Anne Spackman's Collection of Famous Quotes: Humorous, Inspirational, Clever, etc.

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For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

You know it's true love when you can't believe you ever lived without it. -Katherine Seelig

What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines or rather indicates his fate

- Thoreau

"There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.''

-- George Santayana, The Life of Reason

I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond, that character--not wealth or power or position--is of supreme worth... I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken.

---Jean Jacques Rousseau

If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud. --Emile Zola

The tragedy of life is what sometimes dies inside a man while he lives. --Schweitzer

No man is rich enough to buy back his past. Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. --Boris Pasternak

Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.

---Jean Jacques Rousseau 1712-1778, Swiss Political Philosopher, Educationist, Essayist

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

---Thomas Jefferson (3rd US President & Founding Father)

He who allows oppression shares the crime

---Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802 British Physiologist & Poet)

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled

- Paul Eldridge

Great Spirit, help me never to judge another until I have walked in his moccasins.

---Sioux Indian Prayer

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

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions

---Noam Chomsky

"The greater the obstacle, the more the glory in overcoming it."

-- Moliere

For why should my freedom be judged by another's conscience?

PAUL, 1 Corinthians 10:29

Truth is not determined by majority vote

- Doug Gwyn

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him

--- Thomas Jefferson

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be

--Thomas Jefferson

Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.--Denis Diderot

Republic. I like the sound of the word. It means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose.

JOHN WAYNE

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government

---Thomas Jefferson

Who has not for the sake of his reputation sacrificed himself? --Nietzsche

Dico tibi verum, libertas optima rerum: nunquam servili sub nexu vivito, fili.
Freedom is best, I tell thee true, of all things to be won: then never live within the bond of slavery, my son. 11th September, 1297. --William Wallace

You can measure a man by the opposition it takes to discourage him.

-- Robert C. Savage

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression: for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach unto himself.

-- Thomas Paine

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God

--- Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826, Third President of the USA

America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

---Alexis de Tocqueville

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

---Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.

---Marian Wright Edelman

All things are possible to one who believes. -- Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?
Edna St. Vincent Milay, Passer Mortuus Est

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.

-- Mikhail Bakunin

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

-- Aldous Huxley

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands

----Plato

Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. -- Einstein

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.-- Walter Bagehot

Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you.

-- Paul Williams, `Das Energi'

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.

-- Plato

Hesitancy in judgment is the only true mark of the thinker.

--- Dagobert D. Runes

No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.

I was excited to find that the Romantics were a part of a whole intellectual climate of rebellion against the notion of a mechanical Reason which replaced Reason with a notion of the supremacy of Imagination or Spirit.

--Dennis Kennedy

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. Mark Twain

Other people's opinion of you does not have to become your reality. -- Les Brown

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.

-- Ramsey Clark

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake. -- Henry David Thoreau

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginiative. Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. --Wilde

A wise man has doubts even in his best moments. Real truth is always accompanied by hesitations. If I could not hesitate, I could not believe

- Henry David Thoreau

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil

- Alfred North Whitehead

Words are the source of misunderstandings. --Antoine de Saint Exupery, le petit prince

Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other. --Graham Greene

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe

---Frederick Douglass

"Theid crioch air an t-saoghal, ach mairidh ceol agus gaol."
"An end will come to all things, but music and love will last forever." -Scottish Gaelic saying

All good things are wild, and free. --Henry David Thoreau

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

-- Roosevelt

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

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

--- Eleanor Roosevelt

What we do in life echoes in Eternity. --Maximus, Decimus Meridius from Gladiator

Though we travel the world ever to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we will find it not. –-Emerson

Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness

---Henri- Frédéric Amiel

Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius. --Benjamin Disraeli

Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. --Einstein

Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth. --Aesop

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968), Speech at Civil Rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963

If I am young, and right, what does my age matter? --Sophocles

People love others not for who they are, but for how they make them feel. -- Irwin Federman

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full! Kissinger

Would the boy you were be proud of the man you are? -- Laurence J. Peter

"The roots of true achievement lie in the will to become the best that you can become." -- Harold Taylor

Learn as much by writing as by reading. -- Lord Acton

Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?
"Grown up"--Edna St Vincent Milay

The loving are the daring. --Bayard Taylor

Do not hurry; do not rest. --Goethe

Unless you love someone,
nothing else makes any sense. --E.E. Cummings

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. --Groucho Marx

Never esteem anything as of advantage to thee that shall make thee break thy word or lose thy self-respect. --Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The truth is rarely pure and never simple-- Wilde

It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.-- Andre Gide

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.--Wilde

Every man carries within himself the whole condition of humanity. --Michel de Montaigne

Love is...born with the pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation! --Jose Marti Y Perez

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish. --Aeschylus

A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one. --J.Pierpoint Morgan

Nepotism--the process by which, after skimming off the cream and discarding it, the world’s mediocre talent is pooled together, homogenized, and the sediment promptly and artificially elevated to cream status.

People are always looking at me as if I were a kind of mirror instead of a person. They don't see me, they see their own hidden thoughts and then they whitewash themselves by claiming that I embody those secret thoughts. --Marilyn Monroe

From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it. -- Bette Davis

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever. -- Napoleon Bonaparte

He who believes in freedom of the will has never loved and never hated. --Eschenbach

Live out of your imagination, not your history. -- Stephen Covey

Life is what happens to you when you're making other plans. -Betty Talmadge

Men are born to succeed, not to fail. -- Henry David Thoreau

Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway. --Elbert Hubbard

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work. -- Thomas Alva Edison

Remember, no matter where you go, there you are. --Peter Weller, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai

For love all love of other sights controls
And makes one little room an everywhere. --John Donne The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. --G.K. Chesterton

Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.-- Archimedes, 300 B.C.

Truth is the opinion that still survives. --Hubberd

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth.-- Benjamin Disraeli

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. --Mark Twain

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.--Aristotle

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. -- Henry David Thoreau

You know that it's love when you can't fall asleep because reality is better than your dreams. -Meggie

Books may well be the only true magic. -- Alice Hoffman

Philanthropist-- a man who has taught himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket. --Ambrose Bierce

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you.

-- Henry Ward Beecher

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. Man's ultimate responsibility is to God alone.

GEOFFREY FISHER Archbishop of Canterbury

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell. --Wilde,The Duchess of Padua.

Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essense of inhumanity.-- George Bernard Shaw

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion. --Matthew Arnold

Un petit mal pour un grand bien. (My translation: "A little mistake (crime) for a great good." --Voltaire

In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. --Oscar Wilde, 1891

Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it. --Mark Twain

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.--Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. --Kierkegaard

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. -- Francis Bacon

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms. --Groucho Marx

The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

He who despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises. --Nietzsche

'You should know by now that men play rough. They soften you up, throw you off guard and then belt you one.' --Velma Valento

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.--Wilde

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell. -Aldous Huxley

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.-- Henry David Thoreau

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.-- Voltaire

Silence-- the unbearable repartee. --G.K. Chesterton

The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of man is great. --Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

Love is passion. Obsession. Someone you can’t live without. Someone you fall head over heels for. Find someone you can love like crazy and will love you the same way back. Listen you your heart. No sense in life without this. To make the journey without falling deeply in love, you haven’t lived a life at all. You have to try, because if you haven’t tried then you haven’t lived. --From film "Meet Joe Black"

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of his reason. --Wilde, Critic as Artist

True love, Sir, is possessive, and cannot bear
To share with all the world. --Moliere

I count him braver who conquers his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victort is the victory over self. --Aristotle

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression. -- Thomas Paine

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. --Henry David Thoreau

Some people pay a compliment as if they expected a receipt. -- Kin Hubbard

What is justice? - To give every man his own.

---Aristotle (B.C. 384-322)

Who, my friends, is superior to death?
Only the gods live forever under the sun.
As for mankind, numbered are their days;
Whatever they achieve is but the wind!--The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2000 B.C

It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.-- Juvenal, Satires

Wonder, rather than doubt, is the root of knowledge. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel

What is now proved was once only imagined. --William Blake

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever enlarges hope will exalt courage. -- Samuel Johnson

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the power of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.--Wilde

Lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then to the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, sc.1

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

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.-- Horace, Odes

When choosing between evils, I always like to take the one I've never tried before. -- Mae West

The reader turns away from a book where all the characters are good without shades or weakness; he knows very well that this isn't human. --George Sand, 1876

All these intellectuals are so stupid, I have no one to talk to. --Anton Chekhov

No author is a man of genius to his publisher, Heinrich Heine, attr.

Better late than never. --Titus Livius, History

I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate… to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all. --Leo Rosten

Don't discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose; if you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.-- Michel de Montaigne

The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.-- Thomas Paine

He has one of those terribly weak natures that are not susceptible to influence--Wilde, An ideal husband

I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect. --Edward Gibbon

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

---Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892)

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. --Aldous Huxley, "Proper Studies", 1927

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is when good men do nothing-- Burke

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. --Oscar Wilde

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world. --Henry David Thoreau

Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security. --Edmund Burke

The public have an insatiable desire to know everything, except what is worth knowing. --Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

Everything rare for the rare. --Nietzsche

The whole world know the shady means by which
The low-brow’s grown so powerful and rich
And risen to a rank so bright and high
That virtue can but blush, and merit sigh. –Moliere, The Misanthrope

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their single distinguishing characteristic. --Wilde, Pricture of Dorian Gray

History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. --Ambrose Bierce, 1911

Most men and women are forced to perfom parts for which they have no qaulifications. --Wilde, Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime

Hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste but they detest at leisure. --Byron

Hatred-- the coward's revenge for being intimidated-- GBShaw

A man's character is his fate. --Heraclitus, On the Universe

If one really loves a woman, all other women in the world must become meaningless to one. --Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe. --Marilyn Vos Savant

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you. -- Aldous Huxley

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.-- Thomas Paine

So I can't live either without you or with you. --Ovid, Amores

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever. --Rabindranath Tagore

For glory gives herself only to those who have always dreamed of her. --Charles de Gaulle

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. --Warren G. Bennis

You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences. --Sheldon Kopp

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

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt. --Bergen Evans

Give me chastity and continence—but not yet. --Saint Augustine

Fences are made for those who cannot fly. --Elbert Hubbard

"I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all." "Love is the only gold." --Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"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

If thou suffer injustice, console thyself: the true unhappiness is in doing it.

---Democritus (B.C. 390-460)

He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.

---St. Augustine 354-430, Numidian-born Bishop of Hippo, Theologian

Justice, being destroyed, will destroy, being preserved, will preserve.

It must never therefore be violated.

---Manu: (c. B.C. 200)

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shall not ration justice!

---Learned Hand (1872-1961)

Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails. --Clarence Darrow

"To love is to allow yourself to be haunted."--Alan Jolis

"If you have it [love], you don't need to have anything else. If you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have." --Sir James M. Barrie

"The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire."

I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There's no freedom on earth for those who deny freedom to others. --Elbert Hubbard

Those who love deeply never grow old. They may die of old age, but they die young. -Benjamin Franklin

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together. --Eugene Ionesco

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. -Mother Teresa

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"I would rather have a crust and tent with you than be the queen of the world."--Isabelle Burton

The more one analyzes people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to the dreadful universal thing called human nature. --Wilde, The Decay of Living

The long-lived books of tomorrow are concealed somewhere among the so-far unpublished MSS of today. Philip Unwin, 1976

The love we give away is the only love we keep. --Elbert Hubbard

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity. --General Douglas MacArthur

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end. -Benjamin Disraeli

Treat your friends as you do your pictures, and place them in their best light. -- Jennie Jerome Churchill

We generally change ourselves for one of two reasons: inspiration or desperation. --Jim Rohn

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

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. --W. Somerset Maugham

It may be that those who do most, dream most. --Stephen Leacock

Love is like being naked in the daylight instead of just having your clothes off in the dark. --Ashley Wood

What if the man could see Beauty Itself; pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine, the man becoming, in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal;... would that be a life to disregard? --Plato

Beauty is only skin deep, but it is a valuable asset if you are poor or have not any sense. -- Kin Hubbard

" It's a special feeling I get when a friend falls in love.. I feel so.. so.. " " Bitter. " " That's it exactly. " - Doctor, Doctor

Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile. --Franklin P. Jones

"If you desire something, intensely, then act upon it. Anything you want that much will be within your reach."

