Hearts entwined
Twenty fingers, twenty toes,
two sweet babies with cheeks of rose.
Born on the same day, two gifts from above,
lives entwined, two babies to love.
~Author Unknown


When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins, then run around the mall looking frantic.  ~Steven Wright


Twin one, twin too!  ~Author Unknown


What's cuter than one baby?
A precious set of twins!
With matching little outfits -
And matchless little grins...
With twice as many babies,
How very busy you will be -
Just think of all the loving
They'll bring your family.
~Author Unknown


All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.  ~Lord Byron


Two faces to wash, and four dirty hands
Two insistent voices, making demands
Twice as much crying, when things go wrong
The four eyes closing, with slumber song
Twice as many garments, blowing on the line
Two cherubs in the wagon, soaking up sunshine
Work I do for twins, naturally comes double
But four arms to hug me, repay all my trouble.
~Author Unknown


When I was born the doctor took one look at my face, turned me over and said, "Look, twins!"  ~Rodney Dangerfield


Not double trouble, but twice blessed.  ~Author Unknown


There's two to wash, two to dry;
There's two who argue, two who cry....
There's two to kiss, two to hug;
And best of all, there's two to love!
~Author Unknown


I may be a twin but I'm one of a kind.  ~Author Unknown


We came into the world like brother and brother;
And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another.
~William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors


Body and spirit are twins:  God only knows which is which.  ~Algernon Charles Swinburne




It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose your own.  ~Harry S Truman


Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.  ~Orson Scott Card


Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.  ~William E. Barrett


A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.  ~Thomas Carlyle


You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live.  ~William Shakespeare


A man who has no office to go to - I don't care who he is - is a trial of which you can have no conception.  ~George Bernard Shaw


The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you're on the job.  ~Slappy White


[O]f all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.  ~Jane Addams, 1910


Cessation of work is not accompanied by cessation of expenses.  ~Cato the Elder


The hardest work in the world is being out of work.  ~Whitney Young, Jr.


An "acceptable" level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job.  ~Author Unknown


Unemployment diminishes people.  Leisure enlarges them.  ~Mason Cooley


Unemployment is like a headache or a high temperature - unpleasant and exhausting but not carrying in itself any explanation of its cause.  ~William Henry Beveridge


We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.  ~John F. Kennedy


When I quit working, I lost all sense of identity in about fifteen minutes.  ~Paige Rense


When we're unemployed, we're called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it's called a depression.  ~Jesse Jackson


I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work.  Work organizes life.  It gives structure and discipline to life.  ~Bill Clinton


What is the good of being a genius if you cannot use it as an excuse for being unemployed?  ~Gerald Barzan


The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right.  ~Robert Farrar Capon, "Being Let Go," New York Times, 5 August 1984




No man needs a vacation so much as the person who has just had one.  ~Elbert Hubbard


A good vacation is over when you begin to yearn for your work.  ~Morris Fishbein


A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you've been taking.  ~Earl Wilson


A vacation is like love - anticipated with pleasure, experienced with discomfort, and remembered with nostalgia.  ~Author Unknown


A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in.  ~Robert Orben


Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so.  After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do.  ~Margaret Laurence


I do not really like vacations.  I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working.  When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin.  To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded; I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time.  ~Robertson Davies


The alternative to a vacation is to stay home and tip every third person you see.  ~Author Unknown


Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.  ~William James


We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings.  ~Erma Bombeck


Those that say you can't take it with you never saw a car packed for a vacation trip.  ~Author Unknown


The rainy days a man saves for usually seem to arrive during his vacation.  ~Author Unknown


By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off.  They are the great vacationless class.  ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh


A vacation trip is one-third pleasure, fondly remembered, and two-thirds aggravation, entirely forgotten.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Vacation:  Two weeks on the sunny sands - and the rest of the year on the financial rocks.  ~Sam Ewing


College is the longest vacation you will ever take. ~ Dan Indante and Karl Marks


Too much work, and no vacation,
Deserves at least a small libation.
So hail! my friends, and raise your glasses,
Work's the curse of the drinking classes.
~Oscar Wilde


No vacation goes unpunished.  ~Karl Hakkarainen


Vacation: a period of travel and relaxation when you take twice the clothes and half the money you need.  ~Author Unknown


Vacations prove that a life of pleasure is overrated.  ~Mason Cooley


Laughter is an instant vacation.  ~Milton Berle


If some people didn't tell you, you'd never know they'd been away on a vacation.  ~Kin Hubbard


There is probably no more obnoxious class of citizen, taken end for end, than the returning vacationist.  ~Robert Benchley


Vacation used to be a luxury, but in today's world it has become a necessity.  ~Author Unknown


Oh, why can't we break away from all this, just you and I, and lodge with my fleas in the hills?  I mean, flee to my lodge in the hills.  ~S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone, and Arthur Sheekman, Monkey Business


If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.  ~Dorothy Canfield Fisher




Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired:  even I who write this, and you who read this.  ~Blaise Pascal


Vanity is the quicksand of reason  ~George Sand


The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.  ~Thomas Wolfe


Pride that dines on vanity, sups on contempt.  ~Benjamin Franklin


There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.  ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898


Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display, and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Beauty's sister is vanity, and its daughter lust.  ~Author Unknown


Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.  ~Franois de la Rochefoucauld


Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly; and I am in continual danger, when in company, of being led an ignis fatuus chase by it.  ~John Adams


There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.  ~Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton


Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others.  Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.  ~Miguel De Unamuno


To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life.  ~Lord Chesterfield


Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.  ~Joseph Conrad


We speak little if not egged on by vanity.  ~Franois de la Rochefoucauld


The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.  ~Henri Bergson


If vanity does not overthrow all our virtues, at least she makes them totter.  ~Franois de la Rochefoucauld


Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.  ~Louis Kronenberger


Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson


What makes the vanity of others insupportable is that it wounds our own.  ~Franois de la Rochefoucauld


In heaven I yearn for knowledge, account all else inanity;
On earth I confess an itch for the praise of fools - that's vanity.
~Robert Browning


Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company.  ~Franois de la Rochefoucauld


Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter, wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others who are within his sphere of action:  and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life.  ~Benjamin Franklin


A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children.  ~David Brenner

You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit.  If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.  ~Harvey Diamond

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.  ~Samuel Butler, Note-Books, 1912

Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion.  Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it.  Please give our respects to its family.  ~Berke Breathed, Bloom County Babylon

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.  ~Paul McCartney

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn!  You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!  Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.  ~George Bernard Shaw

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.  ~Henry David Thoreau

How can you eat anything with eyes?  ~Will Kellogg

The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.  If beef is your idea of "real food for real people" you'd better live real close to a real good hospital.  ~Neal Barnard

Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant?  I'm halfway through my fishburger and I realize, Oh my God.  I could be eating a slow learner.  ~Lynda Montgomery

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.  ~George Bernard Shaw

We don't need to eat anyone who would run, swim, or fly away if he could.  ~James Cromwell

If you knew how meat was made, you'd probably lose your lunch.  ~k.d. lang

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Being a meat eater is really expensive, even if you don't count the cost of chemo.  ~Snargleplexon.com

My situation is a solemn one.  Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks.  But death is better than cannibalism.  My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.  ~George Bernard Shaw

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs

Vegetarianism is harmless enough though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.  ~Robert Hutchison, address to the British Medical Association, 1930

Heart attacks... God's revenge for eating his little animal friends.  ~Author Unknown

Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

For the most part, we carnivores do not eat other carnivores.  We prefer to eat our vegetarian friends.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

My perspective of veganism was most affected by learning that the veal calf is a by-product of dairying, and that in essence there is a slice of veal in every glass of what I had thought was an innocuous white liquid - milk.  ~Rynn Berry, quoted in Joanne Stepaniak, The Vegan Sourcebook, 1998

Nothing spoils lunch any quicker than a rogue meatball rampaging through your spaghetti.  ~Jim Davis, "Garfield"  (Please note: In its original context, this is NOT about vegetarianism)

Vegetarians taste better.  ~Author Unknown

Vegetarian - that's an old Indian word meaning "lousy hunter."  ~Andy Rooney

Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?  ~Author Unknown

If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made of meat?  ~Author Unknown

I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.  ~Rita Rudner

Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food to be classified as cannibals.  ~Finley Peter Dunne

Vegetarian:  A person who eats only side dishes.  ~Gerald Lieberman

In the strict scientific sense we all feed on death - even vegetarians.  ~Mr. Spock, Star Trek, "Wolf in the Fold"

The human body has no more need for cows' milk than it does for dogs' milk, horses' milk, or giraffes' milk.  ~Michael Klaper

Tongue - a variety of meat, rarely served because it clearly crosses the line between a cut of beef and a piece of a dead cow.  ~Bob Ekstrom

Recognize meat for what it really is:  the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal.  ~Ingrid Newkirk

I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls.  God knows that I've crawled on occasion, and I'm glad that no one ate me.  ~Alex Poulos

We all love animals.  Why do we call some "pets" and others "dinner?"  ~k.d. lang

Coexistence... what the farmer does with the turkey - until Thanksgiving.  ~Mike Connolly

I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician.  ~Marty Feldman

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.  ~A. Whitney Brown

A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.  ~George Bernard Shaw

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.  ~George Bernard Shaw

If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?  ~Author Unknown

I never go without my dinner.  No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.  ~Oscar Wilde

There is no substitute for mother's milk.  ~Martin H. Fischer

I've found without question that the best way to lead others to a more plant-based diet is by example - to lead with your fork, not your mouth.  ~Bernie Wilke, quoted in Joanne Stepaniak, The Vegan Sourcebook, 1998

Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless
Christmas dinner's dark and blue
When you stop and try to see it
From the turkey's point of view.
~Shel Silverstein, "Point of View"

All normal people love meat.  If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say, "Yo Goober!  Where's the meat?"  I'm trying to impress people here, Lisa.  You don't win friends with salad.  ~Matt Groening, The Simpsons, spoken by the character Homer Simpson

Truely man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs.  We live by the death of others:  we are burial places!  I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.  ~Leonardo da Vinci

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other....  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

I venture to maintain that there are multitudes to whom the necessity of discharging the duties of a butcher would be so inexpressibly painful and revolting, that if they could obtain a flesh diet on no other condition, they would relinquish it forever.  ~W.E.H. Lecky

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?  ~George Bernard Shaw

I just could not stand the idea of eating meat - I really do think that it has made me calmer....  People's general awareness is getting much better, even down to buying a pint of milk:  the fact that the calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn't go to them but to us cannot really be right, and if you have seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it cannot understand why its calf isn't by, it can make you think a lot.  ~Kate Bush

I think if you want to eat more meat you should kill it yourself and eat it raw so that you are not blinded by the hypocrisy of having it processed for you.  ~Margi Clark

"Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.  ~Leo Tolstoy

As soon as I realized that I didn't need meat to survive or to be in good health, I began to see how forlorn it all is.  If only we had a different mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of it.  It's a very romantic notion, an entrenched part of American culture, but I've seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria and panic was something I shall never forget.  ~Cloris Leachman

We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do.  Cruelty... is a fundamental sin, and admits of no arguments or nice distinctions.  If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, it protests against cruelty, is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us - in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh?  For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived.  How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb?  How could his nose endure the stench?  How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?  ~Plutarch

It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab Notes

Vegetarianism can easily reach religious proportions.  Refraining from meat on moral grounds serves to dignify feelings of guilt toward sad-eyed, furry creatures and substitutes righteousness for squeamishness.  ~Bill Griffith, Griffith Observatory comic strip, 1977

To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.  I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

A veteran USDA meat inspector from Texas describes what he has seen:  "Cattle dragged and choked... knocking 'em four, five, ten times.  Every now and then when they're stunned they come back to life, and they're up there agonizing.  They're supposed to be re-stunned but sometimes they aren't and they'll go through the skinning process alive.  I've worked in four large [slaughterhouses] and a bunch of small ones.  They're all the same.  If people were to see this, they'd probably feel really bad about it.  But in a packing house everybody gets so used to it that it doesn't mean anything."  ~Slaughterhouse 1997

I eat everything that nature voluntarily gives:  fruits, vegetables, and the products of plants.  But I ask you to spare me what animals are forced to surrender:  meat, milk, and cheese.  ~Author Unknown (Thanks, Eric)

Think of me tonite
For that which you savor
Did it give you something real,
or could you taste the pain of my death in its flavor?
~Wayne K. Tolson, from "Food Forethought"

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.  ~Albert Einstein

I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed.  I saw and felt their pain.  They felt the approaching death.  I could not bear it.  I cried like a child.  I ran up a hill and could not breathe.  I felt that I was choking.  I felt the death of the lamb.  ~Vaslav Nijinsky

Would you kill your pet dog or cat to eat it?  How about an animal you're not emotionally attached to?  Is the thought of slaughtering a cow or chicken or pig with your own hands too much to handle?  Instead, would hiring a hit-man to do the job give you enough distance from the emotional discomfort?  What animal did you put a contract out on for your supper last night?  Did you at least make sure that none went to waste and to take a moment to be grateful for its sacrifice?  ~Anonymous



But the freedom that they fought for, and the country grand they wrought for,
Is their monument to-day, and for aye.
~Thomas Dunn English


It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.  ~Author unknown, sometimes attributed to M. Grundler


In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.  ~José Narosky


This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.  ~Elmer Davis


But fame is theirs - and future days
On pillar'd brass shall tell their praise;
Shall tell - when cold neglect is dead -
"These for their country fought and bled."
~Philip Freneau


Freedom is never free.  ~Author Unknown


I think there is one higher office than president and I would call that patriot.  ~Gary Hart


When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?  ~George Canning


As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.  ~John Fitzgerald Kennedy


Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.  ~Michel de Montaigne


I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?"  ~Eve Merriam


We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.  ~Cynthia Ozick


Lord, bid war's trumpet cease;
Fold the whole earth in peace.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes


How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!  ~Maya Angelou


When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.  ~Chinese Proverb


The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums.  ~Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up


The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.  ~Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit


Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.  ~G.K. Chesterton


How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
~William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, much later adapted to "So shines a good deed in a weary world" by David Seltzer for the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory


In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned.  When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.  ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935


All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.  ~Marshall Rosenberg

There is a great streak of violence in every human being.  If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.  ~Sam Peckinpah

We challenge the culture of violence when we ourselves act in the certainty that violence is no longer acceptable, that it's tired and outdated no matter how many cling to it in the stubborn belief that it still works and that it's still valid.  ~Gerard Vanderhaar

The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.  ~Chinese Proverb

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?  ~Alan Paton

Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.  ~John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667

There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used.... Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was.  The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness.  The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.  ~Gil Bailie

Violence in the voice is often only the death rattle of reason in the throat.  ~John Frederick Boyes

Let us thank God that we live in an age when something has influence besides the bayonet.  ~Daniel Webster

In violence we forget who we are.  ~Mary McCarthy

It is clear that the way to heal society of its violence... and lack of love is to replace the pyramid of domination with the circle of equality and respect.  ~Manitonquat

Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.  ~Dave Barry

It's not the bullet with my name on it that worries me.  It's the one that says "To whom it may concern."  ~Anonymous Belfast resident, quoted in London Guardian, 1991

I believe everybody in the world should have guns.  Citizens should have bazookas and rocket launchers too.  I believe that all citizens should have their weapons of choice.  However, I also believe that only I should have the ammunition.  Because frankly, I wouldn't trust the rest of the goobers with anything more dangerous than string.  ~Scott Adams

I will not carry a gun.... I'll carry your books, I'll carry a torch, I'll carry a tune, I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even hari-kari if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!  ~Hawkeye, M*A*S*H, "Officer of the Day"

Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Why are sex and violence always linked?  I'm afraid they'll blur together in people's minds - sexandviolence - until we can't tell them apart.  I expect to hear a newscaster say, "The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex."  ~Dick Cavett, 1978

And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.  ~George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it.  Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.  ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.  ~Max Stirner

Play allows us to develop alternatives to violence and despair.... ~Stuart Brown

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private citizens will occasionally kill theirs.  ~Elbert Hubbard

He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in the glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart.  It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The moment a man claims a right to control the will of a fellow being by physical force, he is at heart a slaveholder.  ~Henry C. Wright, The Liberator, 7 April 1837

Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing.  ~Josef de Maistre

How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness?  One man must not kill.  If he does, it is murder.... But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder.  It is just, necessary, commendable, and right.  Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent.  But how many does it take?  ~Adin Ballou, The Non-Resistant, 5 February 1845

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.  ~Gandhi

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit.  You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nonviolence doesn't always work - but violence never does.  ~Madge Micheels-Cyrus

In some cases nonviolence requires more militancy than violence.  ~Cesar Chavez

If you suck on a tit the movie gets an R rating.  If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG.  ~Jack Nicholson

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.  ~Gandhi

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil





Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.  ~Horace Mann, "Thoughts for a Young Man," 1859


We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Blushing is the color of virtue.  ~Diogenes


Virtue is praised, but hated.  People run from it, for it is ice-cold and in this world you have to keep your feet warm.  ~Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 1762


Virtue is insufficient temptation.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Do not be too moral.  You may cheat yourself out of much life so.  Aim above morality.  Be not simply good; be good for something.  ~Henry David Thoreau


He that has energy enough to root out a vice should go further, and try to plant a virtue in its place.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


Modesty and unselfishness - these are virtues which men praise - and pass by.  ~André Maurois, Ariel, 1924


Virtues are dangerous as vices insofar as they are allowed to rule over one as authorities and not as qualities one develops oneself.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Virtue is its own revenge.  ~E.Y. Harburn


All of us are experts at practicing virtue at a distance.  ~Theodore M. Hesburgh


The imperfections of a man, his frailties, his faults, are just as important as his virtues.  You can't separate them.  They're wedded.  ~Henry Miller


Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company.  ~Franois de la Rochefoucauld


A man hasn't got a corner on virtue just because his shoes are shined.  ~Anne Petry


What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.  ~Voltaire


Sin is commitable in thought, word or deed; so is virtue.  ~Martin H. Fischer


To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.  ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.  ~Robert S. Lynd


The excess of virtue is a vice.  ~Greek Proverb


Unless I accept my faults I will most certainly doubt my virtues.  ~Hugh Prather


They who disbelieve in virtue because man has never been found perfect, might as reasonably deny a sun because it is not always day.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Water which is too pure has no fish.  ~Ts'ai Ken T'an


On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.  ~George Orwell


It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.  ~Edith Sitwell


Some folks wear their halos much too tight.  ~Author Unknown


What, after all, is a halo?  It's only one more thing to keep clean.  ~Christopher Fry


We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.  ~La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665


If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking.  Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.  ~Raymond Inmon

A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.  ~Paul Dudley White

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.  ~John Muir, 1913, in L.M. Wolfe, ed., John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938

Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.  ~Steven Wright

I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.  ~G.M. Trevelyan

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.  ~Aldous Huxley

When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber of your body.  I measure your health by the number of shoes and hats and clothes you have worn out.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.  ~Wallace Stevens

After a day's walk everything has twice its usual value.  ~George Macauley Trevelyan

I dream of hiking into my old age.  ~Marlyn Doan

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.  ~Cyril Connolly

Solvitur ambulando, St. Jerome was fond of saying.  To solve a problem, walk around.  ~Gregory McNamee

A pedestrian is someone who thought there were a couple of gallons left in the tank.  ~Author Unknown

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.  ~John Muir

Thoughts come clearly while one walks.  ~Thomas Mann

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.  ~John Muir

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.  Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.  I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

Walks.  The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird.  ~Jules Renard

You need special shoes for hiking - and a bit of a special soul as well.  ~Terri Guillemets

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.  ~John Burroughs

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," 1841

Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.  ~J.K. Rowling, "The Egg and The Eye," Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000, spoken by the character Mad-Eye Moody

People say that losing weight is no walk in the park.  When I hear that I think, yeah, that's the problem.  ~Chris Adams

How can you explain that you need to know that the trees are still there, and the hills and the sky?  Anyone knows they are.  How can you say it is time your pulse responded to another rhythm, the rhythm of the day and the season instead of the hour and the minute?  No, you cannot explain.  So you walk.  ~Author unknown, from New York Times editorial, "The Walk," 25 October 1967

Make your feet your friend.  ~J.M. Barrie

I'm the walkingest girl around.  I like to work at it - really get my heart pounding.  ~Amy Yasbeck

He who limps is still walking.  ~Stanislaw J. Lec

There is this to be said for walking:  It's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.  ~Edward Abbey

Walking isn't a lost art - one must, by some means, get to the garage.  ~Evan Esar

Now shall I walk
or shall I ride?
"Ride," Pleasure said:
"Walk," Joy replied.
~W.H. Davies

[We] live with our heels as well as head and most of our pleasure comes in that way.  ~John Muir

Ever wonder where you'd end up if you took your dog for a walk and never once pulled back on the leash?  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Your body is built for walking.  ~Gary Yanker

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I haven't got any special religion this morning.  My God is the God of Walkers.  If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.  ~Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia, 1977

The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.  ~Jacqueline Schiff

We live in a fast-paced society.  Walking slows us down.  ~Robert Sweetgall

Walking:  the most ancient exercise and still the best modern exercise.  ~Carrie Latet

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days.  It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight.  Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror.  The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.  ~Theodor W. Adorno

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.  ~Henry David Thoreau

A dog is one of the remaining reasons why some people can be persuaded to go for a walk.  ~O.A. Battista

