Quotations

Quotations about Life

2008-11-29T03:05:00.000-08:00

Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. ~Hans Christian Anderson

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me." ~Erma Bombeck

The purpose of life is a life of purpose. ~Robert Byrne

The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth. ~Chinese Proverb

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. ~Elwyn Brooks White

Life is simple, its just not easy. ~Author Unknown

A life without cause is a life without effect. ~Barbarella

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't. ~Richard Bach

Life's not always fair. Sometimes you can get a splinter even sliding down a rainbow. ~Cherralea Morgen

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it. ~Jack Handey

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it. ~Christopher Morley, Thunder on the Left

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
~Robert Frost, "Cluster of Faith," 1962

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular. ~Kathy Norris

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. ~Emily Dickinson

Yes, I will try to be. Because I believe that not being is arrogant. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot. ~Ashleigh Brilliant

I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. ~Quentin Crisp

As we struggle to make sense of things, life looks on in repose. ~Author Unknown

I think I've discovered the secret of life - you just hang around until you get used to it. ~Charles Schulz

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. ~Arthur Miller

Life is like a blanket too short. You pull it up and your toes rebel, you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder; but cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable night. ~Marion Howard

Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. ~Author Unknown

You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth. ~Charles Johnson

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can. ~Danny Kaye

I have a simple philosophy: Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches. ~Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once. ~Lillian Dickson

We are born wet, naked, and hungry. Then things get worse. ~Author Unknown

Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up. ~Author Unknown

Life is a cement trampoline. ~Howard Nordberg

To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him. ~Jeremy Taylor

Life... is like a box of chocolates - a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that no one ever asks for, unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So, you're stuck with mostly undefinable whipped mint crap, mindlessly wolfed down when there's nothing else to eat while you're watching the game. Sure, once is a while you get a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but it's gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. In the end, you are left with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, which, if you are desperate enough to eat, leaves nothing but an empty box of useless brown paper. ~The X-Files

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

God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled. ~Author Unknown

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. ~Grandma Moses

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer. ~Jim Carrey

The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without, and to depart. ~John, Viscount Morley, Address on Aphorisms

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

My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can. ~Cary Grant

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach. ~Havelock Ellis

Living involves tearing up one rough draft after another. ~Author Unknown

My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn. ~Louis Adamic

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. ~Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, in London and Westminster Review, 12 November 1838

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark. ~Samuel Johnson

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I am with you kid. Let's go." ~Maya Angelou

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Why torture yourself when life'll do it for you? ~Author Unknown

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. ~George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma, 1906

Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays;
Hither and thither, and mates, and slays.
~Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, 1859

...the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. ~Walt Whitman, "O Me! O Life!", Leaves of Grass

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. ~Mark Twain

Life is the game that must be played. ~Edwin Arlington Robinson

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

There is no wealth but life. ~John Ruskin

I know what things are good: friendship and work and conversation. These I shall have. ~Rupert Brooke

Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise. ~Jerome K. Jerome

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. ~Henry David Thoreau

Life is not a final. It's daily pop quizzes. ~Author Unknown

Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool. ~Gioacchino Rossini

We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones. ~Paul Eldridge

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. ~T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out. ~Anton Chekhov

Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation. ~W. Somerset Maugham

In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love. ~Diego Marchi

I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
~Robert Browning

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. ~Ashleigh Brilliant

Life is an incurable Disease. ~Abraham Cowley

The philosophy of mine earth can be summed up as this: Sunshine creates happiness, and I create myself. Nights are long and life is predominantly good. Wind is refreshing. Tea is wisdom. Do the best you can, and be good to yourself so that you can above all be good to others. ~Jessi Lane Adams

Human life is purely a matter of deciding what's important to you. ~Anonymous

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. ~Albert Camus

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination. ~Christopher Isherwood

The only way to have a life is to commit to it like crazy. ~Angelina Jolie

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do. ~Bruce Crampton

Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
~Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Let No Charitable Hope

To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funnybone. ~Reba McEntire

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss. ~Thomas Carlyle

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. ~Havelock Ellis

Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week. ~Joseph Addison

We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. ~Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 1945

Give us Lord, a bit o' sun,
A bit o' work and a bit o' fun;
Give us all in the struggle and sputter
Our daily bread and a bit o' butter.
~From an inn in Lancaster, England

The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins. ~Heywood Broun

We're all accidental soldiers in the army of life. ~Ymber Delecto

Life is a long process of getting tired. ~Samuel Butler

He who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for. ~Moroccan Proverb

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. ~Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. ~Douglas Adams

Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one? ~George Bernard Shaw

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on. ~Robert Frost

Sometimes our hearts get tangled
And our souls a little off-kilter...
~Sera Christann

Life is like a ten-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use. ~Charles Schulz

There is no finish line. ~Nike advertisement

It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect. ~Sherwood Anderson

Life is life, and death is life, and everything in between. ~Cherralea Morgen

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment. ~Ludwig Wittgenstein

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain. ~Thomas Jefferson

The world is a sunny success. ~Ever Garrison

Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life. ~Vita Sackville-West

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century. ~William Lyon Phelps

In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back. ~Charlie Brown

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose. ~Fred Allen

Not unfortunately the universe is wild - game-flavoured as a hawk's wing. ~B.P. Blood

You live and learn. At any rate, you live. ~Douglas Adams

Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers. ~Learned Hand

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Life is the sum of all your choices. ~Albert Camus

Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, where X is work, Y is play, and Z is keep your mouth shut. ~Albert Einstein

I gave my life to learning how to live.
Now that I have organized it all...
It is just about over.
~Sandra Hochman

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. ~Anaïs Nin

[P]erhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right. ~George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Adam Bede

Only a few things are really important. ~Marie Dressler

We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. ~Henry Miller

Life is like eating artichokes; you have got to go through so much to get so little. ~Thomas Aloysius Dorgan

Life is a ticket to the greatest show on earth. ~Martin H. Fischer

Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock. ~Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates," Side Effects, 1980

Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Life's like a novel with the end ripped out. ~Danny Orton and Blair Daly, "Stand"

If you stop struggling, then you stop life. ~Huey Newton

Sometimes questions are more important than answers. ~Nancy Willard, quoted in The Meaning of Life, compiled by Hugh S. Moorhead

It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you. ~Phillips Brooks

There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that they enjoy life. ~William Lyon Phelps

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around. ~David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965

If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret. ~Confucius

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate. ~R.D. Laing

In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.
~Ben Jonson, To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison, 1640

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

We should give meaning to life, not wait for life to give us meaning. ~Stacy

Many of us are equal to life's emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it. ~James Gibbons Huneker

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor. ~Ogden Nash

I do like a little bit of butter to my bread. ~A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. ~Henry Van Dyke

People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Life is a long lesson in humility. ~James M. Barrie

In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings." ~From the movie Mansfield Park

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism. ~Anton Chekhov

To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it. ~Samuel Butler

Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. ~Kathleen Norris

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. ~Mark Twain

One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him. ~Lemony Snicket

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes. ~José Ortega y Gasset

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe. ~Peter De Vries, Let Me Count the Ways, 1965

Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence. ~Joseph Wood Krutch

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer.... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. ~Richard Phillips Feynman

Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind. ~Timothy Fuller

The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens. ~Jason Q., from generationterrorists.com

It's just life. Just live it. ~The Quote Garden

Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes. ~Luigi Pirandello

Life is a shit sandwich. But if you've got enough bread, you don't taste the shit. ~Jonathan Winters

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. ~H.L. Mencken

Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of. ~Agnes' Law

Life is one big judgment call. ~The Quote Garden

Chance is always powerful, let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. ~Ovid

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. ~Barbara Kingsolver

Life is a series of collisions with the future. ~José Ortega y Gasset

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Life is half spent before we know what it is. ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651

Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it. ~Barbara Kingsolver

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust - we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. ~Albert Einstein, in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929

Jack Palance: "Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit."
Billy Crystal: "Yeah, but what's that one thing?"
Jack Palance: "That's what you've got to figure out."
~From the movie City Slickers

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian. ~Dennis Wholey

Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like. ~Author Unknown

Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one? ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. ~Crowfoot, 1890, as quoted in Catch the Whisper of the Wind compiled by Cheewa James

Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers? ~Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal, 1950

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. ~Garrison Keillor

The meaning of life is not an unquestionable answer; it is an unanswerable question. ~The Quote Garden

Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive. ~Mel Brooks

Unbeing dead isn't being alive. ~e.e. cummings

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. ~Brendan Gill

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~Thomas Merton

Quotations about Love

2008-11-29T02:02:00.000-08:00

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

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. ~Albert Einstein

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder. ~Charles Morgan

You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip. ~Jonathan Carroll, "Outside the Dog Museum"

Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs. ~Ovid

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. ~Eric Fromm

Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. ~Kahlil Gibran

Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway. ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species. ~W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1949

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

When love is not madness, it is not love. ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river. ~Malagasy Proverb

Do I love you because you're beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

For you see, each day I love you more
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
~Rosemonde Gerard

Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate! ~Sandra J. Dykes

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

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end. ~Author Unknown

Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker. ~Author Unknown

Love is a sweet tyranny, because the lover endureth his torments willingly. ~Proverb

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods. ~Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. ~Peter Ustinov

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595

The art of love... is largely the art of persistence. ~Albert Ellis

Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that. ~Michael Leunig

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law. ~Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524

Who, being loved, is poor? ~Oscar Wilde

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame. ~Henry David Thoreau

Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely. ~Laurence Marks, M*A*S*H, "Love Story," original air date 7 January 1973, spoken by the character Hawkeye

A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it. ~Frank A. Clark

Shall we compare our hearts to a garden -
with beautiful blooms, straggling weeds,
swooping birds and sunshine, rain -
and most importantly, seeds.
~Grey Livingston

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. ~Robert Heinlein

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. ~George Moore

We loved with a love that was more than love. ~Edgar Allan Poe

If I love you, what business is it of yours? ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

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

My debt to you, Belovèd,
Is one I cannot pay
In any coin of any realm
On any reckoning day.
~Jessie B. Rittenhouse

We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands. ~Quoted by Alexandra Penney in Self

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself. ~Jean Anouilh

When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage. ~Bill Balance

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly. ~Rose Franken

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat. ~Ben Hecht

A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasn’t put there to stay -
Love isn’t love
'Til you give it away.
~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, "You Are Sixteen (Reprise)"
(Thanks, Krystel)

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies. ~Swedish Proverb

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. ~Henry Van Dyke

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia. ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975

Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place. ~Ice T, The Ice Opinion, quoted in Reader's Digest, "Quotable Quotes," February 2002

Love is no respecter of age or practicality
Neither morality: unabashed
She enters where she will
Unheeding that her immortal fires
Burn up human hearts...
~Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me, www.originals.net

Love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses. ~Lord Dewar

When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks. ~Natalie Clifford Barney

Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Love burns across the infinitude. ~Meriel Stelliger

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves. ~John Bulwer

'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come. ~Lord Byron

A hundred hearts would be too few
To carry all my love for you.
~Author Unknown

Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots. ~Author unknown, as printed in The Hoosier Farmer

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke. ~Lynda Barry

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies. ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new. ~Ursula K. LeGuin

Love is not singular except in syllable. ~Marvin Taylor

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old. ~John Ciardi

People who are sensible about love are incapable of it. ~Douglas Yates

Love never reasons but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles lest it has done too little. ~Hannah Moore

Ah me! why may not love and life be one? ~Henry Timrod

Take away love and our earth is a tomb. ~Robert Browning

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. ~William Shakespeare, "Sonnet CXVI"

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. ~Leo Tolstoy

It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken. ~Marguerite de Valois

You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from. ~Werner Erhard

No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation. And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Love me and the world is mine. ~David Reed

It would be impossible to "love" anyone or anything one knew completely. Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object. ~Paul Valéry, Tel quel, 1943

The love game is never called off on account of darkness. ~Tom Masson

They who meet on an April night are forever lost in love, if there's moonlight all about and there's no moon above. ~E.Y. "Yip" Harburg and Fred Saidy, dialogue just before the song "Old Devil Moon" in the musical Finian's Rainbow (Thanks, Katherine!)

Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence. ~David Byrne

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. ~Robert Frost

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. ~Zora Neale Hurston

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. ~Emily Brontë

The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

An old man in love is like a flower in winter. ~Portuguese Proverb

Will you love me in December as you do in May,
Will you love me in the good old fashioned way?
When my hair has all turned gray,
Will you kiss me then and say,
That you love me in December as you do in May?
~James J. Walker

Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane. ~Honoré de Balzac

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Love is the poetry of the senses. ~Honoré de Balzac

Love is a game that two can play and both win. ~Eva Gabor

Without love, the rich and poor live in the same house. ~Author Unknown

The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it. ~Francis Quarles, Emblems

Love is like those second-rate hotels where all the luxury is in the lobby. ~Paul-Jean Toulet

We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack. ~Marie Ebner Von Eschenbach, Aphorism

It's hard to defeat a woman in love. ~Destin Figuier

All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen. ~François, duc de La Rochefoucauld

Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can't. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Love, and a cough, cannot be hid. ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651

Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what's missing. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Poetry spills from the cracks of a broken heart, but flows from one which is loved. ~Christopher Paul Rubero

A man is not where he lives, but where he loves. ~Latin Proverb

The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate

I need the starshine of your heavenly eyes,
After the day's great sun.
~Charles Hanson Towne

A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be. ~Nicholas de Chamfort

Love is not consolation. It is light. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked. ~Erich Segal

Loving is never a waste of time. ~Astrid Alauda

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. ~Fyodor Dostoevski

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self. ~William Butler Yeats

Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. ~Author Unknown

Love is what you've been through with somebody. ~James Thurber, quoted in Life magazine, 1960

Love is being stupid together. ~Paul Valery

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love. ~Charles Baudelaire

Open your heart and take us in,
Love - love and me.
~W.E. Henley

Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times. ~Rita Rudner

Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so. ~Charles du Bos

I love you like crazy, baby
'Cuz I'd go crazy without you.
~Pixie Foudre

What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another. ~William Carlos Williams

I learned the real meaning of love. Love is absolute loyalty. People fade, looks fade, but loyalty never fades. You can depend so much on certain people, you can set your watch by them. And that's love, even if it doesn't seem very exciting. ~Sylvester Stallone