I don't want to live--I want to love first, and live incidentally. --Zelda Fitzgerald

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but no vision. --Helen Keller

Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you. --William Arthur Ward

You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence. --C. G. Jung

Since it doesn't cost a dime to dream, you'll never short-change yourself when you stretch your imaginiation. --Robert Schuller

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

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

Energy and persistence conquer all things. -- Ben Franklin

Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What's a sundial in the shade. -- Ben Franklin

The best way to predict the future is to create it. -- Unknown

Work like you don't need the money, dance like no one is watching, and love like you've never been hurt. -- Mark Twain

Absence diminishes small loves, and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire. --La Rochefoucauld

"No woman falls in love with a man unless she has a better opinion of him than he deserves."--Ed Howe

While pursuing our endeavors for tomorrow, we dare not forget the prospects of today. -- Unknown

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer. --Charles Kettering

Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great. --Comte DeBussy-Rabutin

There is no force so powerful as an idea whose time has come. --Everett Dirksen

Hell, there are no rules here--we're trying to accomplish something. --Thomas A. Edison

What does not kill me makes me stronger. --Goethe

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. --George Bernard Shaw

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night. --Edgar Allan Poe

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. –-Winston Churchill

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.--Aldous Huxley

To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable. --Helen Keller

"The mark of a true crush is that you fall in love first and grope for reasons afterward."=-Shana Alexander

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed. -Mark Twain

Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.

---Theodore Parker

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe. --Anatole France

Love is like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense. -Mark A. Overby

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it. --Garrison Keillor

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

Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and very important. -Lisa Hoffman

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself. -Jane Addams

I'll never let a man drag me down to the point of where I hate him. --Booker T. Washington

Love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove
Oh, no, it is an ever fix'd mark
That looks on tempests
and is never shaken. --Shakespeare, sonnet 116

When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also. --Wilde

Ephemeral creatures that we are! Who shall say what each man is, and is not? For man is but the shadow of a dream. --Pindar, Pythian VIII

Confidence-- the feeling you have before you know better. GBSHaw

"Like everyone who is not in love, he imagined that that one chooses the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strengths of various qualities and advantages."--Marcel Proust

In later life, as in earlier, only a few persons influence the formation of our character; the multitude pass us by like a distant army. One friend, one teacher, one beloved, one club, one dining table, one work table are the means by which one's nation and the spirit of one's nation affect the individual. --Jean Paul Richter

To see you is what my eyes long for, to touch you is what my body longs for, but to love you, my heart has done already for a long time. --Lena Nemke

He who has been smitten by the arrows of love never again fears any other wound. --Author Unknown

People only see what they are prepared to see. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed. --Mark Twain

You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb. --Nancy Banks-Smith

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

Be the change you want to see in the world. --Mohandas K. Gandhi

People wish to be settled; but it is onlly as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love is like oxygen. -–Christian, Moulin Rouge

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

Lack of will power has caused more failure than lack of intelligence or ability. --Flower A. Newhouse

The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. --E. J. Phelps

Never argue with a fool. Someone watching may not be able to tell the difference. --Unknown

All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother. --Abraham Lincoln

'Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open one's mouth and remove all doubt. --Samuel Johnson

The boy who is going to make a great man... must not make up his mind not merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand defeats. --Theodore Roosevelt

Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too. --Lichty & Wagner

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity. --Albert Einstein

Act the part and you will become the part. --William James

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. --Aldous Huxley

Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? --Kelvin Throop, III

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain. --Lily Tomlin

A rumor is one thing that gets thicker instead of thinner as it is spread. --Richard Armour

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth

- Blaise Pascal

Never, Never, Never, Never give up. --Winston Churchhill

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. -Gilbert K. Chesterton

How much better to know that we have dared to live our dreams than to live our lives in a lethargy of regret. --Gilbert Caplin

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

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.

--James Allen

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history

- Plato

A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood

- William Shenstone

Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday. --Unknown

Politicians are the same all over. they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river. --Nikita Khrushchev One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. --Helen Keller

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it

- G. K. Chesterton

We must remember that a right lost to one is lost to all. -- William Reece Smith, Jr.

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars. -- Les Brown

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

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power. --John Steinbeck

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be outraged by silence - Amiel

Anything less than mad, passionate, extraordinary love is a waste of time. There are too many mediocre things in life, and love should not be one of them.

Virtuous and wise he was, but not severe; He still remember'd that he once was young. --Dr. John Armstrong

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. --Mark Twain

An army of a thousand is easy to find, but, ah, how difficult to find a general. --Chinese proverb

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Time is the wisest of all counselors. -- Plutarch

Nobody ever died of laughter. -- Max Beerbohm

The truth is more important than the facts

- Frank Lloyd Wright

Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment. -- Baltasar Gracian

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

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. -- Aldous Huxley

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city. -- George Burns

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up. --Oscar Wilde, "An Ideal Husband"

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

When you embrace others' perception of you, it may be reality. Or, it may add another dimension to reality, by opening potential and worth--perception can open your human soul to discover itself. But when another's perception of you grinds against your soul and sense of self, perception is a weapon against the greater truth, a truth not composed solely of facts, but of imagination, spirit, and the true integrity of a person's body and mind. Then, perception becomes a lie and a crime against another person. The only remedy for it can be love and the desire to understand, to recall the best from a person, and to allow oneself to see what is good. The crime of the blind judge has but one punishment: to be loving, to seek wisdom and truth, and then put it aside in favor of bringing forth the good of each character in the present. Understand what a man loves most about himself and the world, and what he has been, and you will come closer to the truth about him. Allow each man to be as he wishes most. Trust that there will be no great conflict of interest in this, and if so, separate those who would use perception as a tool to harm others. Allow each man his own innate knowledge of his own soul. Allow him the benefit of your perceptions--do not use your perceptions as a tool to harm another. Imagine greater things to and for others, and they will imagine greater things for you. Then, allow them to be and enjoy what they most love.