If you pick 'em up, O Lord, I'll put 'em down.  ~Author Unknown, "Prayer of the Tired Walker"

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.... ~Robert Frost

There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country.  A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo.  Even a bicycle goes too fast.  ~Paul Scott Mowrer, The House of Europe

I represent what is left of a vanishing race, and that is the pedestrian.... That I am still able to be here, I owe to a keen eye and a nimble pair of legs.  But I know they'll get me someday.  ~Will Rogers

After dinner sit awhile, after supper walk a mile.  ~English Proverb

If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.  ~Charles Dickens

Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling.  Thus it stretches time and prolongs life.  Life is already too short to waste on speed.  ~Edward Abbey, "Walking"

As a nation we are dedicated to keeping physically fit - and parking as close to the stadium as possible.  ~Bill Vaughan

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty.  She's ninety-three today and we don't know where the hell she is.  ~Ellen DeGeneres

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes
my rage, forgetting everything.
~Pablo Neruda, translated

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.  ~Henry David Thoreau

What really helps motivate me to walk are my dogs, who are my best pals.  They keep you honest about walking because when it's time to go, you can't disappoint those little faces.  ~Wendie Malick

If you want to forget all your other troubles, wear too tight shoes.  ~The Houghton Line, November 1965

The Americans never walk.  In winter too cold and in summer too hot.  ~J.B. Yeats

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour of four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking.  The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.  ~Mark Twain

Hiking is just walking where it's okay to pee.  ~Demetri Martin

[Hiking] is the best workout!... You can hike for three hours and not even realize you're working out.  And, hiking alone lets me have some time to myself.  ~Jamie Luner

Don't let people drive you crazy when you know it's in walking distance.  ~Author Unknown

The night walked down the sky with the moon in her hand.  ~Frederick L. Knowles



Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud.  I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth.  I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace.  ~Charles Sumner


War does not determine who is right - only who is left.  ~Bertrand Russell


It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.  ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs


I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?"  ~Eve Merriam


The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.  If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.  ~Albert Einstein


The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.  ~David Friedman


"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.  ~James Morrow


Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.  ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter


All the arms we need are for hugging.  ~Author Unknown


A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.  ~Napoleon


If we do not end war - war will end us.   Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything.  ~H.G. Wells, Things to Come (the "film story"), Part III, adapted from his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, spoken by the character John Cabal (Thanks Bill!)


A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.  ~German Proverb


The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.  Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.  We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.  ~Omar Bradley


Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953


The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums.  ~Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up


What a cruel thing is war:  to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.  ~Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864


Everyone's a pacifist between wars.  It's like being a vegetarian between meals.  ~Colman McCarthy


Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education.  Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization.  We must make our choice; we cannot have both.  ~Abraham Flexner


Draft beer, not people.  ~Attributed to Bob Dylan


The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.  ~John F. Kennedy


In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
~John McCrae


What this planet needs is more mistletoe and less missile-talk.  ~Author Unknown


Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them. ~Pacifist Badge, 1978


Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.  ~Ernest Hemingway


War makes thieves and peace hangs them.  ~George Herbert


You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.  ~Jeanette Rankin


You are not going to get peace with millions of armed men.  The chariot of peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon.  ~David Lloyd George


Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.  ~Carl Sandburg


In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.  ~José Narosky


We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.  ~James Russell Lowell


If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.  ~Pentagon official explaining why the U.S. military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War


I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.  ~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973


War would end if the dead could return.  ~Stanley Baldwin


War! that mad game the world so loves to play.  ~Jonathan Swift


It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.  ~Voltaire, War


We need a new law that owners of SUVs are automatically in the military reserve.  Then they can go get their own goddamn oil.  ~Jello Biafra, quoted in The Guardian, 3 November 2007


If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how?  ~Joan Baez, "What Would You Do If....?"


I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet.  [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.  ~Ronald Reagan, 1985


[John] Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester.  It is not only the living who are killed in war.  ~Isaac Asimov


The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.  ~Henry Fosdick


All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.  In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace.  When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?  ~Benjamin Franklin


In war, truth is the first casualty.  ~Aeschylus  (Thanks, Dan)


Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.  ~Francis Meehan


Only the dead have seen the end of war.  ~Plato


No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Man, in his sensitivity, does not give names to animals he intends to eat but goes on giving names to children he intends to send to war.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.  ~Napoleon Hill


We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.  ~Jeane J. Kirkpatrick


Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War.  He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind.  He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth.  ~Mark Twain


Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.  ~Bertrand Russell, attributed


It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die.  It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate.  ~George McGovern


I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.  ~George McGovern


When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.  ~Jean-Paul Sartre


The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem.  It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.  ~Albert Einstein, "Atomic War or Peace," Atlantic Monthly, November 1945


You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.  ~Albert Einstein


We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong.  ~Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941


The refuge of the morally, intellectually, artistically and economically bankrupt is war.  ~Martin H. Fischer


They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.  But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying.  You will die like a dog for no good reason.  ~Ernest Hemingway


The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life.  The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies.  Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery.  ~Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil


Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?  ~Norman Cousins


I think war might be God's way of teaching us geography.  ~Paul Rodriguez


The era of true peace on earth will not come as long as a tremendous percentage of your taxes goes to educate men in the trades of slaughter.  ~Reginald Wright Kauffman


Are bombs the only way of setting fire to the spirit of a people?  Is the human will as inert as the past two world-wide wars would indicate?  ~Gregory Clark






The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.  ~Omar Bradley


War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.  ~Thomas Mann


We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.  ~Havelock Ellis


Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried


Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?  ~Thomas Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus"


The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.  ~John F. Kennedy


War is the only game in which it doesn't pay to have the home-court advantage.  ~Dick Motta


The trouble with selfish motives is that they harden into principles, and you end up sending your kids to war for them.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


War.  The dark time of valour, loss and hope where a man is controlled by his gun; where a gun is controlled by his hatred.  Completely uncontrollable.  ~Daniel Ha


If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "no" to war.  For one does not create a human society on mounds of corpses.  ~Louis Lecoin


War is fear cloaked in courage.  ~William Westmoreland


War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.  War is nasty; war is fun.  War is thrilling; war is drudgery.  War makes you a man; war makes you dead.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried


War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.  ~Thomas de Quincey


No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.  ~Henry Kissinger


Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.  ~Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War, 1948


I would like it if men had to partake in the same hormonal cycles to which we're subjected monthly.  Maybe that's why men declare war - because they have a need to bleed on a regular basis.  ~Brett Butler


We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.  ~Harriet Tubman


It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passions, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.  ~André Gide, Journals, 13 September 1938


Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.  ~Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol 1, book VII, chapter 4


The military don't start wars.  Politicians start wars.  ~William Westmoreland


I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.  ~Ulysses S. Grant


We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame
~Nikki Giovanni


Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.  ~Author Unknown


What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.  ~Aldous Huxley


Man has no right to kill his brother.  It is no excuse that he does so in uniform:  he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Declaration of Rights"


Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals.  ~Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1955


To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.  ~Michael Servetus


A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been.  ~Victor Hugo


Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.  ~Otto Von Bismark


The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people.  ~Gerome Gragni and James Rado, 1967


War hath no fury like a noncombatant.  ~Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment


What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.  Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.  ~Simone Weil, Ecrits historiques et politiques, 1960


War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


The stench of the trail of Ego in our History.  It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.  ~George Meredith, Beauchamp's Career


Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform?  ~Douglas Jerrold


If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons.  ~Pope John Paul II


Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.  A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.  They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined.  Now, what are they?  Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?  The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.  ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience


Older men declare war.  But it is the youth that must fight and die.  ~Herbert Hoover


A day of battle is a day of harvest for the devil.  ~William Hooke


There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.  ~Havelock Ellis


All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.  ~François Fénelon


War should belong to the tragic past, to history:  it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future.  ~Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla)


Men were made for war.  Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life.  ~Alice Thomas Ellis


Will... the threat of common extermination continue?... Must children receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance?  ~Pope John Paul II, speech at the UN, 1979


War is nothing less than a temporary repeal of the principles of virtue.  It is a system out of which almost all the virtues are excluded, and in which nearly all the vices are included.  ~Robert Hall


Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom.  One world or none.  ~Stuart Chase


Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history.  ~Pieter Geyl, Debates With Historians


Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?  ~Holly Near


The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service.  ~Albert Einstein


O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.  ~Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"


If you shoot one person you are a murderer.  If you kill a couple persons you are a gangster.  If you are a crazy statesman and send millions to their deaths you are a hero.  ~Author unknown, 1939 newspaper, see also "If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy.  If millions die, that's only statistics" attribued to Joseph Stalin and "a single man killed is a misfortune, a million is a statistic" attributed to an anonymous Frenchman, 1948 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


Men like war: they do not hold much sway over birth, so they make up for it with death.  Unlike women, men menstruate by shedding other people's blood.  ~Lucy Ellman


The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.  The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.  The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.  ~John Stewart Mill


The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.  ~Louis Simpson


The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.  ~George Patton


The expendability factor has increased by being transferred from the specialised, scarce and expensively trained military personnel to the amorphous civilian population.  American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars.  In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in a Third World War 90-95 per cent would be civilians.  ~Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action


You can't say civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.  ~Will Rogers, New York Times, 23 December 1929


Organized slaughter, we realize, does not settle a dispute; it merely silences an argument.  ~James Frederick Green


I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man.  Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force?  Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures?  ~Thomas Jefferson


War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.  ~Charles Evans Hughes


War is a game which were their subjects wise, kings would not play at.  ~William Cowper


Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.
~Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959


War is not an adventure.  It is a disease.  It is like typhus.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


They should pick a dry year to fight the war.  Better yet, civilize the moronic races and have no wars at all.  ~Clair J. Clark, letter to wife, March 1944


I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war.  ~Georges Clemenceau


As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of exalted characters.  ~Edward Gibbon


There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried.  The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other.  I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves.  But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves.  Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


War!  When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing.  When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages.  Who are the real savages?  Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?  ~Guy de Maupassant, Sur l'Eau


The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too.  It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks.  It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements.  But it fell, it fell.  ~Hermann Hagedorn, "The Bomb That Fell on America"


I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.  I hate war, and never again will I sanction or support another.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick


It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.  ~Fred Woodworth


In an incredible perversion of justice, former soldiers who sprayed festeringly poisonous chemicals on Vietnam, and now find today that they themselves have been damaged by them, appeal to the people for sympathy and charity.  The effects of the defoliant "Agent Orange" are discussed at length, but not one single newspaper article or hearing that we are aware of has even mentioned the effects of the people who still live in those regions of Vietnam.  It's as outlandish as if Nazis who gassed Jews were now to come forward and whine that the poisons they utilized had finally made them sick.  The staggering monstrousness goes unlaughed at and even unnoticed, as in a Kafka novel.  ~Fred Woodworth, The Match, No. 79


