- You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
-- Kahlil Gibran
- Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.
-- Francois Guisot (1787-1874)
- Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.
-- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
- What is a socialist? One who has yearnings
- To share equal profits from unequal earnings..
-- Dean (William R.) Inge (1860-1954), 1925
- Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.
-- Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), from Social Statistics (1850)
- The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion are adversaries are insane.
-- Mark Twain, lecture _Christian Science
- No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
-- William Blake
- Don't sweat the petty things...pet the sweaty things.
-- Anon.
- For she belike hath drunken deep
- Of all the blessedness of sleep.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), _The Knight's Tomb_
- Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast.
-- Shakespeare, _Macbeth_
- Sleep is better than medicine.
-- Proverb
- Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy _Sleep_.
-- Edward Young (1683-1765), _Night Thoughts..._
- Sleep, nurse of our life, care's best reposer.
-- Edward Herbert (1583-1648), _To his Mistress, for her Picture_
- Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise.
-- Thomas Dekker (1577-1632), _the Comedy of Patient Grissil_:
- Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now,
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
-- Cole Porter
- You're the Nile,
You're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile
On the Mona Lisa.
-- Cole Porter
- Good authors, too, who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose . . .
Anything goes.
-- Cole Porter
- Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I don't.
-- Cole Porter
- The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.
-- Gustave Courbet
- Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.
-- Gustave Courbet
- The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.
-- Gustave Courbet
- Painting is the representation of visible forms. . . The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
-- Gustave Courbet
- I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota, without . . . having painted as much as you can cover with your hand, to please somebody or in order to sell the picture more easily.
-- Gustave Courbet
- Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
-- Vince Lombardi
- Football is a game of cliches, and I believe in every one of them.
-- Vince Lombardi
- It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenge and does something about it.
-- Vince Lombardi
- It's not whether you get knocked down. It's whether you get up again.
-- Vince Lombardi
- Winning isn't everything, but the will to win is everything.
-- Vince Lombardi
- Even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in the broad, intelligent, and spacious way.
-- John Morley
- It is more true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and habits, than to say that our lives and habits depend on our opinions.
-- Frederick William Robertson
- He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinion.
-- George Santayana
- Prejudice is a great time saver. It enables you to form opinions without bothering to get the facts.
-- Anon.
- If a man should register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
-- Jonathan Swift
- Hatred destroys the person who hates.
-- James Baldwin
- Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
-- James Baldwin
- A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
-- James Baldwin
- If a man fools you once, he's a jerk. If he fools you twice, you're a jerk.
-- Anon.
- What all schoolchildren learn: those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
-- W.H. Auden
- Virtue is not always rewarded nor evil punished.
-- Anon.
- The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
-- Antonio Gramsci
- Driving forward is the chief characteristic of western man since the Sumerians. His dread triad of vices is property-holding, voraciousness, and lust.
-- Antonio Gramsci
- Our necessities are few but our wants are endless.
-- Anon.
- Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.
-- Joyce Carol Oates
- "Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life.
-- Joyce Carol Oates
- The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity.
-- Nietsche
- Oh what a job it is to get us to listen to ourselves!
-- Anon.
- Having listened to people for a long time, I believe many of us should be thankful not to be shot.
-- Leston Havens
- Of course they fought as lovers must do to find a liveable space.
-- L. Havens
- Only a fool predicts the fate of a marriage, you can do better with the weather.
-- Anon.
- Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.
-- Rose Lane
- Two things are bad for the heart - running up stairs and running down people.
-- Bernard M. Baruch
- Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.
-- Rita Rudner
- We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
-- Jassamyn West
- Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
-- Benjamin Whorf
- Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.
-- Oscar Wilde
- I eat my peas with honey
I've done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife!
-- Anon.
- I therefore come before you armed with the delusions of adequacy with which so many of us equip ourselves.
-- Air Vice-Marshall A.D. Button
- Without trust, words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.
-- John Harold
- You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jelly beans.