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives. --William Dement

Those who love deeply never grow old. They may die of old age, but they die young. -Benjamin Franklin

You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time. --J.S. Knox

Happiness is good health and a selective memory. -- Ingrid Bergman, altered

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your mind off your goals. --Unknown

We judge others by their behavior but ourselves by our intentions. --Stephen Covey

When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber. --Winston Churchill

Leaders are dealers in hope. --Napoleon

The only way to have a friend is to be one. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart. --Robert G. Ingersoll

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. --Salvor Hardin

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. --Oscar Wilde

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. --Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nobody rises to low expectations. --Calvin Lloyd

That's the difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn't good enough for me! I demand euphoria! --Calvin

Others can stop you temporarily - you are the only one who can do it permanently. --Zig Ziglar

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

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it. -- Marcel Proust

People who take risks are the people you'll lose against. --John Scully

A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror. -- Ken Keys

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin in twithout knowing what you mean to say, and finish without knowing what you have written. -Jean Jacques Rousseau

If you don't have something to overcome, you'll be overcome by complacency. --Randall D. Worley

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about but few have seen. --François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Do something... lead, follow, or get out of the way. --Gen. George Patton

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. --George Santayana

We like someone because. We love someone although. -Henri De Montherlant

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. --H. L. Mencken

We love because it is the only true adventure. -Nikki Giovanni

I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an army of 100 lions led by a sheep. --Talleyrand

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. --Bernadette Devlin

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. -- Jonathan Kozol

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out. --Elizabeth Bowen

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory. -- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves. --Abraham Lincoln

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. --Putt's Law

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. -Erica Jong

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

The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well. --Joe Ancis

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency. --Eugene McCarthy

You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!—Wordsworth

Any place you love is the world to you... but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. Wilde, The Remarkable Rocket.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke. Max Eastman, attr.

You know what makes great leadership? It is the ability to get men to do what they don't want to do, and like it." --Harry S. Truman

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. Mark Twain, 1897

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. --Voltaire

Each of us bears his own Hell.-- Virgil, Aeneid

We in the good black ship
Between the opposing waves are hurled, and wage
A desperate struggle with the darkling storm.
The straining sails grow clamorous; they rip
And fly in rags. The foaming waters burst
Into the hold. The anchors lose their grip.
And now a billow, greater than the first,
Rushes upon us, fraught with perils grave,
While the ship plunges deep into the wave. --Alcaeus

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it. --John Ruskin

It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered. Aeschylus, Agamemnon

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself. --Oscar Wilde

One ages rapidly on the battlefield. --Napoleon

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.-- Oscar Wilde

The frontiers between history and imagination are very little more than Chinese screens, removable at will. --Richard Cobb, 1978

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. --Jules de Gaultier

Young men want to be faithful and care not; old men want to be faithless and cannot. --Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Conceit-- God's gift to little men-- Bruce Barton

I struggle to be brief and become obscure. Horace

He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line. Goethe, 1825

Be slow to fall into friendship, but when thou art in, continue firm and constant. -- Socrates

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. --Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

Beauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebullience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right. -- Donald Culross Peattie

Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess.-- Heinrich Heine

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell. --Harry S. Truman

The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Better hazard once than always be in fear. --Thomas Fuller

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. -- Ambrose Redmoon

An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.-- Pliny the Younger, Letters

Through perserverence many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure. --Benjamin Disraeli

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

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. --H. L. Mencken

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

"He means well" is useless unless he does well. --Plautus

Change your thoughts and you change your world. --Norman Vincent Peale

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. --Oscar Wilde

Believe as a child believes and the magic will find you. -- Teresa Langdon

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it. --Marcus Aurelius

You can't be truly rude until you understand good manners. --Rita Mae Brown

I am a part of all that I have met. --John Milton

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it. --Jonathan Winters

From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it.--Bette Davis

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain

Beware how you take away hope from another human being. --Oliver Wendell Holmes

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. -Mother Teresa

Always do what you are afraid to do. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities. --Charles de Gaulle

Don't be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small steps. --David Lloyd George

Never tell the truth to those unworthy of it.... --Mark Twain

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all. --Dale Carnegie

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got. --Betty Ford

You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do. --Henry Ford

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take. --Wayne Gretzky

Civil laws against adultery and fornication have been on the books forever, in every country. That's not the law's business; that's God's business. He can handle it.

JUSTICE THOMAS G. KAVANAGH

We are drowning in information and starved for knowledge. --Unknown

A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner. --English proverb

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh -- at yourself. --Ethel Barrymoore

People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value. --Stephen Covey

Free Speech-- the right to argue about issues you don't understand

There is but one genuine love potion--consideration. --Menander

If this be not a real fight; in which something is eternally gained for this universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight. --William James

That which is striking and beautiful is not always good, but that which is good is always beautiful. -- Ninon de L'Enclos

Family Tree-- a tree in which the branches are so uninteresting that they are forced to brag about the roots

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will. -- Mohandas K. Gandhi

The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds. -- Jawaharial Nehru

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile. Denis Waitley

In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.-- Pliny the Elder

I drink to make other people interesting. --George Jean Nathan

My duty is a thing I never do, on principle--Wilde, An Ideal Husband

They only are wise who know they know nothing. Those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything. --GB Shaw

Politics is not my game; they impress me as a dog's life without a dog's decencies-- Mark Twain

No man is free who is not master of himself. --Epictetus

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

A mask tells us more than a face. --Wilde, Pen, Pencil, and Poison

Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself. --Plutarch

The earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed. -Mahatma Ghandi

Success-- when you live miserably in order to die rich

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. --Bertrand Russell

What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked form the unfit, to do the unnecessary. --Richard Harkness

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. --Wilde

Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is the infirmity of will--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Education-- an admirable thing, but it is well to remember that nothing worth knowing can be taught-- Wilde

To love is to place our happiness in the the happiness of another. --Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see. --Martin Luther

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening. V.S. Pritchett, 1979

When a friend speaks to me, whatever he says is interesting. --Jean Renoir

To find a fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.-- Plutarch

If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that. Thomas Carlyle, 1840

I couldn't help it. I can resist everything except temptation. --Oscar Wilde, from Lady Windermere's Fan

Happiness depends upon ourselves. --Aristotle

I am a child of Luck; I can not be dishonored.
Luck is my mother; the passing months, my brothers,
Have seen me rich and poor. Oedipus Rex, Sophocles

In wildness is the preservation of the world. --Henry David Thoreau

One of the commonest but most uncritical faults of criticism--the refusal to consider what it is the author intended to give us. --George Saintsbury

Whatever you can do, or believe you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. --Goethe

Do not think of your faults, still less of others' faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off. Like dead leaves, when their time comes. --John Ruskin

Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly. --Plutarch

Much learning does not teach understanding.-- Heraclitus, On the Universe

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. -- Winston Churchill

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.--Wilde

Once you get into this stream of history, you can't get out. --Richard Nixon

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.-- H. L. Mencken

He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past. -- George Orwell

They who are to be judges must also be performers. Aristotle

It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one. --Honore de Balzac, 1836