A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations.  They have the best implements of war.  ~Herbert V. Prochnow


Studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of combat fatigue cases... found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure, and that fear of failure ran a strong second.  ~S.L.A. Marshall


You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.  ~Franklin P. Jones, referring to the atomic bomb


We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

Pure water is the world's first and foremost medicine.  ~Slovakian Proverb

A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.  ~William Wordsworth

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature.  It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.  ~Annie Dillard

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.  ~Joseph Conrad

Never a ship sails out of the bay
But carries my heart as a stowaway.
~Roselle Mercier Montgomery, The Stowaway

Water flows uphill towards money.  ~Anonymous, saying in the American West, quoted by Ivan Doig in Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986

I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.  ~Isak Dinesen

Filthy water cannot be washed.  ~African Proverb

Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.  ~Loren Eiseley

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.
~e.e. cummings

Most of us, I suppose, are a little nervous of the sea.  No matter what its smiles may be, we doubt its friendship.  ~H.M. Tomlinson

The only cure for seasickness is to sit on the shady side of an old brick church in the country.  ~Author Unknown

Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.
~William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality

Ocean:  A body of water occupying two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.  ~Ambrose Bierce

I find myself at the extremity of a long beach.  How gladly does the spirit leap forth, and suddenly enlarge its sense of being to the full extent of the broad, blue, sunny deep!  A greeting and a homage to the Sea!  I descend over its margin, and dip my hand into the wave that meets me, and bathe my brow.  That far-resounding roar is the Ocean's voice of welcome.  His salt breath brings a blessing along with it.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Foot-prints on the Sea-shore"

The sea has never been friendly to man.  At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.  ~Joseph Conrad

Praise the sea; on shore remain.  ~John Florio

Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.  ~Blaise Pascal

My connection to the earth is reinforced through the rhythm of the waves.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

The great sea makes one a great sceptic.  ~Richard Jefferies

"Take your shoes off," purred the ocean waves.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

In one drop of water are found all the secrets of the oceans.  ~Kahlil Gibran

And thou, vast ocean! on whose awful face
Time's iron feet can print no ruin-trace.
~Robert Montgomery, The Omnipresence of the Deity

Why do we love the sea?  It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.  ~Robert Henri

Keep your feet on the deck, your hands on the tiller, your eyes on the horizon and your beer in the fridge!  ~B.E. Marshall

I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it raging and roaring like a wild beast in its den.  It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free and ending just where it began.  ~William Hazlitt

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.  ~James Russell Lowell

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.  ~Henry David Thoreau

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A person should go out on the water on a fine day to a small distance from a beautiful coast, if he would see Nature really smile.  Never does she look so delightful, as when the sun is brightly reflected by the water, while the waves are gently rippling, and the prospect receives life and animation from the glancing transit of an occasional row-boat, and the quieter motion of a few small vessels.  But the land must be well in sight; not only for its own sake, but because the immensity and awfulness of a mere sea-view would ill accord with the other parts of the glittering and joyous scene.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

There is indeed, perhaps, no better way to hold communion with the sea than sitting in the sun on the veranda of a fishermen's cafe.  ~Joseph W. Beach

He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.  ~George Herbert

The sea hath no king but God alone.  ~Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The White Ship

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.  ~John Ruskin

A lot of people like snow.  I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.  ~Carl Reiner

Let the rain kiss you.  Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.  Let the rain sing you a lullaby.  ~Langston Hughes

Rainbows apologize for angry skies.  ~Sylvia Voirol

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.  ~Patrick Young

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.  ~George Santayana

Weather is a great metaphor for life - sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, and there's nothing much you can do about it but carry an umbrella.  ~Terri Guillemets

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.  ~Muriel Spark, Territorial Rights, 1979

Weather forecast for tonight:  dark.  ~George Carlin

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.  ~Kin Hubbard

There is no season such delight can bring
As summer, autumn, winter and the spring.
~William Browne

I played as much golf as I could in North Dakota, but summer up there is pretty short.  It usually falls on Tuesday.  ~Mike Morley

Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain.  ~Author Unknown

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.  ~Roger Miller

No one but Night, with tears on her dark face,
Watches beside me in this windy place.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay

Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface.  We may will call it black diamonds.  Every basket is power and civilization.  For coal is a portable climate.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

When snow falls, nature listens.  ~Antoinette van Kleeff

Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger.  ~Saint Basil

A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods.  ~Rachel Carson

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.  ~Don Delillo

Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravelled from the tumbling main...
~Thomas Lovell Beddoes

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event.  You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?  ~J.B. Priestley

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.  ~Mark Twain, attributed

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.  ~Annie Dillard

For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every day has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.  ~George Gissing, "Winter," The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 1903

When I no longer thrill to the first snow of the season, I'll know I'm growing old.  ~Lady Bird Johnson

The best kind of rain, of course, is a cozy rain.  This is the kind the anonymous medieval poet makes me remember, the rain that falls on a day when you'd just as soon stay in bed a little longer, write letters or read a good book by the fire, take early tea with hot scones and jam and look out the streaked window with complacency.  ~Susan Allen Toth, England For All Seasons

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event.  You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?  ~J.B. Priestley

Snowflakes are kisses from heaven.  ~Author Unknown

Dear beautiful Spring weather, I miss you.  Was it something I said?  ~"Skipper" Kim Corbin

All was silent as before -
All silent save the dripping rain.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Any proverbs about weather are doubly true during a storm.  ~Terri Guillemets

It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.  ~Mark Twain

The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.  ~e.e. cummings

There's no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.  ~Alfred Wainwright

The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy.  The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour.  ~Charles Dickens

What dreadful hot weather we have!  It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.  ~Jane Austen

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply...
~Edna St. Vincent Millay

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.  ~Joan Didion

Spooky wild and gusty; swirling dervishes of rattling leaves race by, fleeing the windflung deadwood that cracks and thumps behind.  ~Dave Beard

I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

Lo, sifted through the winds that blow,
Down comes the soft and silent snow,
White petals from the flowers that grow
In the cold atmosphere.
~George W. Bungay

Silently, like thoughts that come and go, the snowflakes fall, each one a gem.  ~William Hamilton Gibson

Where does the white go when the snow melts?  ~Hugh Kieffer

Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.  ~Vista M. Kelly

On cable TV they have a weather channel - 24 hours of weather.  We had something like that where I grew up.  We called it a window.  ~Dan Spencer

Snowmen fall from heaven... unassembled.  ~Author Unknown

When it snows, you have two choices:  shovel or make snow angels.  ~Author Unknown

Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough.  ~Earl Wilson

The snow is sparkling like a million little suns.  ~Lama Willa Miller

I used to stare up at the sky trying to see where the snowflakes were born.  I could do it for hours.  Well, minutes.  But it was always the waiting that was the most fun.  ~Author unknown, from a package of Starbucks coffee, 2010

The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.  ~John Muir

Through woods and mountain passes
The winds, like anthems, roll.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.  ~Jonathan Swift

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.  ~John Steinbeck

Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.  ~Bill Watterson

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.  ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east.  The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man's energy.  ~Arthur Conan Doyle

The sun lay like a friendly arm across her shoulder.  ~Margorie Kinnan Rawlings, South Moon Under

Bad weather always looks worse through a window.  ~Author Unknown

There is nothing in the world more beautiful than the forest clothed to its very hollows in snow.  It is the still ecstasy of nature, wherein every spray, every blade of grass, every spire of reed, every intricacy of twig, is clad with radiance.  ~William Sharp

Name the season's first hurricane Zelda and fool Mother Nature into calling it a year.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

O the snow, the beautiful snow,
Filling the sky and earth below;
Over the house-tops, over the street,
Over the heads of the people you meet,
Dancing, flirting, skimming along.
~James W. Watson

Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.  ~Edward Abbey

There's one good thing about snow, it makes your lawn look as nice as your neighbor's.  ~Clyde Moore

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient.  There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.  ~Joseph Wood Krutch

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky - seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.  ~Joseph Conrad

There is little chance that meteorologists can solve the mysteries of weather until they gain an understanding of the mutual attraction of rain and weekends.  ~Arnot Sheppard

Nature has no mercy at all.  Nature says, "I'm going to snow.  If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough.  I am going to snow anyway."  ~Maya Angelou

I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains.  One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness.  ~Adeline Knapp

New-England weather - it is a matter about which a great deal is said, but very little done.  ~Charles Dudley Warner, 1884, commonly attributed to Mark Twain as "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)



Love is a symbol of eternity.  It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.  ~Author Unknown


We have the greatest pre-nuptial agreement in the world.  It's called love.  ~Gene Perret


Love one another and you will be happy.  It's as simple and as difficult as that.  ~Michael Leunig


I dreamed of a wedding of elaborate elegance,
A church filled with family and friends.
I asked him what kind of a wedding he wished for,
He said one that would make me his wife.
~Author Unknown


After all there is something about a wedding-gown prettier than in any other gown in the world.  ~Douglas William Jerrold


[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.  ~Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally


Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Trip over love, you can get up.  Fall in love and you fall forever.  ~Author Unknown


My heart to you is given:
Oh, do give yours to me;
We'll lock them up together,
And throw away the key.
~Frederick Saunders


My whole heart for my whole life.  ~French saying used on poesy rings


I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning


True love stories never have endings.  ~Richard Bach


There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.  ~Martin Luther


A hundred hearts would be too few
To carry all my love for you.
~Author Unknown


Many are the starrs I see, but in my eye no starr like thee.  ~English saying used on poesy rings


Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart.  ~Author Unknown


A man in love is incomplete until he is married.  Then he's finished.  ~Zsa Zsa Gabor


Spouse:  someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single.  ~Author Unknown


Are we not like two volumes of one book?  ~Marceline Desbordes-Valmore


If two stand shoulder to shoulder against the gods,
Happy together, the gods themselves are helpless
Against them while they stand so.
~Maxwell Anderson


I love being married.  It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.  ~Rita Rudner


Marriage, n:  The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.  ~Ambrose Bierce


The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.  ~Peter Devries


A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.  ~Mignon McLaughlin


The Oriole weds his mottled mate,
The Lily weds the bee;
Heaven's marriage ring is round the earth,
Let me bind thee?
~Author Unknown






The highest happiness on earth is marriage.  ~William Lyon Phelps


Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker.  ~Author Unknown


Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.  ~Emily Brontë


Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.  ~Albert Einstein


Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravelled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star: -
So many times do I love again.
~Thomas Lovell Beddoes


When love is not madness, it is not love.  ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca


Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs.  ~Ovid


I love thee - I love thee,
'Tis all that I can say
It is my vision in the night,
My dreaming in the day.
~Thomas Hood


For you see, each day I love you more
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
~Rosemonde Gerard