Ah, lady, when I gave my heart to thee,
It passed into thy lifelong regency.
~Gilbert Parker

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. ~Plato

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words. ~William Shakespeare

Love floods us with hope. ~Jareb Teague

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable. ~Bruce Lee

Life only starts when love comes. ~From the movie Bill of Divorcement, 1932

Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravelled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star: -
So many times do I love again.
~Thomas Lovell Beddoes

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy. ~George Jean Nathan

Love makes time pass; time makes love pass. ~French Proverb

True love stories never have endings. ~Richard Bach (Thanks, Bonnie)

I love you as you are, but do not tell me how that is. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

There's nothing more freeing than the shackles of love. ~Emma Racine deFleur

When you're attracted to someone it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously, so what we know as fate is two neuroses knowing that they're a perfect match. ~Jeff Arch, Nora Ephron, and David S. Ward, Sleepless in Seattle

Platonic love is love from the neck up. ~Thyra Smater Winsolow

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. ~Tom Robbins

The eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love. ~Margaret Atwood

You really shouldn't say "I love you" unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget. ~Author unknown, attributed to an 8-year-old named Jessica

So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life. ~John Milton

Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold. ~Zelda Fitzgerald

Men love because they are afraid of themselves, afraid of the loneliness that lives in them, and need someone in whom they can lose themselves as smoke loses itself in the sky. ~V.F. Calverton

Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too. ~Author unknown, attributed to an 8-year-old named Greg

Lust fades, so you'd better be with someone who can stand you. ~Alan Zweibel and Jessie Nelson, The Story of Us

Ah! a blessing beyond all fate
My sole mate 'tis my soul mate.
~Pixie Foudre

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. ~Victor Hugo

Love is the greatest refreshment in life. ~Pablo Picasso

I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1945

Love means nothing in tennis, but it's everything in life. ~Author Unknown

What the world really needs is more love and less paper work. ~Pearl Bailey

Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures. ~Germaine Greer

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. ~W. Somerset Maugham

We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love. ~Author Unknown

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination. ~Voltaire

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. ~William Shakespeare

While God waits for His temple to be built of love, men bring stones. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Love is metaphysical gravity. ~R. Buckminster Fuller

Love is my religion - I could die for it. ~John Keats

Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex. ~Dan Greenburg

Love would never be a promise of a rose garden unless it is showered with light of faith, water of sincerity and air of passion. ~Author Unknown

Just because somebody doesn't love you the way you want them to, doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have. ~Author Unknown

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular? ~Author Unknown

Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart. ~Author Unknown

Love is missing someone whenever you're apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you're close in heart. ~Kay Knudsen

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another. ~Henry Louis Mencken

You learn to like someone when you find out what makes them laugh, but you can never truly love someone until you find out what makes them cry. ~Author Unknown

Sometimes we make love with our eyes. Sometimes we make love with our hands. Sometimes we make love with our bodies. Always we make love with our hearts. ~Author Unknown

True love is when you put someone on a pedestal, and they fall - but you are there to catch them. ~Author Unknown

You know when you have found your prince because you not only have a smile on your face but in your heart as well. ~Author Unknown

Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart. ~Author Unknown

Trip over love, you can get up. Fall in love and you fall forever. ~Author Unknown

Love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image... otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. ~Author Unknown

Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less. ~Julins Gordon

To the world you might be one person, but to one person you might be the world. ~Author Unknown

No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

It's so easy to fall in love but hard to find someone who will catch you. ~Author Unknown

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Candle light, moon light, star light,
The brightest glow is from love light.
~Grey Livingston

Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Come live in my heart and pay no rent. ~Samuel Lover

Romance is dead - it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece. ~Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus. ~Emma Goldman, The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation

I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art. ~Thomas Moore

Love isn't blind, it's retarded. ~Don Foster and Susan Beavers, Two and a Half Men

Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion. ~Miguel de Unamuno

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. ~Michel de Montaigne

I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone. ~Javan

Like I've always said, love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun. ~Armistead Maupin, Maybe the Moon (Thanks, David)

Part of the reason that men seem so much less loving than women is that men's behavior is measured with a feminine ruler. ~Francesca M. Cancian

What I need to live has been given to me by the earth. Why I need to live has been given to me by you. ~Author Unknown

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden. ~Claudia Ghandi

Falling in love is so hard on the knees. ~Aerosmith

In true love the smallest distance is too great, and the greatest distance can be bridged. ~Hans Nouwens

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages. ~Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain, 1922

In springtime, love is carried on the breeze. Watch out for flying passion or kisses whizzing by your head. ~Emma Racine deFleur

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. ~G.K. Chesterton

I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night. ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. ~George Bernard Shaw

The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence. ~Edward Thomas

[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. ~Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

Quotations about Living

2008-11-29T02:01:00.002-08:00

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us. ~Michael Cibenko

Don't let the past steal your present. ~Cherralea Morgen

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday. ~Robert Nathan, So Love Returns

You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present. ~Jan Glidewell

Would you keep a chive on your tooth just because you enjoyed last night's potato? ~From the television show Boston Common

I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future. ~David Gerrold

I can't wait all my life
On a street of broken dreams.
~Journey, "It Could Have Been You"

No man is rich enough to buy back his past. ~Oscar Wilde

It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crops. ~George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time. ~Art Buchwald

If you are still talking about what you did yesterday, you haven't done much today. ~Author Unknown

Don't let yesterday use up too much of today. ~Cherokee Indian Proverb

The past is a good place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. ~Author Unknown

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way. ~Edna Ferber

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. ~Carl Sandburg, "Prairie," Complete Poems, 1950

The past is never there when you try to go back. It exists, but only in memory. To pretend otherwise is to invite a mess. ~Chris Cobbs

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. ~Euripides, Alexander

The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post. ~L. Thomas Holdcroft

We cannot carry our father's corpse with us everywhere we go. ~Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 1913

The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before. ~Herman Melville, White Jacket

No yesterdays are ever wasted for those who give themselves to today. ~Brendan Francis

People are always asking about the good old days. I say, why don't you say the good now days? ~Robert M. Young

Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives, I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace. ~Author Unknown

"Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better. ~George E. Woodberry

Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone. ~Jerome K. Jerome, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1889

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us. ~Alexander Graham Bell

You have to wake up a virgin each morning. ~Jean-Louis Barrault

We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it. ~John Newton

If you have one eye on yesterday, and one eye on tomorrow, you're going to be cockeyed today. ~Author Unknown

Nothing is worth more than this day. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Today is the greatest
Day I've ever known
Can't live for tomorrow,
Tomorrow's much too long....
~Billy Corgan, "Today," Siamese Dream (Smashing Pumpkins), 1993

The living moment is everything. ~D.H. Lawrence

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee. ~Montaigne

Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts. ~Jean Cocteau, Professional Secrets, 1922

Let the credit card companies market as they will, the only thing that's priceless is Now. ~Caleb Baylor Hive, 2005

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. ~Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Forever is composed of nows. ~Emily Dickinson

Could we see when and where we are to meet again, we would be more tender when we bid our friends goodbye. ~Marie Louise De La Ramee