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. --Anatole France

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. --Buckminster Fuller

For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong. --H. L. Mencken, Mencken's Metalaw

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell.-- Edna St. Vincent Millay, Letters, 1952

I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong. -- Leo Rosten

Always hold your head up, but be careful to keep your nose at a friendly level. -- Max L. Forman

Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street. -- Elbert Hubbard

An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff. --Adlai Stevenson, 1966


”My God! It chills my heart to see the ways
Men come to terms with evil nowadays;
Sometimes, I swear, I’m moved to flee and find
Some desert land unfouled by humankind.?
”Come, let’s forget the follies of the times
And pardon mankind for its petty crimes;
Let’s have an end of rantings and of railings,
And show some leniency toward human failings.?-Moliere

Some writers appear to believe that emotions gain in intensity through being inarticulate. Perhaps the emotions are are not significant enough to endure full daylight. --T.S.Eliot, 1920

I know of nothing sublime, which is not some modification of power. -- Edmund Burke

Dare to be naive. --Buckminster Fuller

One has to requite good and ill; but why precisely the person who did us good or ill? --Nietzsche

There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.-- Polybius, History

What's wrong with a little incest? It's both handy and cheap.--James Agate

Many readers judge the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1849

Be ashamed to die unless you have won some victory for humanity.-- Horace Mann

A nymphomaniac is a women as obsessed with sex as the average man.--Mignon McLaughlin

Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality. -- Jules de Gautier

Imagination selects ideas from the treasures of remembrance, and produces novelty only by varied combinations. -- Samuel Johnson

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love? -- Igor Stravinsky

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'-- Don Marquis

Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst. --Marcus Valerius Martialis

We read fine things but we never feel them to the full until we have gone through the same steps as the author. --John Keats, 1818

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite. -- G.K. Chesterson

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. -- Winston Churchill

Let each man pass his days in that wherein his skill is greatest.-- Sextus Propertius, Elegies

Nothing matters much, and few things matter at all. --Alfred Balfour

Famous last words: "All my posessions for a moment of time." --Queen Elizabeth I of England

I remain just one thing and one thing only-- and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician-- Charlie Chaplin

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points to a political career. --GBShaw

The poet camouflages, in the expression of joy, his despair at not having found its reality. --Max Jacob, 1919

A teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops. -- Henry Adams

Don't try to take on a new personality; it doesn't work. --Richard Nixon

Each of us leads lives of quiet desperation.

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five. --Groucho Marx

You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things, like being spanked every day by a middle aged woman—stuff you pay good money for in later life. --Emo Philips

Generosity gives assistance rather than advice. -- Vauvenargues

Give freely to him that deserveth well, and asketh nothing; and that is a way of giving to thyself. -- Thomas Fuller

Friendships multiply joy and divide griefs. -- Thomas Fuller

In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer. -- Albert Camus

Intelligence alone, without wisdom and empathy for suffering, is hollow. -- John G. Stoessinger

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves. -- William Shakespeare

Love all, trust a few. -- William Shakespeare

Love is always in the mood of believing in miracles. -- J. C. Powys

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

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? Cicero

Must business thee from hence remove?
Oh, that’s the worst disease of love;
The poor, the foul, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He which hath business and makes love, doth do
Such wrong as when a married man doth woo. –-John Donne

In fact, nothing is said that has not been said before. --Publius Terentius Afer, Eunuchus

It is impossible to write ancient history because we lack source materials, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many. Charles Peguy, 1917

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability. -- Marcu Tullius Cicero

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money always implies the promise of magic, but the effect is much magnified when, as now, people have lost faith in everything else. -- Lewis H. Lapham

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. -- Erich Fromm

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. -- Victor Frankel

The only true gift is a portion of yourself. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends and lies which become history in the end. --Jean Cocteau, 1957

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction. --Voltaire, 1764

Indeed, he’s so in love with contradiction,
He’ll turn against his most profound conviction
And with a furious eloquence deplore it,
If only someone else is speaking for it.—Moliere

The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others.-- Marcel Proust

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.-- Groucho Marx

Liberty of the imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. --Joseph Conrad, 1905

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Einstein

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginary, would take only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. --Franklin P. Adams, 1927

Truth-- the opinion that still survives-- Hubberd

A man of genius is unendurable if he does not also possess at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness. --Nietzsche

Selfishness-- the greatest curse of the human race-- Gladstone

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. - Dag Hammarskjold

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it. --Ernest Hemingway, 1963

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion

- Francis Bacon

Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please. --Pythagoras

Be the first to say what is self-evident, and you are immortal. --M. Ebner-Eschenbach

People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dreams are the touchstones of our character. -- Henry David Thoreau

Every thought we think is creating our own future. -- Louise L. Hay

The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own. -- Michael Konda

Television has raised writing to a new low. --Samuel Goldwyn

Curiousity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. -- Samuel Johnson

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education. -- Sir Walter Scott

There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy. - Dante

The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own numbers as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as merely transient meteors, doomed soon to fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily on to immortality. --Washington Irving, 1824

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. -- George Bernard Shaw

To establish oneself in the world, one has to do all one can to appear established.-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception. --Groucho Marx

My classmates would copulate with anything that moved, but I never saw any reason to limit myself.--Emo Philips

I would have made a great pope. --Richard Nixon

To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price on conjectures. --Anatole France, from The Revolt of the Angels

Never think of the future. It comes soon enough. --Albert Einstein

Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action. --Goethe

A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation. --H.L. Mencken 1919

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. --Carl Jung

Lead me not into temptation—I can find the way myself.--Rita Mae Brown

I had rather be right than be president-- Henry Clay

Literature: Proclaiming in front of everyone what one is careful to conceal from one's immediate circle. --Jean Rostand, 1931

Reason and love are sworn enemies. --Pierre Corneille

People who are sensible about love are incapable of it. --Douglas Yates "This is the true measure of love: When we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us." -Goethe

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so in whining poetry. --John Donne

The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be. - Edgar Allen Poe

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.-- George Bernard Shaw

All authentic writing comes from an individual; but a final judgment of it will depend, not on how much individuality it contains, but how much of common humanity. --John Peale Bishop, 1948

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

To be turned from one's course by men's opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold an office.-- Quintus Fabius Maximus, from Plutarch