Who, being loved, is poor?  ~Oscar Wilde


Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.  ~Zora Neale Hurston


A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasnt put there to stay -
Love isnt love
'Til you give it away.
~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, "You Are Sixteen (Reprise)"


Come, let's be a comfortable couple and take care of each other!  How glad we shall be, that we have somebody we are fond of always, to talk to and sit with.  ~Charles Dickens


Let all thy joys be as the month of May,
And all thy days be as a marriage day.
~Francis Quarles


Grow old with me!  The best is yet to be.  ~Robert Browning


All things do go a-courting,
In earth, or sea, or air,
God hath made nothing single
But thee in His world so fair.
~Emily Dickinson


When the one man loves the one woman and the one woman loves the one man, the very angels desert heaven and come and sit in that house and sing for joy.  ~The Brahma Sutras


We're all a little weird.  And life is a little weird.  And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love.  ~Robert Fulghum, True Love


If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
~John Donne


Two souls, one heart.  ~French saying used on poesy rings


My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, both are infinite.
~William Shakespeare


There is no such cozy combination as man and wife.  ~Menander


Think not because you are now wed
That all your courtship's at an end.
~Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza


One of the best things about marriage is that it gets young people to bed at a decent hour.  ~M.M. Musselman


[Marriage] ...the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue.  ~Mrs Patrick Campbell


A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.  ~Andre Maurois


Love me and the world is mine.  ~David Reed


Never go to bed mad.  Stay up and fight.  ~Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966




A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.  ~Doug Larson


A weed is but an unloved flower.  ~Ella Wheeler Wilcox


But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else.  In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit.  Weeds are people's idea, not nature's.  ~Author Unknown


What is a weed?  I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions.  For me, a weed is a plant out of place.  ~Donald Culross Peattie


Crabgrass can grow on bowling balls in airless rooms, and there is no known way to kill it that does not involve nuclear weapons.  ~Dave Barry


I always think of my sins when I weed.  They grow apace in the same way and are harder still to get rid of.  ~Helena Rutherfurd Ely, A Woman's Hardy Garden, 1903


But make no mistake:  the weeds will win; nature bats last.  ~Robert M. Pyle


Weeds are nature's graffiti.  ~Janice Maeditere


They know, they just know where to grow, how to dupe you, and how to camouflage themselves among the perfectly respectable plants, they just know, and therefore, I've concluded weeds must have brains.  ~Dianne Benson, Dirt, 1994


We can in fact only define a weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of the well-known definition of dirt - as matter out of place.  What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it.  ~E.J. Salisbury, The Living Garden, 1935


I learn more about God
From weeds than from roses;
Resilience springing
Through the smallest chink of hope
In the absolute of concrete....
~Phillip Pulfrey, "Weeds," Perspectives, www.originals.net


First time I've picked weeds in almost a year.  Definitely missed it.  I love the smell of dirt and plant revealing their hidden nature.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


A man's children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season.  ~Author Unknown


Criticizing another's garden doesn't keep the weeds out of your own.  ~Author Unknown


Roses are red,
Violets are blue;
But they don't get around
Like the dandelions do.
~Slim Acres


Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.  ~A.A. Milne


One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.  ~John Burroughs, Pepacton, 1881


May all your weeds be wildflowers.  ~Author Unknown


Free Weeds
U Pick 'Em
~Author Unknown


You must weed your mind as you would weed your garden.  ~Terri Guillemets


Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.  ~Author Unknown


Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be.  Some people find in it a kind of soothing monotony.  It leaves their minds free to develop the plot for their next novel or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have encountered a relative's latest example of unreasonableness.  ~Christopher Lloyd, The Well-Tempered Garden, 1973


A good garden may have some weeds.  ~Thomas Fuller


When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it.  If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.  ~Author Unknown


Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.  ~William Shakespeare


A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds
And when the weeds begin to grow
It's like a garden full of snow...

~John Fletcher, part of a nursery rhyme  (Thanks, Paul!)


Weed 'em and reap.  ~Author Unknown


Man is the only critter who feels the need to label things as flowers or weeds.  ~Author Unknown


Don't water your weeds.  ~Proverb


What is a weed?  A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic, 1878


He who hunts for flowers will finds flowers; and he who loves weeds will find weeds.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


A man's nature runs either to herbs, or to weeds; therefore let him seasonably water the one, and destroy the other.  ~Francis Bacon


Even the richest soil, if left uncultivated will produce the rankest weeds.  ~Leonardo da Vinci





Thanks to Michael Garofalo of The Spirit of Gardening
for sharing some of these great quotes!





Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.  ~Bill Watterson


Weekends are a bit like rainbows; they look good from a distance but disappear when you get up close to them.  ~John Shirley


There aren't enough days in the weekend.  ~Rod Schmidt


The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.  ~Chuck Palahniuk


The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


Why wait for the weekend to have fun  ~Loesje, loesje.org


Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday.  ~Author Unknown


Your hair may be brushed, but your mind's untidy.
You've had about seven hours of sleep since Friday.
No wonder you feel that lost sensation.
You're sunk from a riot of relaxation.
~Ogden Nash, about weekends


Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.  ~Lyndon B. Johnson


Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.  ~Anthony Burgess


Of all the days that's in the week
I dearly love but one day
And that's the day that comes betwixt
A Saturday and Monday.
~Henry Carey


Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.  ~Joseph Addison


Most people are in a factory from nine till five.  Their job may be to turn out 263 little circles.  At the end of the week they're three short and somebody has a go at them.  On Saturday afternoons they deserve something to go and shout about.  ~Rodney Marsh, 1969


Give a man a fish and he has food for a day; teach him how to fish and you can get rid of him for the entire weekend.  ~Zenna Scha


There is little chance that meteorologists can solve the mysteries of weather until they gain an understanding of the mutual attraction of rain and weekends.  ~Arnot Sheppard


Weekends don't pay as well as weekdays but at least there's football.  ~S.A. Sachs


How pleasant is Saturday night,
When I've tried all the week to be good,
And not spoke a word that was bad,
And obliged everyone that I could.
~Nancy Sproat


I hate weekends because there is no stock market.  ~Rene Rivkin


The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.  ~Jean Rhys


Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.  ~Richard Rorty


Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.  ~Ogden Nash


Living up to ideals is like doing everyday work with your Sunday clothes on. ~Ed Howe


I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.  ~Andrew Wyeth

Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours."  ~Robert Byrne

There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you.... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.  ~Ruth Stout

One of my current pet theories is that the winter is a kind of evangelist, more subtle than Billy Graham, of course, but of the same stuff.  ~Shirley Ann Grau

Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.  ~Pietro Aretino

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer.  I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.  ~John Burroughs

Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do - or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so.  ~Stanley Crawford

I like these cold, gray winter days.  Days like these let you savor a bad mood.  ~Bill Watterson

Every mile is two in winter.  ~George Herbert

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."  ~Henry David Thoreau, 28 November 1858 journal entry

When the bold branches
Bid farewell to rainbow leaves -
Welcome wool sweaters.
~B. Cybrill

I was just thinking, if it is really religion with these nudist colonies, they sure must turn atheists in the wintertime.  ~Will Rogers

Every winter,
When the great sun has turned his face away,
The earth goes down into a vale of grief,
And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables,
Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay -
Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.
~Charles Kingsley

To shorten winter, borrow some money due in spring.  ~W.J. Vogel

O, wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Winter came down to our home one night
Quietly pirouetting in on silvery-toed slippers of snow,
And we, we were children once again.
~Bill Morgan, Jr.

Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Winter either bites with its teeth or lashes with its tail.  ~Proverb

The color of springtime is in the flowers; the color of winter is in the imagination.  ~Terri Guillemets

Brew me a cup for a winter's night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I'll toast our bright eyes,
my sweetheart fair.
~Minna Thomas Antrim

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.  ~Sinclair Lewis

Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories.  ~From the movie An Affair to Remember

Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours,
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers....
~Thomas Campion, "Winter Nights"

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.  ~William Blake

Of winter's lifeless world each tree
Now seems a perfect part;
Yet each one holds summer's secret
Deep down within its heart.
~Charles G. Stater

Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude.  ~William Shakespeare

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire:  it is the time for home.  ~Edith Sitwell

Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat.  ~Author Unknown

One kind word can warm three winter months.  ~Japanese Proverb

Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer.  ~Plutarch, Moralia

More season quotes and poems at The Spirit of Gardening



Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.  ~Elbert Hubbard


We can be Knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.  ~Michel de Montaigne


Wisdom begins at the end.  ~Daniel Webster


Patience is the companion of wisdom.  ~St. Augustine


Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.  ~Doug Larson


Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.  ~David Star Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair


He who devotes sixteen hours a day to hard study may become at sixty as wise as he thought himself at twenty.  ~Mary Wilson Little


Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age.  Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.  ~Tom Wilson


How can you be a sage if you're pretty?  You can't get your wizard papers without wrinkles.  ~Bill Veeck


The years teach much which the days never knew.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange - my youth.
~Sara Teasdale


The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.  ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988


Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.  ~Juvenal, Satires


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


I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.  ~John Buchan


It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.  ~A.A. Hodge


A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer.  ~Author Unknown


A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.  ~Chinese Proverb


Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.  ~Norman Cousins


He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom.  ~James Gibbons Huneker


Wisdom comes by disillusionment.  ~George Santayana


Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it.  ~Doug Larson


Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.  ~Tobias Smollett


Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.  ~William Wordsworth


The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.


Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.  ~Alfred Lord Tennyson


Wisdom outweighs any wealth.  ~Sophocles


If wisdom and diamonds grew on the same tree we could soon tell how much men loved wisdom.  ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911


The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool..  ~William Shakespeare, As You Like It


One must spend time in gathering knowledge to give it out richly.  ~Edward C. Steadman


The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.  ~William James


It is more easy to be wise for others than for ourselves.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld


Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.  ~Josh Billings


Wisdom is never on the menu, you have to own the restaurant.  ~Carrie Latet


There are subjects in which I wish to become knowledgeable, and subjects in which I wish to remain wise.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The child, offered the mother's breast,
Will not in the beginning grab it;
But soon it clings to it with zest.
And thus at wisdom's copious breasts
You'll drink each day with greater zest.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Every wise man lives in an observatory.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.  ~Martin H. Fischer


A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew.  ~Herb Caen


There is a wisdom of the head, and... a wisdom of the heart.  ~Charles Dickens


Common-sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


No man was ever wise by chance.  ~Seneca


We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.  ~Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, c.1420

You've got a lot of choices.  If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.  ~Steven D. Woodhull (U.S. geologist, 1976-)

What saves a man is to take a step.  Then another step.  It is always the same step, but you have to take it.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

Don't wait for the Last Judgment.  It happens every day.  ~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956

Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Remember, if youre headed in the wrong direction, God allows U-turns!  ~Allison Gappa Bottke

Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall.  Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day.  Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down.  And this is all life really means.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

If you don't like how things are, change it!  You're not a tree.  ~Jim Rohn

In what you say of another, apply the test of kindness, necessity and truth, and let nothing pass your lips without a 2/3 majority.  ~Liz Armbruster, on www.robertbrault.com

See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little.  ~Pope John XXIII

Give thanks for what you are now, and keep fighting for what you want to be tomorrow.  ~Fernanda Miramontes-Landeros

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Now that it's all over, what did you really do yesterday that's worth mentioning?  ~Coleman Cox

Laziness will cause you pain.  ~Slogan on T-shirt worn at the Vee Arnis Jitsu School of Self-Defense

If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.  ~Toni Morrison

Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics.  Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.  ~Max Lerner, Actions and Passions, 1949

Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone in order to do it.  ~Author Unknown

Sometimes it's more important to be human, than to have good taste.  ~Brecht

[O]wning your burdens is half the battle.  ~From the television show Scrubs

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.  ~Victor Hugo

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.  ~William James

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.  ~Leo Aikman

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires.  Seek discipline and find your liberty.  ~Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.  ~Plato

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.  ~Jonathan Kozel

Tough and funny and a little bit kind:  that is as near to perfection as a human being can be.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.  ~Frances Willard

Always when judging
Who people are,
Remember to footnote
The words "So far."
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it's me.  ~Author unknown, variation of an excerpt from "The Serenity Prayer" by Reinhold Neibuhr

A day is Eternity's seed, and we are its Gardeners.  ~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com

People cannot go wrong, if you don't let them.  They cannot go right, unless you let them.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Excess on occasion is exhilirating.  It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.  ~W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938

The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself.  ~Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Last Tournament," Idylls of the King

There is no such thing as an ugly woman.  ~Vincent Van Gogh

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.  ~Dave Barry

Women like silent men.  They think they're listening.  ~Marcel Achard, Quote, 4 November 1956

Sure God created man before woman.  But then you always make a rough draft before the final masterpiece.  ~Author Unknown

Some men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman's toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough, would add immeasurably to world peace.  ~Marianne Williamson, "A Woman's Worth"

Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them.  ~Bill Maher

A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who has never owned a car.  ~Carrie Snow

You start out happy that you have no hips or boobs.  All of a sudden you get them, and it feels sloppy.  Then just when you start liking them, they start drooping.  ~Cindy Crawford

Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.  ~Laurence J. Peter

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.  ~Author Unknown

A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon.  ~Arnold Haultain

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.  Luckily, this is not difficult.  ~Charlotte Whitton

Women are always beautiful.  ~Ville Valo

The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy.  ~Ellery Queen

Curve:  The loveliest distance between two points.  ~Mae West

Can you imagine a world without men?  No crime and lots of happy fat women.  ~Nicole Hollander

Women get the last word in every argument.  Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.  ~Author Unknown

Next to the wound, what women make best is the bandage.  ~Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad.  An optimist is a man who hopes they are.  ~Chauncey Mitchell Depew

The rarest thing in the world is a woman who is pleased with photographs of herself.  ~Elizabeth Metcalf

There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.  ~Madeleine K. Albright

A man's face is his autobiography.  A woman's face is her work of fiction.  ~Oscar Wilde

There's something luxurious about having a girl light your cigarette.  In fact, I got married once on account of that.  ~Harold Robbins

When a man talks dirty to a woman, it's sexual harassment.  When a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95 a minute.  ~Author Unknown

Men get laid, but women get screwed.  ~Quentin Crisp

The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges.  ~Germaine Greer

Whether they give or refuse, it delights women just the same to have been asked.  ~Ovid

Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish:  God Almighty made 'em to match the men.  ~George Eliot, "The Harvest Supper," Adam Bede

Women are like elephants to me.  I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want to own one.  ~W.C. Fields

Women really do rule the world.  They just haven't figured it out yet.  When they do, and they will, we're all in big big trouble.  ~"Doctor Leon," drleons.com

Ah, women.  They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.  ~George Meredith

Men who don't like girls with brains don't like girls.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Women keep a special corner of their hearts for sins they have never committed.  ~Cornelia Otis Skinner

Lovely female shapes are terrible complicators of the difficulties and dangers of this earthly life, especially for their owners.  ~George du Maurier

Every woman is wrong until she cries, and then she is right - instantly.  ~Sam Slick (Thomas Chandler Haliburton)

The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.  ~Guy de Maupassant

I have an idea that the phrase "weaker sex" was coined by some woman to disarm some man she was preparing to overwhelm.  ~Ogden Nash

When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces.  Women go right on cooking.  ~Gail Sheehy

The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.  ~Simone de Beauvoir

They call it PMS because Mad Cow Disease was already taken.  ~Author Unknown

Be to her virtues very kind,
Be to her faults a little blind.
~Matthew Prior

They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.  ~Oliver Goldsmith

A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women.  ~Edgar Wallace

It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

You see, dear, it is not true that woman was made from man's rib; she was really made from his funny bone.  ~J.M. Barrie, What Every Woman Knows

If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.  ~Aristotle Onassis

Men will always delight in a woman whose voice is lined with velvet.  ~Brendan Francis

Men really prefer reasonably attractive women; they go after the sensational ones to impress other men.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

I married beneath me - all women do.  ~Nancy Astor, speech, Oldham, England, 1951

Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.  ~Elsa Schiaparelli

Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weakness.  ~Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand, Letters to Voltaire

If President Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been Moses' secretary, there would only be eight commandments.  ~Art Buchwald, 1974

Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.  ~Oscar Wilde

I'd much rather be a woman than a man.  Women can cry, they can wear cute clothes, and they're the first to be rescued off sinking ships.  ~Gilda Radner

She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.  ~Woody Allen, Getting Even, 1973

It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.  ~Alexandre Dumas, fils

I'd rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four.  ~Fred Allen

When a woman comes to her glass, she does not employ her time in making herself look more advantageously what she really is, but endeavours to be as much another creature as she possibly can.  Whether this happens because they stay so long and attend their work so diligently that they forget the faces and persons which they first sat down with, or whatever it is, they seldom rise from the toilet the same woman they appeared when they began to dress.  ~Joseph Addison

All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.  ~Sigmund Freud

Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones.  ~Camille Paglia

No woman will ever be satisfied because no man will ever have a chocolate penis that shoots out money.  ~Author Unknown

When I glimpse the backs of women's knees I seem to hear the first movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.  ~Author Unknown

A woman wears her tears like jewelry.  ~Author Unknown

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?  Nobody.  ~J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

No woman wants to see herself too clearly.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

I prefer the word homemaker, because housewife always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.  ~Bella Abzug

The basic Female body comes with the following accessories:  garter belt, panti-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers, barrettes, bangles, beads, lorgnette, feather boa, basic black, compact, Lycra stretch one-piece with modesty panel, designer peignoir, flannel nightie, lace teddy, bed, head.  ~Margaret Atwood

Women go to beauty parlors for the unmussed look men hate.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Women polish the silver and water the plants and wait to be really needed.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

You have to have the kind of body that doesn't need a girdle in order to get to pose in one.  ~Carolyn Kenmore

A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.  ~George Eliot

There are women who do not like to cause suffering to many men at a time, and who prefer to concentrate on one man:  These are the faithful women.  ~Alfred Capus

No matter how good she looks, some other guy is sick and tired of putting up with her crap.  ~Author Unknown

Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman.  ~Honoré de Balzac, The Physiology of Marriage

The girls that are always easy on the eyes are never easy on the heart.  ~Author Unknown

If a woman must make a fool of herself, the least a man can do is to let her be one in her own way.  ~When Ladies Meet, 1941 movie written by Rachel Crothers, John Meehan, Leon Gordon, S.K. Lauren, and Anita Loos, spoken by the character Bridgie Drake  (not sure if this is also in the 1933 movie or 1932 play - anyone know?)

Men enjoy being thought of as hunters, but are generally too lazy to hunt.  Women, on the other hand, love to hunt, but would rather nobody knew it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

I've reached the age where competence is a turn-on.  ~Billy Joel

A man gives many question marks, however, a woman is a whole mystery.  ~Diana Stürm

In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on woman.  ~Nancy Astor, My Two Countries

God did it on purpose so that we may love you men instead of laughing at you.  ~Mrs Patrick Campbell, in reply to a male acquaintance who asked why women seem to have no sense of humor

Men at most differ as Heaven and Earth, but women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.  ~Alfred Lord Tennyson

A woman asks little of love:  only that she be able to feel like a heroine.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The chief excitement in a woman's life is spotting women who are fatter than she is.  ~Helen Rowland

I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.  ~Stanley Baldwin

And verily, a woman need know but one man well, in order to understand all men; whereas a man may know all women and understand not one of them.  ~Helen Rowland

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.  ~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Men look at themselves in mirrors.  Women look for themselves.  ~Elissa Melamed

If your husband expects you to laugh, do so; if he expects you to cry, don't; if you don't know what he expects, what are you doing married?  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

There are three ways to spread news:  telegram, television, and tellawoman.  ~Author Unknown

Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen.  ~Compton Mackenzie, Literature in My Time, 1933

One is not born a woman, one becomes one.  ~Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination.  ~Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue, 1925

Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty-eight and forty.  ~James Thurber, Time, 15 August 1960

Dramatic art in her opinion is knowing how to fill a sweater.  ~Bette Davis, about Jayne Mansfield

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.  ~Washington Irving

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

After about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of that one.  And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate.  ~Mel Gibson, about what women want

Women who make men talk better than they are accustomed to are always popular.  ~E.V. Lucas

I'm not against half naked girls - not as often as I'd like to be.  ~Benny Hill

A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman is as bad as she dares.  ~Elbert Hubbard

You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.  ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"

The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.  ~Robert Graves

What men desire is a virgin who is a whore.  ~Edward Dahlbert

Women are afraid of mice and of murder, and of very little in between.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

A woman should be an illusion.  ~Ian Fleming

There are three things men can do with women:  love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.  ~Stephen Stills

It is because of men that women dislike one another.  ~Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, 1688

Behind every great woman is a guy looking at her ass.  ~Author Unknown

Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.  ~Caroline K. Simon

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.  ~Thomas Carlyle

Women who feel naked without their lipstick are well over thirty.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Women are like dogs really.  They love like dogs, a little insistently.  And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket.  ~Mary Roberts Rinehart

It's the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time.  ~Tallulah Bankhead

A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.  ~Karl Kraus

A man chases a woman until she catches him.  ~American Proverb

Variability is one of the virtues of a woman.  It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy.  So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.  ~G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, 1910

Beauty is the first present Nature gives to women, and the first it takes away.  ~Méré

There's just something about letting a girl have her way with you.  ~A.C. Van Cherub

Brains are an asset, if you hide them.  ~Mae West

With men, as with women, the main struggle is between vanity and comfort; but with men, comfort often wins.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Once a woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her.  ~John Vanbrugh, The Relapse, 1696

Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?  ~Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 1970

A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.  ~Edna Ferber

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.  ~Germaine Greer

Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak.  ~William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals.  To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football.  ~Fran Lebowitz

You're booty-blinded.  You know what that is?  It's like being snow-blinded only it ain't no snow, it's a cute little piece of ass.  ~From the movie I Spy

Women are never landlocked:  they're always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

To get to a woman's heart, a man must first use his own.  ~Mike Dobbertin, quoted in A 5th Portion of Chicken Soup for the Soul

Through sources, we have obtained the following alien assessment of the human species:  The male wants to be valued for what he pretends to be.  The female wants to be overvalued for what she truly is.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.  ~Cornelia Otis Skinner, attributed

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.  ~Samuel Johnson

Women speak two languages - one of which is verbal.  ~William Shakespeare

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.  ~James Thurber

I hate women because they always know where things are.  ~Voltaire

Good-looking girls break hearts, and goodhearted girls mend them.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue.  ~Hermione Gingold

The people I'm furious with are the women's liberationists.  They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men.  That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.  ~Anita Loos, New York Times, 10 February 1974

Women always worry about the things that men forget; men always worry about the things women remember.  ~Author Unknown

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.  ~H.L. Mencken

Worry is a misuse of imagination.  ~Dan Zadra

If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.  ~Don Herold

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.  ~Mark Twain

Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.  ~Author Unknown

Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which will never happen.  ~James Russel Lowell

If things go wrong, don't go with them.  ~Roger Babson

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.  ~Leo Buscaglia

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

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying.  It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.  ~Dale Carnegie

I've developed a new philosophy... I only dread one day at a time.  ~Charlie Brown (Charles Schulz)

Troubles are a lot like people - they grow bigger if you nurse them.  ~Author Unknown

If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.  ~E. Joseph Cossman

Nerves and butterflies are fine - they're a physical sign that you're mentally ready and eager.  You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that's the trick.  ~Steve Bull

I keep the telephone of my mind open to peace, harmony, health, love and abundance.  Then, whenever doubt, anxiety or fear try to call me, they keep getting a busy signal - and soon they'll forget my number.  ~Edith Armstrong

Nerves provide me with energy.  They work for me.  It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that I get worried.  ~Mike Nichols

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.  ~Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"

People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross.  ~Author Unknown

You can't wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time.  ~Pat Schroeder

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, 1927

Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.  ~Glenn Turner

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.  ~George Bernard Shaw, "Family Affection," Parents and Children, 1914

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.  ~Christian Nevell Bovee

Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.  ~Nelson DeMille

For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe.  ~Author Unknown

We experience moments absolutely free from worry.  These brief respites are called panic.  ~Cullen Hightower

If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times.  ~Dean Smith

It only seems as if you are doing something when you're worrying.  ~Lucy Maud Montgomery

A hundredload of worry will not pay an ounce of debt.  ~George Herbert

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.  ~Thomas A. Edison

Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.  ~Swedish Proverb

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

That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.  ~Chinese Proverb

We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it.  But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.  ~John Newton

Worry ducks when purpose flies overhead.  ~Terri Guillemets

It iz the little bits ov things that fret and worry us; we kan dodge an elefunt but we kan't a fli.  ~Josh Billings

Worry, doubt, fear and despair are the enemies which slowly bring us down to the ground and turn us to dust before we die.  ~Attributed to Douglas MacArthur

Worry is an addiction that interferes with compassion.  ~Deng Ming-Dao

You can never worry your way to enlightenment.  ~Terri Guillemets

When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system.  What chance has a man got against a system?  ~Russell Hoban

[A]ny concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.  ~Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor.  "Never worry about your heart till it stops beating."  ~E.B. White

There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry... Yesterday and Tomorrow.  ~Robert Jones Burdette

A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work.  ~John Lubbock

As a rule, what is out of sight disturbs men's minds more seriously than what they see.  ~Julius Caesar

If worrying were an Olympic sport, you'd get the gold for sure.  ~Stephenie Geist

I refuse to be burdened by vague worries.  If something wants to worry me, it will have to make itself clear.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Worry is rust upon the blade.  ~Henry Ward Hughes

Anxiety is a deep conscious breath away from dissolving.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com

Heavy thoughts bring on physical maladies; when the soul is oppressed so is the body.  ~Martin Luther

I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.  It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.  ~Dorothy Day

Worry is a complete cycle of inefficient thought revolving about a pivot of fear.  ~Author Unknown

Loneliness, insomnia, and change:  the fear of these is even worse than the reality.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down.  ~George MacDonald

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man!  Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!  ~Charles Dickens

Some patients I see are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds.  ~Zacharty Bercovitz

Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.  ~Mark Twain

I highly recommend worrying.  It is much more effective than dieting.  ~William Powell

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.  ~Michel de Montaigne

If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.  ~Calvin Coolidge

When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come.  ~Joseph Joubert

Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.  ~Edgar Watson Howe

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.  ~Thomas Jefferson

When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around.  I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something.  Only, I don't go.  I'm too worried to go.  I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go.  ~J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind.  If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.  ~Arthur Somers Roche

We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.  ~Etty Hillesum

There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.  ~Josh Billings

Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.  ~John Dryden

Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.  ~William Ralph Inge

There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.  ~Seneca

We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us.  ~John Lancaster Spalding

We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal.  We worry away our lives.  ~Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979

There is always sufficient reason for despair, but there is never sufficient purpose.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none.  For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen.  ~Pliny the Younger

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

Do not be afraid of tomorrow; for God is already there.  ~Author Unknown

Real difficulties can be overcome, it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.  ~Theodore N. Vail

No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.  ~George MacDonald

Rule number one is, don't sweat the small stuff.  Rule number two is, it's all small stuff.  ~Robert Eliot

They need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.  ~Jack Kerouac

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.  ~Montaigne, Essays, 1588

No human thing is of serious importance.  ~Plato, The Republic

Fear can keep us up all night long, but faith makes one fine pillow.  ~Philip Gulley

Don't fight with the pillow, but lay down your head
And kick every worriment out of the bed.
~Edmund Vance Cooke

Every evening I turn my worries over to God.  He's going to be up all night anyway.  ~Mary C. Crowley

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.  ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.  ~Anaïs Nin

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.  ~Ray Bradbury

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.  ~E.L. Doctorow

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.  ~Charles Peguy

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.  The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.  ~Sylvia Plath

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.  ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.  ~Elmore Leonard

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.  ~Toni Morrison

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.  ~Norbet Platt

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.  ~Vita Sackville-West

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning:  I wanted to know what I was going to say.  ~Sharon O'Brien

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.  ~Mark Twain

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.  ~James Michener

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.  By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.  ~Mark Twain

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed.  I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty:  at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.  ~Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.  ~William Wordsworth

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.  ~Vladimir Nabakov

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.  ~Terri Guillemets

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.  ~Orson Scott Card

A metaphor is like a simile.  ~Author Unknown

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.  ~Mark Twain, letter to George Bainton, 1888 (Thanks, Andrew & Barbara), variation of Josh Billings' "Don't mistake vivacity for wit, thare iz about az much difference az thare iz between lightning and a lightning bug."

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air.  All I must do is find it, and copy it.  ~Jules Renard, "Diary," February 1895

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.  ~Author Unknown

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.  ~Karl Kraus

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet.  So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.  ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man's Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else," The Dame School of Experience, 1920

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.  But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.  ~Samuel Lover, Handy Andy, 1842

I love writing.  I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.  ~James Michener

Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood.  I'd type a little faster.  ~Isaac Asimov

I love being a writer.  What I can't stand is the paperwork.  ~Peter De Vries

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Writing, I think, is not apart from living.  Writing is a kind of double living.  The writer experiences everything twice.  Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.  ~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make.  ~Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967

A writer and nothing else:  a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.  ~John K. Hutchens, New York Herald Tribune, 10 September 1961

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.  ~English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.  ~Hannah Arendt

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.  ~Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle.  ~John Cheever

Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
~William Safire, "Great Rules of Writing"

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.  ~Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907

Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.  ~Gene Fowler

Write down the thoughts of the moment.  Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.  ~Francis Bacon

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.  ~William Gass, "Habitations of the Word," Kenyon Review, October 1984

Be obscure clearly.  ~E.B. White 

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers.  My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.  There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.  ~Flannery O'Connor

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.  The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.  ~Joan Baez

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.  ~Samuel Butler

Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn't we?  ~Terri Guillemets

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.  ~Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversation: Diogenes and Plato

Let me walk through the fields of paper
touching with my wand
dry stems and stunted
butterflies....
~Denise Levertov, "A Walk through the Notebooks"

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

Every writer I know has trouble writing.  ~Joseph Heller

Writer's block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite.  ~Terri Guillemets

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.  ~Baltasar Gracián

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.  ~Enrique Jardiel Poncela

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.  ~Harold Ross

When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
~Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.  ~Sholem Asch

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook:  his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.  ~Lord Byron

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.  ~Anais Nin

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer.  ~Jack Smith

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.  ~Juvenal, Satires

Writing is a struggle against silence.  ~Carlos Fuentes

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it.  ~Jack London, "Getting Into Print," 1905

The process of writing has something infinite about it.  Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.  ~Elias Canetti

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.  If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.  ~Paul Gallico, "Confessions of a Story Writer," 1946

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.  The chasm is never completely bridged.  We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

One hates an author that's all author.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Beppo"

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.  ~Burton Rascoe

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.  ~Agatha Christie

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names.  I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.  ~Etty Hillesum, quoted in Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die by Karol Jackowski

A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.  ~Ethel Wilson

Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man.  ~Emily Dickinson

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.  ~Don Marquis

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.  ~Miguel de Cervantes

Writers are not just people who sit down and write.  They hazard themselves.  Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.  ~E.L. Doctorow

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare.  For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.  ~Henry David Thoreau

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you.  And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.  ~Arthur Polotnik

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.  ~Adlai Stevenson, as quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs

The first goal of writing is to have one's words read successfully.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.  ~T.S. Eliot

What would there be in a story of happiness?  Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.  ~André Gide

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.  ~Samuel Johnson

Lists are the butterfly nets that catch my fleeting thoughts... ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

A good style should show no signs of effort.  What is written should seem a happy accident.  ~W. Somerset Maugham, Summing Up, 1938

They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.  ~Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.  ~Stephen King

It is plagiarism when you take something out of a book and use it as your own.  If you take it out of several books then it is research.  ~Quoted by Ralph Foss, 1932 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.  ~Karl Kraus

As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me:  grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.  ~Virginia Woolf

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act.  It discharges the tension.  ~Norman Mailer

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.  ~Lord Byron

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.  ~Theodore Dreiser, 1900

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.  ~Havelock Ellis

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason.  They made no such demand upon those who wrote them.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.  ~Saul Bellow