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

It is only possible to live happily-ever-after on a day-to-day basis. ~Margaret Bonnano

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present. ~Babatunde Olatunji

Trust no future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within and God o'erhead.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Psalm of Life

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. ~Alan Watts

It's not what if, it's what now. ~Author Unknown

Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return. ~Mary Jean Iron

We are always getting ready to live but never living. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence. ~Sholem Asch, The Nazarene, 1939

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do. ~Jean de la Bruyere

If you worry about what might be, and wonder what might have been, you will ignore what is. ~Author Unknown

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness. ~James Thurber

We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow. ~Fulton Oursler

Chasing the past, I stumbled into the future. ~T.A. Sachs

Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys. ~André Gide, Nourritures Terrestres

In today already walks tomorrow. ~Friedrich von Schiller

When I am anxious it is because I am living in the future. When I am depressed it is because I am living in the past. ~Author Unknown

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~Abraham Maslow

The future is always beginning now. ~Mark Strand, Reasons for Moving

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. ~Albert Einstein

Life lived for tomorrow will always be just a day away from being realized. ~Leo Buscaglia

The future is no place to place your better days. ~Dave Matthews

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face. ~Jim Bishop

If a man examine carefully his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. ~Emerson, Journals, 1827

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

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor. ~D.H. Lawrence

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. ~Dale Carnegie

Pile up too many tomorrows and you'll find that you've collected nothing but a bunch of empty yesterdays. ~The Music Man

We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God's. ~Henry Ward Beecher

God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road. ~Isak Dinesen

Slight not what's near through aiming at what's far. ~Euripides

Life's a journey, not a destination. ~Aerosmith

If you wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes. If you don't wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes. ~Senegalese Proverb

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time. ~Abraham Lincoln

Quotations about Luck

2008-11-29T02:01:00.001-08:00

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change. ~Wilson Mizner

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered. ~William Shakespeare

Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit. ~R.E. Shay

Luck is the by-product of busting your fanny. ~Don Sutton

Everything in life is luck. ~Donald Trump

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident. ~Mark Twain

Luck never gives; it only lends. ~Swedish Proverb

Luck: when your burst of energy doesn't run afoul of someone else's. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Go and wake up your luck. Persian Saying

Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves. ~Larry King

Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent. ~Langston Coleman

It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned. ~Frank A. Clark

Luck never made a man wise. ~Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

Luck is when opportunity knocks and you answer. ~Author Unknown

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. ~Thomas Jefferson

Luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don't depend on it. ~Author Unknown

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike? ~Jean Cocteau

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

Quotations about Learning

2008-11-29T02:00:00.002-08:00

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. ~Clay P. Bedford

Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life. ~Henry L. Doherty

I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma. ~Eartha Kitt

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. ~Attributed to Harry S. Truman

A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study. ~Chinese Proverb

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled. ~Paul Eldridge

Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself. ~Vilfredo Pareto

When the student is ready, the master appears. ~Buddhist Proverb

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. ~Jacob Bronowski

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. ~Mark Twain

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

You learn something every day if you pay attention. ~Ray LeBlond

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue. ~Antisthenes

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon. ~Alexander Pope

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. ~Thomas Huxley

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves. ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928

I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. ~Abraham Lincoln

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. ~Mohammed

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. ~Chinese Proverb

All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind. ~Martin H. Fischer

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught. ~Winston Churchill

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live. ~Mortimer Adler

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I am defeated, and know it, if I meet any human being from whom I find myself unable to learn anything. ~George Herbert Palmer

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I find four great classes of students: The dumb who stay dumb. The dumb who become wise. The wise who go dumb. The wise who remain wise. ~Martin H. Fischer

No matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to learn a new language, science, or the bicycle, he has entered a new realm as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world. ~Frances Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle

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

It is not hard to learn more. What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong. ~Martin H. Fischer

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time. ~Russell Hoban

You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. ~H.G. Wells

I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me. ~Dudley Field Malone

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily. ~Thomas Szasz

I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets. ~Bernard Keble Sandwell

Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later. ~Dana Stewart Scott

His studies were pursued but never effectually overtaken. ~H.G. Wells

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~Alvin Toffler

Learning without thought is labor lost. ~Confucius

The pupil can only educate himself. Teachers are the custodians of apparatus upon which he himself must turn and twist to acquire the excellencies that distinguish the better from the poorer of God's vessels. ~Martin H. Fischer

The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book. You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library. ~Lesley Conger

The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn. ~Henry S. Haskins

We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself. ~Lloyd Alexander

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way. ~Marvin Minsky

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. ~John Lubbock

Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back. ~Chinese Proverb

People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong. ~Bill Vaughan

Quotations about Leadership

2008-11-29T02:00:00.001-08:00

Remember the difference between a boss and a leader; a boss says "Go!" - a leader says "Let's go!" ~E.M. Kelly

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says "I was beaten," he does not say "My men were beaten." ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A leader leads by example, whether he intends to or not. ~Author Unknown

Leadership is action, not position. ~Donald H. McGannon

You can't lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself. ~Gene Mauch

The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone. You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it. ~Elaine Agather

You don't have to hold a position in order to be a leader. ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing. ~Albert Schweitzer

Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them. ~Robert Jarvik

You do not lead by hitting people over the head. That's assault, not leadership. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself. ~Thomas J. Watson

If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

A leader is a dealer in hope. ~Napoleon Bonaparte, attributed

Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders. ~Tom Peters

One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you. ~Dennis A. Peer

A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit. ~John C. Maxwell

A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists.
~Witter Bynner, The Way of Life According to Laotzu

The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way. ~Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep. ~Charles Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand-Périgord

A man is only a leader when a follower stands beside him. ~Mark Brouwer

I suppose that leadership at one time meant muscle; but today it means getting along with people. ~Indira Gandhi

Leaders need to be optimists. Their vision is beyond the present. ~Rudy Giuliani

A leader leads by example not by Force. ~Sun Tzu

A leader who doesn't hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader. ~Golda Meir

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. ~Theodore Roosevelt

He led his regiment from behind -
He found it less exciting.
But when away his regiment ran,
His place was at the fore, O.
~W.S. Gilbert

Leadership is based on a spiritual quality; the power to inspire, the power to inspire others to follow. ~Vince Lombardi

Every leader needs to look back once in a while to make sure he has followers. ~Author Unknown

The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes. ~Tony Blair

Leadership: the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that person is crazy. ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"

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

A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done. ~Ralph Nader

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships. ~Charles Simic

Management is nothing more than motivating other people. ~Lee Iacocca

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them. ~Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

I am not a labor leader. I don't want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out. ~Eugene V. Debs

To lead the people, walk behind them. ~Lao-Tzu

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. ~Eric Hoffer

Quotations about Knowledge

2008-11-29T01:58:00.000-08:00

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. ~Ralph W. Sockman

Knowledge is a sacred cow, and my problem will be how we can milk her while keeping clear of her horns. ~Albert Szent-Györgyi, "Teaching and Expanding Knowledge," Science, 4 December 1964

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

Knowledge is haunted by the ghost of past opinion. ~Author Unknown

A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak. ~Michael Garrett Marino