-- Ronald Reagan (1981)
- The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back.
-- Abigail Van Buren (1974)
- My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
-- Oscar Wilde
- What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient.
-- B. Thoene
- When the mind is possessed of reality, it feels tranquil and joyous even without music or song, and it produces a pure fragrance even without incense or tea.
-- Hung Tzu-ch'eng (1593-1665)
- The man who consecrates his hours by vigorous effort, and an honest aim, at once he draws the sting of life and Death; he walks with nature; and her paths are peace.
-- Young (1683-1765)
- Fate chooses our relationships; we choose our friends.
- Friend-one who knows all about you and loves you just the same.
- True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.
- Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.
- Old friends are always best, less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.
- Friends are like spaghetti, they should stick together.
- The only way to have a friend is to be one.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- If you have one true friend, you have more than your share. Chance makes our parents, but choice makes our friends.
-- Jacques Delille
- People say that friends hold hands, but true friends don't need to, because they know that the other hand is always there.
- Your destiny is not always the one you seek, but always the one that finds you.
- Intuition: going your way without inquiring about the way.
- Architecture: music that stands still.
- Life is a race between your hand raising the champagne cup to your lips and the ocean's tide rising to swallow you.
- Enjoy the pleasures of old age -- as long as you are young.
- Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
-- William Golding
- No day is so bad that it can not be fixed by a good nap.
-- Carrie Snow
- There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
-- Herman Hesse, from Demain
- Halfway up the stairs is the stair where I sit,
There isn't any other stair quite like it.
It's not at the bottom,
It's not at the top,
but this is the stair where I always stop.
-- Anon.
- We achieve everything by our efforts alone. Our fate is not decided by an almighty God. We decide our own fate by our actions. You have to gain mastery over yourself...It is not a matter of sitting back and accepting.
-- Aung San Suu Kyi.
- Sign in a cafe: "Please wait for the hostess to be seated"
- Your Mother Doesn't Work Here, So Clean Up After Yourself
- No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
-- William Blake
- When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.
-- Cicero (B.C. 106-43)
- In civil jurisprudence it too often happens that there is so much law, that there is no room for justice, and that the claimant expires of wrong in the midst of right, as mariners die of thirst in the midst of water.
-- Caleb Charles Colton (1780-1832)
- Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
-- Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
- "nemo me impune lacessit"
[no one attacks me with impunity]
-- Scottish motto
- To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.
-- George Washington (1732-1799)
- You may either win your peace or buy it;
win it by resistance to evil;
buy it by compromise with evil.
-- John Ruskin (1819-1900)
- Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
-- Savielly Grigorievitch
- Nothing contributes more to peace of soul than having no opinion at all.
-- George Christopher Lichtenberg
- Tact is the art of convincing people that they know more than you do.
-- Raymond Mortimer
- He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
-- Ralph W. Emerson
- The average American thinks he isn't.
-- Anon.
- Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
-- Samuel Butler
- If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
-- Edmund Wilson
- Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
-- W.C. Fields
- People are always neglecting something they can do in trying to do something they can't do.
-- Ed Howe
- Electronic Mail: For when you absolutely, positively, have to lose important documents at the speed of light.
-- Anon.
- Two rules of success in life: 1. Don't tell people everything you know.
-- Anon.
- My motto: sans limites. (no limits)
-- Isadora Duncan
- It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
-- "Remembrance of Times Past" by James Thurber
- When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.
-- "The Cherry Orchard" by Anton Chekhov
- Never believe what a patient tells you his doctor said.
-- Sir William Jenner
- Doctors are men who prescribe medicine of which they know little to cure diseases of which they know less in human beings of which they know nothing.
-- Voltaire
- Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
- I don't want the world, I just want your half.
-- the musical group They Might Be Giants
- I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.
-- Elbert Hubbard
- But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn 1
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.
--Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i. Sc. 1.
- For aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
--Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i. Sc. 1.
- Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
--Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i. Sc. 1.
- Lord, what fools these mortals be!
--Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act iii. Sc. 2.
- So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition.
--Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i. Sc. 1.
- The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
--Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act v. Sc. 1.
- Some lies are so well disguised to resemble truth, that we should be poor judges of the truth not to believe them.
-- Anon.
- The infinite is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.
-- Jorge Luis Borges - Essay: "The Avatars of the Tortoise"
- Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
-- Benito Mussolini, speech, December 13, 1914
- Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands, and an infinite scorn in our hearts.
-- Benito Mussolini, speech, 1928
- Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual.
-- Benito Mussolini, _The Doctrine of Fascism_, in _Italian Encyclopedia_ (1932)
- Fortunately the Italian people is not habituated to eating several times a day.
-- Benito Mussolini, speech, Chamber of Deputies, December 12, 1930
- The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.
-- T. De Quincey, "On the Knocking at the Gate in _Macbeth_"
- As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.
- -Mark Twain, Additional Notes to his _Autobiography_, February 7, 1906
- What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?
- -Mark Twain, _Spelling And Pictures_, address at the annual dinner of the Associated Press, New York, September 18, 1906.
- This morning arrives a letter from my ancient silver-mining comrade, Calvin H. Higbie, a man whom I have not seen nor had communication with for forty-four years... [Footnote: _Roughing It_ is dedicated to Higbie.] ...I shall allow myself the privilege of copying his punctuation and his spelling, for to me they are a part of the man. He Jis as honest as the day is long. He is utterly simple-minded and straightforward, and his spelling and his punctuation are as simple and honest as he is himself. He makes no apology for them, and no apology is needed.
- -Mark Twain, Additional Notes to his _Autobiography_, March 26, 1906
- I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction, and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is wages earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God, and not by your own effort, transfers the distinction to our heavenly home - where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction, but it leaves you naked and bankrupt.
- -Mark Twain, Additional Notes to his _Autobiography_, March 27, 1906
- Society everwhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist... Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- Accept your genius and say what you think.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- What your heart thinks great is great. The soul's response is always right.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- The characteristic of genuine heroism is persistency.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- Beware when the great God lets loose a genius upon the world. Then all things are at risk.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. The rugged battle of fate, where strength is born, we shun.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
- 'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude
- A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
- What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Life is pain; anyone who tells you different is selling something.
-- Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride
- If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.
-- Georges Simenon
- I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
-- Henry David Thoreau
- So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
- I disagree with everything you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
-- Voltaire
- A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
-- Robert Frost
- It is better to do thine own duty, however lacking in merit,
than to do that of another, even though efficiently.
It is better to die doing one's own duty,
for to do the duty of another is fraught with danger.
-- Bhagavad Gita (c. B.C. 400)
- If we must fall, we should boldly meet the danger.
-- Tacitus (55-117 A.D.)
- Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.
-- Socrates (B.C. 469-399)
- Pray as if everything depended on God, and work as if everything depended upon man.
-- Francis J. Spellman (1889-1967)
- For Africa to me . . . is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
-- Maya Angelou (1972)
- Reach high, for the stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
-- Pamela Vaull Starr
- To live is to war with trolls.
-- Henrik Ibsen
- I have no sceptre, but I have a pen.
-- Voltaire
- Nothing is impossible to industry.
-- Periander (fl. c. B.C. 570)
- Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
- The surest road to health, say what they will,
Is never to suppose we shall be ill; -
Most of those evils we poor mortals know,
From doctors and imagination flow.
-- Charles Churchill (1731-1764)
- When people's ill, they come to I,
I Physics, bleeds, and sweats 'em;
Sometimes they live, sometimes they die.
What's that to I? I lets 'em.
-- John C. Lettsom, Quoted in: Say it Again, edited by Dorothy Uris
- One doctor, singly like the sculler plies,
The patient struggles, and by inches dies;
But two physicians, like a pair of oars,
Waft him right swiftly to the Stygian shores
-- Sir Samuel Garth (1661-1719) The Dispensary
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