If we judge of love by its usual effects, it resembles hatred more than friendship. --La Rochefoucauld

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. --H. L. Mencken

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it. -- Garrison Keillor

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.-- W. Somerset Maugham

Use your imagination not to scare yourself to death but to inspire yourself to life. -- Adele Brookman

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. -- Leo Tolstoy

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. --George Bernard Shaw

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact. --Edmund Burke

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. -- Mark Twain

Politician--

1. A person who keeps people loyal to him by keeping those around him angry at someone else

2. Someone who when bought, perhaps stays bought

Politics is the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary-- RLStevenson

.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and the good books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent. --George Orwell, 1946

Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction. --H.L. Mencken, 1919

Politics--

1. A perpetual emergency

2. The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle-- Ely Culbertson

Pity--makes the world soft to the weak and noble to the strong-- Edwin Arnold

Sleep, those little slices of death, how I loathe them. - Edgar Allen Poe

Political debate--an enthusiastic debate of organized emotions

The greatest of all gifts is the power to estimate things at their true worth. --La Rochefoucauld

Criticism is prejudice made plausible. --H. L. Mencken

But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man shouild not have been. The present is what man ought to be. The future is what artists are. --Wilde

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure . . . than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. --Theodore Roosevelt

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well. Daniel J. Boorstin, 1962

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.-- George Bernard Shaw

Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it. -- Don Marquis

The public is wonmderfully tolerant; it forgives anything except genius. --Wilde

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself. --Franklin D. Roosevelt

A pessimist is one who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist. -- Elbert Hubbard


I love you more than can be said or thought;
Indeed, I wish you were in such distress
That I might show my deep devotedness.
Yes, I could wish that you were wretchedly poor,
Unloved, uncherished, utterly obscure;
That fate had set you down upon the earth
Without possessions, rank, or gentle birth;
Then, by the offer of my heart, I might
Repair the great injustice on your plight
I’d raise you from the dust, and proudly prove
The purity and vastness of my love.--Moliere

Ut saepe summa ingenia in occulto latent! -- Plautus

In the dramatis personae of the realistic novel, time is the leading character. --Emyr Humphreys, 1986

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river. --Nikita Krushchev

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions. --from Hamlet, Shakespeare

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade: today it is the reverse. Joseph Roux, 1886

The writer cannot afford to question his own essential nature. --Randall Jarrett, 1965

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. --Wilde.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating--Wilde, The Model Millionaire

You must do the (good) things you think you cannot do. -- Roosevelt

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. --Bertrand Russell

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. --Wilde

p> No, no, this formula you’d have me follow,
However fashionable, is false and hollow,
And I despise the frenzied operations
Of all these barterers of protestations,
These lavishers of meaningless embraces,
These utterers of obliging commonplaces,
Who court and flatter everyone on earth
And praise the fool no less than the man of worth.
Should you rejoice that someone fondles you,
Offers his love and service, swears to be true,
And fills your ears with praises of your name,
When to the first damned fop he’ll say the same?
No, no; no self-respecting heart would dream
Of prizing so promiscuous an esteem;
However high the praise, there’s nothing worse
Than sharing honors with the universe. --Moliere, the Misanthrope

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece; no other task is of any consequence. --Cyril Connolly, 1967

Love begets love. This torment is my joy. --Theodore Roethke

Your book may be a masterpiece but do not suggest that to the publisher because many of the most hopeless manuscripts that have come his way have probably been so described by their authors. --Stanley Unwin, 1926

One hour of right down love Is worth an hour of dully living on. --Aphra Behn

Some of the presidents were great, and some weren't. I can say that beacause I wasn't one of the great presidents, but I had a good time trying." --Harry S Truman

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

To fear love is to fear life. --Bertrand Russell

Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.-An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. -- Thomas Jefferson

Hector Berlioz

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure. -- Russel Baker

A woman's always younger than a man of equal years. -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

All men have an equal share of pride; the only difference is in their ways and means of showing it. -- La Rochefoucauld

People expect from a writer what they once expected from a priest. They want spiritual and moral guidance, some of the greatest needs in the modern world. Alberto Moravio, 1978

You can lead a boy to college but you can't make him think. -- Elbert Hubbard

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. --Einstein

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing... It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing. --George Bernard Shaw, 1898

The poor novelist constructs his characters, he controls them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them functions; he eavesdrops on them before he even knows them. --Andre Gide, 1926

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work. -- Bette Davis

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. --Mark Twain

Truth is universal ... perception of truth is not. --Mark Twain

God gives us our relatives - thank God we can choose our friends.

-- Ethel Watts Mumford (1878-1940)

There's nothing wrong with the average person that a good psychiatrist can't exaggerate. --Toronto Star Newspaper

Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. --Dylan Thomas

"Everyone has a talent; what is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads." -- Erica Jong

Success is just a matter of attitude. -- Darcy E. Gibbons

Without Knowledge, Skill cannot be focused. Without Skill, Strength cannot be brought to bear and without Strength, Knowledge may not be applied. --Alexander the Great's Chief Physican

He Who Knows Others Is Wise. He Who Knows Himself Is Enlightened. -Tao Te Ching

Trust everybody, but cut the cards. -- Finley Peter Dunne "Let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out the natural bent." -- Plato

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it is all. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834.

Scandal-- gossip made tedious by morality-- Wilde

The truly great book does not find its readers, it creates them. --Dagobert D. Runes, 1966

There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues. -- Charles Baudelaire

There are no facts, only interpretations. -- Freidrich Nietzsche

There are more important things than money -- the only trouble is they all cost money. -- Louis A. Safian

We seem to be made to suffer; it's our lot in life. -C3PO, Star Wars

Man is what he believes. -- Anton Chekov

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess. -- Samuel Johnson

Only a mediocre writer is always at his best. -- W. Somerset Maugham

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. -- Aristotle

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal. --Henry Wadsworth Longefellow, 1849

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs. -- Henry Miller

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage. -- Pubilius Syrus

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. --Sir Francis Bacon, "Of Beauty"

It is not improbabilities of incident but improbabilities of character that matter. --Thomas Hardy, 1886

Bad artists always admire each other's work. -- Oscar Wilde

You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. --C.S. Lewis, 1966

Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them. --Aristotle

Moral indignation is, in most cases, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy. --Vittorio de Sica

As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. --Ivy-Compton Burnett, 1949