In your thirst for knowledge, be sure not to drown in all the information. ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. ~George Bernard Shaw

One part of knowledge consists in being ignorant of such things as are not worthy to be known. ~Crates

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. ~Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates. ~Abbott Lawrence Lowell

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing. ~Maurice Maeterlinck

Knowledge is the true organ of sight, not the eyes. ~Panchatantra

We are here and now. Further than that, all knowledge is moonshine. ~H.L. Mencken

If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions. ~Susanne K. Langer

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oftentimes the supposed increasers of knowledge have only given a new name, and a worse, to what every body knew before. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger? ~Thomas Henry Huxley

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also. ~Carl G. Jung

Quotations about Kisses

2008-11-23T11:32:00.001-08:00

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. ~Albert Einstein

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. ~Ingrid Bergman

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know. ~Mistinguett (Jeanne Bourgeois), Theatre Arts, December 1955

Is not a kiss the very autograph of love? ~Henry Finck

A kiss, when all is said, what is it?
A rosy dot placed on the "i" in loving;
'Tis a secret told to the mouth instead of to the ear.
~Edmond Rostand

Kissing is a means of getting two people so close together that they can't see anything wrong with each other. ~Rene Yasenek

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said. ~Victor Hugo

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

A kiss that speaks volumes is seldom a first edition. ~Clare Whiting

I am in favor of preserving the French habit of kissing ladies' hands - after all, one must start somewhere. ~Sacha Guitry

I kissed my first girl and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. I haven't had time for tobacco since. ~Arturo Toscanini

Give me a kisse, and to that kisse a score;
Then to that twenty, adde a hundred more;
A thousand to that hundred; so kisse on,
To make that thousand up a million;
Treble that million, and when that is done,
Let's kisse afresh, as when we first begun.
~Robert Herrick, "To Anthea (III)"

In trying to get our own way, we should remember that kisses are sweeter than whine. ~Author Unknown

Stolen kisses require an accomplice. ~Just One Fool Thing After Another: A Cowfolks' Guide to Romance

Always kiss your children goodnight, even if they're already asleep. ~H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

kisses are a better fate
than wisdom.
~e.e. cummings

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt. ~Thomas Carlyle

A man snatches the first kiss, pleads for the second, demands the third, takes the fourth, accepts the fifth - and endures all the rest. ~Helen Rowland

Love's first snow-drop, virgin kiss. ~Robert Burns

'Twas not my lips you kissed
But my soul
~Judy Garland

What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop? ~Robert Browning, A Toccata of Galuppi's

Once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul thro'
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

People who throw kisses are mighty hopelessly lazy. ~Bob Hope

A kiss without a hug is like a flower without the fragrance. ~Proverb

A kiss is just a pleasant reminder that two heads are better than one. ~Author Unknown

Were kisses all the joys in bed,
One woman would another wed.
~William Shakespeare, Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music, IV

What lies lurk in kisses. ~Heinrich Heine

Happiness is like a kiss - it feels best when you give it to someone else. ~Author Unknown

The soul that can speak through the eyes can also kiss with a gaze. ~Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

"May I print a kiss on your lips?" I said,
And she nodded her full permission:
So we went to press and I rather guess
We printed a full edition.
~Joseph Lilientha

Kissing is like drinking salted water. You drink, and your thirst increases. ~Chinese Proverb

[T]hen I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down... and kissed him. And the world cracked open. ~Agnes de Mille

A kiss seals two souls for a moment in time. ~Levende Waters

See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea: -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love's Philosophy

Her kisses left something to be desired... the rest of her. ~Author Unknown

She kissed me, and my mouth wrote a poem of welcome to her lips. ~Ward Elliot Hour

I ran up the door, opened the stairs, said my pajamas and put on my prayers - turned off my bed, tumbled into my light, and all because he kissed me good-night! ~Author Unknown

Never a lip is curved with pain
That can't be kissed into smile again.
~Brete Harte

A kiss is the upper persuasion for a lower invasion. ~Author Unknown

The only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child. ~Joe Houldsworth

Kisses kept are wasted;
Love is to be tasted.
There are some you love, I know;
Be not loathe to tell them so.
Lips go dry and eyes grow wet
Waiting to be warmly met.
Keep them not in waiting yet;
Kisses kept are wasted.
~Edmund Vance Cooke

Kisses are like tears, the only real ones are the ones you can't hold back. ~Author Unknown

A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years. ~Rupert Brooke

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Professor at the Breakfast-Table

Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.
~Dorothy Parker

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

Each kiss a heart-quake... ~Lord Byron, Don Juan

[L]eave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
~Ben Jonson, To Celia

It takes a lot of experience for a girl to kiss like a beginner. ~Ladies Home Journal, 1948

Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words. ~Margaret Mitchell

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me;
Say I'm growing old, but add Jenny kissed me.
~Leigh Hunt, Jenny Kissed Me

A man's kiss is his signature. ~Mae West

We're all kissed by angels but some of us never think to pucker. ~Amethyst Snow-Rivers

Kiss: love professed through lips. ~Scarlett Bene

Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made
For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.
~William Shakespeare

When I kiss you, I can taste your soul. ~Carrie Latet

I wasn't kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth. ~Chico Marx

I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children they just about throw up. ~Barbara Bush

A man had given all other bliss,
And all his worldly worth for this,
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ancient lovers believed a kiss would literally unite their souls, because the spirit was said to be carried in one's breath. ~Eve Glicksman

Quotations about Kindness

2008-11-23T11:31:00.002-08:00

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true. ~Robert Brault

If you haven't any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble. ~Bob Hope

Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up. ~Jesse Jackson

A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble. ~Charles H. Spurgeon

It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice. ~Author Unknown

Today, give a stranger one of your smiles. It might be the only sunshine he sees all day. ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Treat everyone with politeness, even those who are rude to you - not because they are nice, but because you are. ~Author Unknown

What this world needs is a new kind of army - the army of the kind. ~Cleveland Amory

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. ~Dalai Lama

During my second year of nursing school our professor gave us a quiz. I breezed through the questions until I read the last one: "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?" Surely this was a joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times, but how would I know her name? I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Before the class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our grade. "Absolutely," the professor said. "In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello." I've never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorothy. ~Joann C. Jones

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble. ~Rudyard Kipling

Don't be yourself - be someone a little nicer. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

There is no greater loan than a sympathetic ear. ~Frank Tyger

Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone in order to do it. ~Author Unknown

A fellow who does things that count, doesn't usually stop to count them. ~Variation of a saying by Albert Einstein

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. ~Mark Twain

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness. ~Seneca

A kind word is like a Spring day. ~Russian Proverb

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not. ~Samuel Johnson

There is one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life - reciprocity. ~Confucius

Don't wait for people to be friendly, show them how. ~Author Unknown

The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway. ~Henry Boye

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. ~Abraham Joshua Heschel

If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape? No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love. ~Mark Twain

Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.
~Adam Lindsay Gordon

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these. ~George Washington Carver

You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you. ~John Wooden

Kindness, like a boomerang, always returns. ~Author Unknown

If those who owe us nothing gave us nothing, how poor we would be. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

The best portion of a good man's life - his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love. ~William Wordsworth