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.  ~Author Unknown, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson (*) (Thanks, Frank Lynch)

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851

I am a man, and alive.... For this reason I am a novelist.  And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.  ~D.H. Lawrence, preface to Shestov, All Things Are Possible, 1938

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.  ~Washington Irving

Ink surrounds me all the time
On my bed sheets, recorded in rhyme
Quills 'ever scribbling in my head
Sometimes damnit I forget what they said.
Ink has settled into my fingerprints
But to keep the words I fear to rinse...
~Terri Guillemets

Write your first draft with your heart.  Re-write with your head.  ~From the movie Finding Forrester

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.  ~Sinclair Lewis

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Writing is both mask and unveiling.  ~E.B. White

Let's hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks.  ~Peter S. Prescott

It's not plagiarism - I'm recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do.  ~Uniek Swain

True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
~Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.  ~Franz Kafka

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.  ~Gustave Flaubert

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it - I might be writing in my dreams.  ~Terri Guillemets

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen.  ~Leo Tolstoy

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.  ~Samuel Johnson

What things there are to write, if one could only write them!  My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings.  But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.  ~Russell Lynes

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.  ~Jean Luc Godard

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.  ~James Norman Hall

Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.  ~Gail Hamilton

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?  ~Joan Didion

I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud.  ~Gordon Atkinson, reallivepreacher.com

Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.  ~A. Bronson Alcott

The artist's only responsibility is his art.  He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate:  The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.  ~Faulkner, quoted in M. Cowley, Writers at Work, 1958

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.  ~Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947

The reason why many people are so fond of using superlatives, is, they are so positive that the poor positive is not half positive enough for them.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer.  But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.  ~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.  ~Jules Renard, Journal, 10 April 1895

The good writers touch life often.  The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.  The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.  ~Ray Bradbury

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear - and devils, too.  ~Terri Guillemets

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute.  Or you might not write the paragraph at all.  ~Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf, 1927

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.  ~G.K. Chesterton

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.  ~André Gide, Journals, 1894

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.  ~Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic, 1963

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.  ~Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963

i never think at all when i write
nobody can do two things at the same time
and do them both well
~Don Marquis, Archy's Life of Mehitabel, 1933

Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals.  ~Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.  ~Samuel Johnson, "Recalling the Advice of a College Tutor," Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1791

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.  ~Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme, 1802

Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you.  ~Mae West

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.  ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.  ~Jessamyn West, Saturday Review, 21 September 1957

I hate writing, I love having written.  ~Dorothy Parker, may not be exact wording

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.  ~George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947  (Thanks, Jennifer)

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.  ~Hart Crane

He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.  ~John Ray

Writing is a product of silence.  ~Carrie Latet

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.  ~G.K. Chesterton

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.  ~Fay Weldon

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Books want to be born: I never make them.  They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.  ~Samuel Butler

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.  ~Robert Benchley

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.  ~Van Wyck Brooks

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.  This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.  ~Ernest Hemingway, interview in Paris Review, Spring 1958

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.  ~Samuel Johnson

The best style is the style you don't notice.  ~Somerset Maugham

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.  ~William Makepeace Thackeray

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.  ~John Updike

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.  ~Leo Tolstoy

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.  ~Goethe

Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.  ~B.K.S. Iyengar

The yoga mat is a good place to turn when talk therapy and antidepressants aren't enough.  ~Amy Weintraub

Yoga is the fountain of youth.  You're only as young as your ssocke is flexible.  ~Bob Harper

You cannot do yoga.  Yoga is your natural state.  What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state.  ~Sharon Gannon

Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it.  Yoga is universal.... But don't approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain.  ~Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois

By embracing your mother wound as your yoga, you transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher of the heart.  ~Phillip Moffitt

Yoga is 99% practice and 1% theory.  ~Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois

Sun salutations can energize and warm you, even on the darkest, coldest winter day.  ~Carol Krucoff

I like the physical part, but I'm also drawn to the spiritual.  For me, yoga is not just a workout - it's about working on yourself.  ~Mary Glover, "Health Profile: Yoga leaves aches and pains behind," Arizona Republic, 2004 April 6

A photographer gets people to pose for him.  A yoga instructor gets people to pose for themselves.  ~Terri Guillemets

I do yoga so that I can stay flexible enough to kick my own arse if necessary.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

The beauty is that people often come here for the stretch, and leave with a lot more.  ~Liza Ciano, co-owner & co-director of Yoga Vermont, yogavermont.com

The last time I opened my chakra so I could feel my peace, I got thrown right out of the pub.  ~Terri Guillemets

Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake.  ~Carl Jung

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.  ~Author Unknown

Vogue and Self are putting out the message of yoginis as buff and perfect.  If you start doing yoga for those reasons, fine.  Most people get beyond that and see that it's much, much more.  ~Patricia Walden

When asked what gift he wanted for his birthday, the yogi replied:  "I wish no gifts, only presence."  ~Author Unknown

Yoga is bodily gospel.  ~Reaven Fields

If I'm losing balance in a pose, I stretch higher and God reaches down to steady me.  It works every time, and not just in yoga.  ~Terri Guillemets

Yoga, an ancient but perfect science, deals with the evolution of humanity.  This evolution includes all aspects of one's being, from bodily health to self-realization.  Yoga means union - the union of body with consciousness and consciousness with the soul.  Yoga cultivates the ways of maintaining a balanced attitude in day-to-day life and endows skill in the performance of one's actions.  ~B.K.S. Iyengar, Astadala Yogamala

Don't just do something - sit there!  ~Author Unknown

I was in yoga the other day.  I was in full lotus position.  My chakras were all aligned.  My mind is cleared of all clatter and I'm looking out of my third eye and everything that I'm supposed to be doing.  It's amazing what comes up, when you sit in that silence.  "Mama keeps whites bright like the sunlight, Mama's got the magic of Clorox 2."  ~Ellen DeGeneres

Anyone who practices can obtain success in yoga but not one who is lazy.  Constant practice alone is the secret of success.  ~Svatmarama, Hatha Yoga Pradipika

Yoga is the practice of quieting the mind.  ~Patanjali, translated from Sanskrit

Yoga is the perfect opportunity to be curious about who you are.  ~Jason Crandell, quoted in Yoga Journal, November 2005

Yoga is difficult for the one whose mind is not subdued.  ~Bhagavad Gita

Corpse pose restores life.  Dead parts of your being fall away, the ghosts are released.  ~Terri Guillemets

Yoga doesn't take time, it gives time.  ~Ganga White

Yoga has a sly, clever way of short-circuiting the mental patterns that cause anxiety.  ~Baxter Bell, quoted in "Worry Thwarts," Yoga Journal, March 2006

Concentrating on poses clears the mind, while focusing on the breath helps the body shift out of fight-or-flight mode.  ~Melanie Haiken, about yoga and anxiety, "Worry Thwarts," Yoga Journal, March 2006

Warrior pose battles inner weakness and wins focus.  You see that there is no war within you.  You're on your own side, and you are your own strength.  ~Terri Guillemets

Mountain pose teaches us, literally, how to stand on our own two feet.... teaching us to root ourselves into the earth.... Our bodies become a connection between heaven and earth.  ~Carol Krucoff

Mountain pose is an affirmation.  You can conquer anything with your natural boldness and resolute strength.  Only you can reach the peak of your success.  ~Terri Guillemets

I tried yoga once but took off for the mall halfway through class, as I had a sudden craving for a soft pretzel and world peace.  ~Terri Guillemets

All unimportant matters drop off you in ragdoll pose.  Very few things are genuinely important.  The Truth sways before you.  ~Terri Guillemets

When you inhale, you are taking the strength from God.  When you exhale, it represents the service you are giving to the world.  ~B.K.S. Iyengar

The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic system, which is often identified with the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which is identified with what's been called the relaxation response.  When you do yoga - the deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the relaxed focus on being present in your body - you initiate a process that turns the fight-or-flight system off and the relaxation response on.  That has a dramatic effect on the body.  The heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, blood pressure decreases.  The body seizes this chance to turn on the healing mechanisms.  ~Richard Faulds

Tree pose grows confidence.  ~Terri Guillemets

Inhale, and God approaches you.  Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you.  Exhale, and you approach God.  Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God.  ~Krishnamacharya

Meditation is not a means to an end.  It is both the means and the end.  ~Jiddhu Krishnamurti

For those wounded by civilization, yoga is the most healing salve.  ~Terri Guillemets

Chair pose is a defiance of spirit, showing how high you can reach even when you're forced down.  ~Terri Guillemets

Basketball is an endurance sport, and you have to learn to control your breath; that's the essence of yoga, too.  So, I consciously began using yoga techniques in my practice and playing.  I think yoga helped reduce the number and severity of injuries I suffered.  As preventative medicine, it's unequaled.  ~Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Before you've practiced, the theory is useless.  After you've practiced, the theory is obvious.  ~David Williams, an Ashtanga yoga teacher in Maui, Hawaii, quoted from yoga.com

Tai chi does not mean oriental wisdom or something exotic.  It is the wisdom of your own senses, your own mind and body together as one process.  ~Chungliang Al Huang

It has long been my dream that one day Americans of all ages, creeds and colors will be practicing taijiquan in the parks of this nation as they do in China.  Few places in the world have such beautiful open spaces which can and should be used productively at no expense.  The result would be tremendous improvement in mental and physical well-being.  ~Jou, Tsung Hwa

As the practitioner incorporates the quality of tai chi movement into his life, he finds that he stops banging into things.  The result of not falling into each step provides the opportunity to instantaneously ease back from unexpected barriers.  ~Wolfe Lowenthal

Of all the exercises, I should say that T'ai Chi is the best.  It can ward off disease, banish worry and tension, bring improved physical health and prolong life.  It is a good hobby for your whole life, the older you are, the better.  It is suitable for everyone - the weak, the sick, the aged, children, the disabled and blind.  It is also an economical exercise.  As long as one has three square feet of space, one can take a trip to paradise and stay there to enjoy life for thirty minutes without spending a single cent.  ~T.T. Liang (Liang Tung-Tsai, 1900-2002), T'ai Chi Ch'uan for Health and Self-Defense

Think of the circular path of each movement, in Tai Chi every movement is in curve or circle that has no ending or beginning.  ~Paul Lam

Tai chi is the one exercise that can universally help solve our growing health crisis.  It has stood the test of thousands of years.  We have a generation of baby boomers with increasing health problems; old people who are sick, in pain, fearful, and cranky; a middle class that is increasingly incapable of affording most of the drugs that are prescribed for their ailments; children that are flaccid, diabetic and asthmatic.  People of all ages are addicted to drugs, alcohol, sugar, cigarettes, and caffeine.  Stress follows almost everyone like a shadow.  ~Bruce Frantzis