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. --Shakespeare

No good Book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first. --Thomas Carlyle, 1829

O Caledonia! stern and wild, meet nurse for a poetic child! Sir Walter Scott, 1805

The best way to keep one's word is not to give it. --Napoleon Bonaparte

The same common sense that makes an author write good things, makes him dread that they are not good enough to deserve reading. La Bruyere, 1688

Do you know what a pessimist is? A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it. -- George Bernard Shaw

The books that are sold the most are the ones that one reads the least. --Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1851

Ah! Don't say that you agree with me. When People agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong. --Oscar Wilde

Philosophy-- any system of thought which enables one to be unhappy intelligently

The attempt to make manifest the fundamental evidence to the nature of things-- Alfred North Whitehall

The difference between divorce and legal separation is that a legal separation gives a husband time to hide his money. --Johnny Carson

You cannot teach a man anything.; you can only help him to find it for himself. --Galileo Galilei

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.--Emerson

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his our upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.--from Macbeth, Shakespeare

The truth is missed by people who say that good writing has no market. That is not the point. Good writing sometimes has a market, and very bad writing sometimes has a market. Useful writing sometimes has a market, and writing of no use whatsoever, even as a recreation, sometimes has a market. Writing the most ridiculous errors and false judgments sometimes has a market. The point is that the market has nothing to do with the qualities attached to writing. It never had and it never will. --Hillaire Belloc, 1925

People-- that part of the state which doesn't know what it wants-- Hegel

Our bookselling is becoming all too much like selling national brands of cars and breakfast cereals--which is great for cars and cereals, but terrible for books. --Mary Ann Lash, 1985

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination. -- Edmund Burke Things are beautiful if you love them. -- Jean Anouilh

Failure isn't falling down, it's staying down. --Mary Pickford

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit. -- Stephen Hawking

The convictions of Hollywood are made of boiled money. --Lillian Hellman

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. --Sir Ernest Bevin

War and Peace maddens me because I didn't write it myself, and worse, I couldn't. --Jeffrey Archer, 1981

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. -- H.L. Mencken

The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the book of Job because all life is a riddle. --G.K.Chesterton, 1937

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is always surprized when others believe him. --Charles de Gaulle

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points to a political career. --GBShaw

There is no such thing as facts, only interpretation. --Nietszche

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. --Orwell

The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right. --Burke


Nietzsche... the philosopher... the greatest, most renowned... a man of tremendous intellect... says in his works that it is possible to forge banknotes. --Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

Conscience does make cowards of us all-- Shakespeare

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest of motives.--Wilde

Critic-- a man who expects miracles-- Huneker

It is the sexless novel that should be distinguished: the sex novel is now normal. --George Bernard Shaw, 1925

Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

You get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself. -- Harry Firestone

You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her. -- Anonymous

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.-- H. L. Mencken

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience. --Ellen Glasgow, 1958

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive. --G. K. Chesterton

No one can ever write about anything that happened to him after he was twelve years old. --Ignazio Silone, 1963

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. -- Johnathan Swift

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, especially if they are worthless. -- Sinclair Lewis

Depending on shock tactics is easy; whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit. --J.B. Priestley, 1974

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. -- Aldous Huxley

An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible. -- Alfred A. Knopf

Blessed is the poet who did not give up, on becoming a man, speaking and unerstanding and thinking as a boy. R. Williams Parry

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. --John G. Riefenbaker

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them—A. Stevenson

The true men of action in our time and those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists-- Auden

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office. --H. L. Mencken

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved. --George Sand

Hell is other people. -Jean-Paul Sartre

The world is divided into people who do things--and people who get the credit. -- Dwight Morrow

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one one extrordinary man. --Elbert Hubbard

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has never been able to find its way. --Wilde, Critic as Artist

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;they kill us for their sport.--King Lear, Shakespeare

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. --George Bernard Shaw

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.-- Horace, Epistles

Give a man free hands, and you'll know where to find them. -- Mae West

There is no sense in crying over spilt milk. --Sophocles

Associate with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; it is better to be alone than in bad company. --George Washington

A conservative is a man who wants the rules changed so no one can make a pile the way he did. -- Gregory Nunn

Le sens commun n'est pas si commun (Common sense is not so common) --Voltaire

Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked? --Sophocles

To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live; to be lulled into security is to die. Wilde

"I plan on growing old much later in life, or maybe not at all." -Patty Carey 1901

Life being short and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books. John Ruskin, 1865

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away. --Raymond Hull

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written. Andre Gide, 1940

Men, no matter how they're trained, do precisely what they want to do.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It merely exists in the mind which contemplates them. --David Hume

But above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care how we check, by severe requirement or narrow caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and, still more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellencies, because they are mingled with rough faults. --The Nature of Gothic, John Ruskin

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date. --George Bernard Shaw

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter. -- Mark Twain

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. -- Mark Twain

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. -- Aldous Huxley

I used to be Snow White -- but I drifted. -- Mae West

He who confers a favor should at once forget it, if he is not to show a sordid ungenerous spirit. To remind a man of a kindness conferred and to talk of it, is little different from reproach.-- Demosthenes

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. --Leo Tolstoy

It is only the very ugly or the very beautiful women who hide their faces. --Oscar Wilde

I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything. --Thomas H. Huxley

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.-- H. L. Mencken

Gentleman-- a man who can disagree without being disagreeable

who is polite when he isn't asking for favors

It is discouraging to try and penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. --Mark Twain

Give me chastity and continence, but not just now. -- St. Augustine

No opera plot can be sensible, for in sensible situations people do not sing. --W H Auden

Life-- a predicament that preceeds death-- Henry James

A long lesson in humility

Far too important a thing to ever be taken seriously

A tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think

The saddest thing next to death

The childhood of our immortality-- Goethe

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. --William James

Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.-- H. L. Mencken

"Established religion is like established anything else. It's easy. It offers answers you can get prepackaged and predigested; right off the shelf and the same for everybody. No thinking required, much less hard thinking. Like a board game; follow the rules, you go to heaven. That's why established religion gets the assholes. ... People like that aren't good anything. What they believe, they believe because it's 'appropriate,' it's what everybody believes, because it's 'the right thing to do' -- in short, it's easy. Our way isn't easy -- oh, we get assholes too, but they usually give up and get out or get it knocked out of them." -- Diana Tregarde in "Burning Water" by Mercedes Lackey