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ~Attributed to both T.H. Thompson and John Watson

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach. ~Winston Churchill

Real generosity is doing something nice for someone who will never find out. ~Frank A. Clark

The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid. ~Author Unknown

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines. ~Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. ~Epictetus

One can pay back the loan of gold, but one dies forever in debt to those who are kind. ~Malayan Proverb

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree. ~Marian Wright Edelman

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. ~Leo Buscaglia

A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses. ~Chinese Proverb

As the bus slowed down at the crowded bus stop, the Pakistani bus conductor leaned from the platform and called out, "Six only!" The bus stopped. He counted on six passengers, rang the bell, and then, as the bus moved off, called to those left behind: "So sorry, plenty of room in my heart - but the bus is full." He left behind a row of smiling faces. It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. ~The Friendship Book of Francis Gay, 1977

We always prefer war on our own terms to peace on someone else's. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Have you had a kindness shown?
Pass it on;
'Twas not given for thee alone,
Pass it on;
Let it travel down the years,
Let it wipe another's tears,
'Til in Heaven the deed appears -
Pass it on.
~Henry Burton, Pass It On

Make it a practice to judge persons and things in the most favorable light at all times and under all circumstances. ~Saint Vincent de Paul

Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something. ~H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

The best way to knock the chip off your neighbor's shoulder is to pat him on the back. ~Author Unknown

Open your heart - open it wide; someone is standing outside. ~Quoted in Believe: A Christmas Treasury by Mary Engelbreit

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again. ~Og Mandino

If every man's internal care
Were written on his brow,
How many would our pity share
Who raise our envy now?
~Peitro Metastasio

Kindness is the greatest wisdom. ~Author Unknown

A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"

If thou are a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf. ~Thomas Fuller

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame. ~Alexander Pope, Epilogue to the Satires, 1738

Life is short but there is always time for courtesy. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Social Aims

The best practical advice I can give to the present generation is to practice the virtue which the Christians call love. ~Bertrand Russell

If we cannot be clever, we can always be kind. ~Alfred Fripp

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving. ~Max Beerbohm

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him. ~Booker T. Washington

The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you. ~John E. Southard

Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life. ~Samuel Johnson

The first and highest law must be the love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est - this is the supreme practical maxim, this is the turning point of the world's History. ~Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

Love someone who doesn't deserve it. ~Author Unknown

The more sympathy you give, the less you need. ~Malcolm S. Forbes

It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens. ~Baha'u'llah

There are no traffic jams when you go the extra mile. ~Attributed to both Zig Ziglar and Dr. Kenneth McFarland

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. ~Nelson Henderson

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl. ~H.L. Mencken

Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. ~James Matthew Barrie

In about the same degree as you are helpful, you will be happy. ~Karl Reiland

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
~William Shakespeare

I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again. ~William Penn

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

How beautiful a day can be
When kindness touches it!
~George Elliston

Sometimes someone says something really small, and it just fits right into this empty place in your heart. ~From the television show My So-Called Life

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim. ~William Feather

Real charity doesn't care if it's tax-deductible or not. ~Dan Bennett

When your suffering is a little greater than my suffering I feel that I am a little cruel. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart. ~Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Always be a little kinder than necessary. ~James M. Barrie

If you step on people in this life, you're going to come back as a cockroach. ~Willie Davis

Quotations about Jealousy

2008-11-23T11:31:00.001-08:00

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run. ~George Bernard Shaw

In jealousy there is more self-love than love. ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665

Envy is a waste of time. ~Author Unknown

The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause. ~Baltasar Gracian

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy. ~Lawrence Durrell, Justine, 1957

If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang. ~Charley Reese

He that is not jealous is not in love. ~St. Augustine

The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves. ~William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope. ~Josh Billings

Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own. ~Harold Coffin

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies. ~Elizabeth Bowen

Envy is thin because it bites but never eats. ~Spanish Proverb

I've spent most of my life walking under that hovering cloud, jealousy, whose acid raindrops blurred my vision and burned holes in my heart. ~Astrid Alauda

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others. ~Ambrose Bierce

Jealousy is simply and clearly the fear that you do not have value. Jealousy scans for evidence to prove the point - that others will be preferred and rewarded more than you. There is only one alternative - self-value. If you cannot love yourself, you will not believe that you are loved. You will always think it's a mistake or luck. Take your eyes off others and turn the scanner within. Find the seeds of your jealousy, clear the old voices and experiences. Put all the energy into building your personal and emotional security. Then you will be the one others envy, and you can remember the pain and reach out to them. ~Jennifer James

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

Jealousy is the great exaggerator. ~Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, The Conspiracy of Fiesco, 1783

Jealousy and love are sisters. ~Russian Proverb

As iron is eaten by rust, so are the envious consumed by envy. ~Antisthenes

Jealousy is an awkward homage which inferiority renders to merit. ~Mme. de Puixieux

Jealousy is the dragon in paradise; the hell of heaven; and the most bitter of the emotions because associated with the sweetest. ~A.R. Orage

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love. ~George Eliot

[T]he ear of jealousy heareth all things. ~The Bible (Apocrypha), Wisdom of Solomon 1:10

Jealousy is a crutch. ~C. Astrid Weber

Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it. ~Honore de Balzac

Jealousy injures us with the dagger of self-doubt. ~Leslie Grimutter

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Envy is ignorance. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

O jealousy! thou magnifier of trifles. ~Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

Never love unless you can
Bear with all the faults of man:
Men will sometimes jealous be,
Though but little cause they see.
~Thomas Campion, "Never Love"

Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both. ~Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ.
~William Shakespeare, Othello

The jealous bring down the curse they fear upon their own heads. ~Dorothy Dix

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. ~Mark Twain

Jealousy is always born with love, but does not always die with it. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Whoever envies another confesses his superiority. ~Samuel Johnson, The Rambler

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

O! beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
~William Shakespeare, Othello

Envy is a symptom of lack of appreciation of our own uniqueness and self worth. Each of us has something to give that no one else has. ~Elizabeth O'Connor

Envy assails the noblest: the winds howl around the highest peaks. ~Ovid

A show of envy is an insult to oneself. ~Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko

Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded. ~William Hazlitt, Characteristics, 1823

Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits. ~Paul Eldridge

The truest mark of being born with great qualities is being born without envy. ~Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive. ~Havelock Ellis, On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue, 1937

Jealousy... is a mental cancer. ~B.C. Forbes

If envy were a fever, all the world would be ill. ~Danish Proverb

Envy slays itself by its own arrows. ~Author Unknown

And oft, my jealousy shapes faults that are not. ~William Shakespeare

Quotations about Intuition

2008-11-23T11:30:00.002-08:00

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's. ~Billy Wilder

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out. ~Michael Burke

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do. ~Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 1977

Instinct is untaught ability. ~Bain

Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness. ~John Sterling

Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. ~Joyce Brothers

Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way. ~Florence Scovel Shinn

Reasoning at every step he treads,
Man yet mistakes his way,
Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads,
Are rarely known to stray.
~William Cowper

The most decisive actions of our life... are most often unconsidered actions. ~André Gide, The Counterfeiters, 1926

A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action. ~Jawaharlal Nehru

An artist's instinct is more refined than the typical mortal's. ~Holden Rinehart

I suspect we have internal senses. The mind's eye since Shakespeare's time has been proverbial; and we have also a mind's ear. To say nothing of dreams, one certainly can listen to one's own thoughts, and hear them, or believe that one hears them: the strongest argument adducible in favour of our hearing any thing. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Instinct is the nose of the mind. ~Madame De Girardin

I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason. ~Stanley Baldwin

Quotations about Intelligence

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We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. ~Albert Einstein

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. ~Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"

If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. ~Stanley Garn

Common sense is not so common. ~Voltaire

I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde. ~Dolly Parton

We should not only use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow. ~Woodrow Wilson

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult. ~Sigmund Freud

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun. ~George Scialabra

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. ~Emerson M. Pugh

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.
~Alexander Pope

There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have. ~Don Herold

Mad, adj.: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. ~Ambrose Bierce

Some people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly. ~Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart. ~Henri Frederic Amiel

A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence. ~Barbara Walters

The invention of IQ does a great disservice to creativity in education. ~Joel Hildebrand

Primitive does not mean stupid. ~Author Unknown

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. ~Albert Einstein

The difference between intelligence and education is this: intelligence will make you a good living. ~Charles F. Kettering

I think the world is run by C students. ~Al McGuire

Character is higher than intellect. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred. ~Aldous Huxley

Quotations about Integrity

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I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day. ~Abraham Lincoln

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am. ~Joseph Baretti, quoted by James Boswell, 1766, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none. ~William Shakespeare

Transcend political correctness and strive for human righteousness. ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it. ~David Star Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair

Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught. ~J.C. Watts

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters. ~Alan Simpson

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. ~Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Character is much easier kept than recovered. ~Thomas Paine

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. ~Buddha

One does evil enough when one does nothing good. ~German Proverb

There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience. ~French Proverb

Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough. ~Arthur Freed

Your life may be the only Bible some people read. ~Author Unknown

Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to. ~Author Unknown

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion? ~William Lloyd Garrison

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right. ~William Safire

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. ~Albert Einstein

The only exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions, running down their friends, side-stepping responsibility, and pushing their luck! ~Author Unknown

But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow. ~Mark Twain, Huck Finn

Character is higher than intellect. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion. ~Abraham Lincoln

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence. ~Author Unknown

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking. ~Henry Ford

Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one. ~Chinese Proverb

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. ~Mark Twain, "What Is Man?", 1906

If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done. ~John Lubbock

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him. ~James D. Miles

I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed. ~Matthew Henry

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. ~Thomas Paine

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. ~Isaac Asimov

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. ~William Shakespeare, Hamlet

A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company. ~Charles Evans Hughes

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

You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you. ~Rwandan Proverb

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once. ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world. ~George Bernard Shaw

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only. ~Samuel Butler, Erewhon

Every time I've done something that doesn't feel right, it's ended up not being right. ~Mario Cuomo

My goal in life is to be as good of a person my dog already thinks I am. ~Author Unknown

To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice. ~Confucius

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh, 1849

You don't carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation. ~Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

I am,
indeed,
a king,
because I know how
to rule myself.
~Pietro Aretino, 10 May 1537

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself. ~Michel de Montaigne

Be always sure you're right, then go ahead. ~Davy Crockett

The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology. ~Red Auerbach

Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not a sin - just stupid.) ~Robert A. Heinlein

Goodness is the only investment that never fails. ~Henry David Thoreau

If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve it. ~Immanuel Hermass von Fichte

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I have ever met. ~Dwight Lyman Moody

Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort. ~Bert Murray

Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip. ~Will Rogers

My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there. ~Indira Gandhi

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., speech, Boston, 8 January 1897

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball,
And that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.
~Ogden Nash

In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current. ~Thomas Jefferson

It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Everyone complains of his memory, but no one complains of his judgment. ~Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665

God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless. ~Chester W. Nimitz

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to. ~Author Unknown

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. ~Henry Louis Mencken, "Sententiae," This and That: A Mencken Chrestomathy, 1948

The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour. ~Japanese Proverb

For the human mind is seldom at stay: If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse. ~Samuel Richardson

I would rather be right than President. ~Henry Clay, speech, 1850

If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral. ~Samuel P. Ginder

I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man. ~Thomas Jefferson, 1809

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit. ~Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

Goodness is beauty in the best estate. ~Christopher Marlowe

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart. ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

If we were all to be judged by our thoughts, the hills would be swarming with outlaws. ~Johann Sigurjonsson

Righteousness is easy in retrospect. ~Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Persons with weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits. ~Thomas Hardy

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them. ~Elbert Hubbard, A Thousand and One Epigrams, 1911

I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated

Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior. ~Logan Pearsall Smith

I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top. ~Frank Moore Colby

It's impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows. ~Jean Baptiste Molière, Le Misanthrope

If honor be your clothing, the suit will last a lifetime; but if clothing be your honor, it will soon be worn threadbare. ~William Arnot

Conscience warns us before it reproaches us. ~Comtesse Diane (Marie Josephine de Suin de Beausacq), Maximes de la vie, 1908

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

Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted. I don't accept it. ~Pablo Casals

Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul? ~Socrates

Every human being has... an attendant spirit.... If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do. ~Lydia M. Child

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. ~Will Durant

Every man over forty is responsible for his face. ~Abraham Lincoln

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. ~William Faulkner

There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thought under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life. ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1595

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging? ~Mark Twain

God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't. ~Alfred Korzyybski

What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient. ~Bodie Thoene, Warsaw Requiem

I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill. ~Mahatma Gandhi

[T]hough of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something. ~Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1890

A man may be born a jackass; but it is his business if he makes himself a double one. ~Martin H. Fischer

Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful. ~Ann Landers

Fortune does not change men; it unmasks them. ~Suzanne Necker

The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts. ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity. ~Ambrose Bierce

There is a great deal of self-will in the world, but very little genuine independence of character. ~Frederick W. Faber

If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable. ~Georges Courteline, La philosophie de Georges Courteline, 1917

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self. ~Martin Luther

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. ~Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops. ~Oscar Wilde

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. ~Somerset Maugham

Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing. ~Michael Iapoce, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Boardroom

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back. ~Abraham Lincoln

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men. ~Mary Renault

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to. ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Following the Equator, 1897

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals. ~Henry David Thoreau

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking. ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Browne

The only guy I have to get better than is who I am right now. ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man. ~George Washington

If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul. ~William Shakespeare

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

Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to. ~Arnold H. Glasow

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil. ~Max Lerner, Actions and Passions, 1949

It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it. ~A.A. Hodge

Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murders. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls. ~Victor Hugo

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good. ~Author Unknown

Do whatever you can to capture, or recapture, your life spark - unless it harms others, in which case suffer with as much happiness as you can muster. Your nobility of spirit will spark itself. ~Corri Alius

I did not use paint, I made myself up morally. ~Eleanora Duse, Le Gaulois, 1922

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. ~Abraham Lincoln

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

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. ~Albert Einstein, "What I Believe," Forum and Century, 1930

A healthy mind has an easy breath. ~Author Unknown

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure. ~B.C. Forbes

Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways. ~Buddha

The time is always right to do what is right. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may. ~Mark Twain