Nothing endures but change.-- Heraclitus, from Diogenes Laertius

Progress is not created by contented people. --Frank Tyger

Love-- a sickness full of woes, all remedies refusing-- Sam Daniel

"First commandment. There ain't no such thing as 'one true way,' and the way you find is only good for you, not anybody else, because your interpretation of what you see and feel and understand as the truth is never going to be the same as anyone else's. Second commandment. The only answers worth having are the ones you find for yourself. Third commandment. Leave the world better than you found it. Fourth commandment. If it isn't true, going to do some good, or spread a little love around, don't say it, do it or think it. Fifth commandment. There are only three things worth living for; love in *all* its manifestations, freedom, and the chance to keep humanity going a little while longer. They're the same things worth dying for. And if you aren't willing to die for the things worth living for, you might as well turn in your membership in the human race. That's all there is, so far as I know or care. The rest is just ruffles and flourishes." -- Diana Tregarde in "Burning Water" by Mercedes Lackey

Love--A gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. --GBShaw

Love at first sight--The world's greatest time-saver --GBShaw

I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally. -W.C. Fields

Manuscript-- submitted in haste and returned at leisure

Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams

Original thought-- nothing but judicious imitation-- Voltaire

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. --Wilde

Beware the fury of a patient man. --Publius Syrus

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice-- Roosevelt

It isn't the incompetent who destroy an organization - It is those who have achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements who are forever clogging things up. --Charles Sorenson

Calumnies are answered best with silence. --Ben Jonson

They made a wasteland and called it peace.--Tacitus

A strife of interests masquerading as a contrast of principles-- on politics, Ambrose Bierce in the Devil's Dictionary

Give a man a free hand, and he'll try to run it all over you. -- Mae West

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking-- Clement Atlee

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people--Wilde

Showing up is 90% of life. --Woody Allen

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. --Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

My husband said he needed more space, so I locked him outside. --Roseanne

Nothing risqué, nothing gained. -- Alexander Woolcott

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men... Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already. --Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

'We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out. ' A man named Latimer said that to a man named Nicolas Ridley, as they were being burnt alive at Oxford, for heresy, on October 16, 1555."

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room. --Peter Sellers

"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, Fahrenheit 451

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. No more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by depreciation of the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future. --Alfred North Whitehead

"Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents." --Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies with in us. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority." -Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. -- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

They do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. --Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little. --Horace

"'There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.'"Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later. -- R. W. Emerson

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation... The other eight are unimportant. -- Henry Miller

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. -- William Blake

Frankly my dear, I don't Give a damn. --Clark Gable to Vivian Leigh

"'I didn't say I liked it, Harry, I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.'"Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. -- Eric Hoffer

“How dare you joke about a crime so grave??
“What crime? How else are people to behave??
“I’d have them be sincere, and never part,
With any word that isn’t from the heart.”Moliere

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. -- Matthew Arnold

"'It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.'" Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

To succeed with the opposite sex, tell her you're impotent. She can't wait to disprove it. -- Cary Grant

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being. -May Sarton

"'I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.'" Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again.. --Vivian Leigh

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth--Shakespeare

If you wish to be a writer, write. -- Epictetus

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. --Mark Twain

There's nothing like a paycheck to make us prostitute ourselves. In conversation, C. J. Spackman

He felt pain was like sad music and got pleasure from it. In conversation, C. J. Spackman

There is a difference between being able to get anyone you want and wanting everyone you can get. In conversation,C. J. Spackman

When I lost faith in everyone else I began to believe in God. In conversation, C. J. Spackman

It's not that you've had many women that bothers me. It's that you loved them all. In conversation, C. J. Spackman

There is no such thing as facts, only interpretation.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.-- Bertrand Russell

Tomorrow is another day. --Vivian Leigh

Beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears.--Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

Beauty is a form of Genius-is higher, indeed, as it needs no explanation.

1700's Riddle:
I never was, I am soon to be
none ever saw, nor will ever see me,
And yet my existence brings
confidence to all
Who live and breathe
On this terrestrial ball.
What am I?

(Answer: Tommorrow)

I will not henceforth lose myself by halves;Lose all or nothing.--Hamlet, Shakespeare

I have known many that travel far for it and yet return as arrant knaves as they went forth, because they carried themselves always along with them.

Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass and glory in the flower, we will seek not but rather find strength in what remains behind.--Wordsworth

I'll never believe anything unless it's incredible.

Tears are at the root of the human heart, like the molten metal in the bowels of the Earth.

But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself.

Thus, a stranger to heaven and earth, I live and no longer sing, It's as if you cut off my wandering soul From both paradise and hell--Anna Ahkmatova

The Kingdom of Britain:

Scots: Keep the sabbath and anything else they can get their hands on.

Irish: Don't believe in anything, but will fight like Hell to defend it.

Welsh: Who pray on their knees and everybody else.

English: Who feel they were born to rule the World and relieve the Almighty of any responsibility.

If you only look at what is, you might never attain what could be. --unknown

A beautiful thing is never perfect. -- Egyptian Proverb

The tyrant is only the slave turned inside out. -- Egyptian Proverb

If objects were male or female:

SWISS ARMY KNIFE -male, because even though it appears useful for a wide > variety of work, it spends most of its time just opening bottles.

KIDNEYS -female, because they always go to the bathroom in pairs. >

TIRE -male, because it goes bald and often is over-inflated. >

HOT AIR BALLOON -male, because to get it to go anywhere you have to light a fire under it... and, of course, there's the hot air part. >

SPONGES -female, because they are soft and squeezable and retain water.

>WEB PAGE -female, because it is always getting hit on. >

SHOE -male, because it is usually unpolished, with its tongue hanging out. >

COPIER -female, because once turned off, it takes a while to warm up. > Because it is an effective repro-ductive device when the right buttons are pushed. Because it can wreak havoc when the wrong buttons are pushed. >

ZIPLOC BAGS -male, because they hold everything in, but you can > see right through them. >

SUBWAY -male, because it uses the same old lines to pick people up. >

HOURGLASS -female, because over time, the weight shifts to the bottom. >

HAMMER -male, because it hasn't evolved much over the last 5,000 years, but it's handy to have around. >

REMOTE CONTROL -female...Ha!...you thought I'd say male. But consider, it gives man pleasure, he'd be lost without it and while he doesn't always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying.

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