'Tis better to suffer wrong than do it. ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. ~G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman, 1905

Conscience is, in most, an anticipation of the opinion of others. ~Henry Taylor

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right. ~Thomas Paine

Remember, if you’re headed in the wrong direction, God allows U-turns! ~Allison Gappa Bottke

Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice. ~Léon Blum

I'll tell you a big secret, my friend: Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day. ~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956

If at first you don't succeed, do it like your mother told you. ~Author Unknown

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience. ~Doug Larson

Take care that no one hates you justly. ~Publilius Syrus

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare. ~Mark Twain

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage. ~William Lloyd Garrison

You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims. ~Harriet Woods

Rule #1: Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules. ~Nordstrom's Employee Handbook

Have a very good reason for everything you do. ~Laurence Olivier

Quotations about the Inner Child

2008-11-23T11:29:00.001-08:00

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life. ~G.K. Chesterton

The great man is he who does not lose his child's-heart. ~Mencius, Book IV

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. ~Gaston Bachelard

When I grow up I want to be a little boy. ~Joseph Heller, Something Happened, 1974

I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then. ~Bob Seger, "Against the Wind"

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. ~Pablo Picasso

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. ~Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943

Everybody's 12 years old in an apple orchard. ~Rachael Ray, Rachael Ray Show, while making autumn stew, original airdate 11 October 2007

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius. ~Rebecca Pepper Sinkler

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination. ~Robert Fulghum

When you're green you're growing, and when you're ripe you start to rot. ~Ray Kroc

Adults are obsolete children. ~Dr. Seuss

A grownup is a child with layers on. ~Woody Harrelson

The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult. ~Eugene Ionesco

I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things.... I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind. ~Leo Buscaglia

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination. ~Sam Levenson

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. ~Norman Podhoretz

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littéraires, 1862

O men, grown sick with toil and care,
Leave for awhile the crowded mart;
O women, sinking with despair,
Weary of limb and faint of heart,
Forget your years to-day and come
As children back to childhood's house.
~Phoebe Cary

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay. ~Brian Aldiss

Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. ~Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, commonly misattributed to Barbara Jordan because she quoted Fulghum in a commencement address

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are. We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them. It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it. Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. ~Albert Einstein

If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult. ~Sigmund Freud

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. ~Rachel Carson

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. ~J. Robert Oppenheimer

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do. ~Jean de la Bruyere

Quotations about Imagination

2008-11-23T11:28:00.002-08:00

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942

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

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. ~Theodore Geisel

Nothing encourages creativity like the chance to fall flat on one's face. ~James D. Finley

Some stories are true that never happened. ~Elie Weisel

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It's the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz. You'll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond 'Z' and start poking around! ~Dr. Seuss

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. ~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea. ~Francis Bacon

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try! ~Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!

A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. ~Author Unknown

The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.
~Emily Dickinson

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. ~George Smith Patton, War as I Knew It, 1947

The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person. ~Frank Barron, Think, November-December 1962

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

Don't expect anything original from an echo. ~Author Unknown

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. ~Pablo Picasso

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ~Jack London

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. ~G.K. Chesterton

Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life. ~Simone Weil

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. ~Stephen Leacock

Sometimes imagination pounces; mostly it sleeps soundly in the corner, purring. ~Leslie Grimutter

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. ~Norman Podhoretz

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. ~Edgar Allan Poe, "Eleonora"

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet. ~Joseph Joubert

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ~Lewis Carroll

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. ~Ansel Adams

Things are only impossible until they're not. ~Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars. ~Vincent Van Gogh

When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
~Lewis Carroll

The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell

I think the world really boils down to two types of people - those who see shapes in cloud formations, and those who just see clouds. ~Danzae Pace

Trust that little voice in your head that says "Wouldn't it be interesting if..." And then do it. ~Duane Michals, "More Joy of Photography"

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun. ~George Scialabba

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. ~Henry David Thoreau

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
~Emily Dickinson, Poems

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. ~Albert Einstein

Anyone who can be replaced by a machine deserves to be. ~Dennis Gunton

Really we create nothing. We merely plagiarize nature. ~Jean Baitaillon

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. ~William Butler Yeats

I remembered a story of how Bach was approached by a young admirer one day and asked, "But Papa Bach, how do you manage to think of all these new tunes?" "My dear fellow," Bach is said to have answered, according to my version, "I have no need to think of them. I have the greatest difficulty not to step on them when I get out of bed in the morning and start moving around my room." ~Laurens Van der Post

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. ~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. ~Albert Szent-Györgyi

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see. ~Duane Michals, Real Dreams

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally. ~Calvin Trillin

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. ~Anna Freud

To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted. ~George Kneller

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge. ~Tuli Kupferberg

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block. ~Paul Gauguin

Quotations about Ignorance

2008-11-23T11:28:00.001-08:00

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge. ~Aldous Huxley

The most violent element in society is ignorance. ~Emma Goldman

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance. ~Saul Bellow

Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas. ~John Dewey

Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity? ~Steve Polyak

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do. ~Norman Juster

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument. ~William G. McAdoo

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad. ~Bob Edwards

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right. ~Mark Twain

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. ~Bertrand Russell

The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so. ~Josh Billings

Some folks are wise and some are otherwise. ~Tobias Smollett

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. ~P.J. O'Rourke

You can be sincere and still be stupid. ~Charles F. Kettering

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects. ~Will Rogers

Ignorance is a right! Education is eroding one of the few democratic freedoms remaining to us. ~Christopher Andrea

Your ignorance cramps my conversation. ~Anthony Hope

It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance. ~Anatole France

History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of ignorance. ~A. Bronson Alcott

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. ~Alfred North Whitehead

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people? ~Author Unknown

Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. ~Author unknown, supposedly from a Washington Post reader submission word contest in which readers were asked to alter a word by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter and supply a new definition

Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole. ~Author unknown, supposedly from a Washington Post reader submission word contest in which readers were asked to alter a word by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter and supply a new definition

Light travels faster than sound. That's why most people seem bright until you hear them speak. ~Author Unknown

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe. ~Frank Zappa

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~Albert Einstein

We have enough youth, how about a fountain of smart? ~Author Unknown

Quotations about Ideals

2008-11-23T11:27:00.000-08:00

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you reach your destiny. ~Carl Schurz

Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices. ~George Bernard Shaw

Some people never have anything except ideals. ~E.W. Howe

When a man forgets his ideals he may hope for happiness, but not till then. ~John Oliver Hobbes

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

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

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

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem. ~John Galsworthy

Reality shouts; ideals whisper. ~Nathaniel LeTonnerre, translated

Materialism is a circumference without a centre. Idealism is a centre without a circumference. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows. ~David T. Wolf

Don't let the alarm clock of life wake you from the dream of your ideals. ~Irisa Hail

Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals. ~G.K. Chesterton

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. ~Henry L. Mencken

Every dogma has its day, but ideals are eternal. ~Israel Zangwill

Quotations about Humor

2008-11-21T09:16:00.003-08:00

Humor is a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one's bottom. ~Taki

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. ~Christopher Morley

Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn. ~Irvin S. Cobb

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. ~Francis Bacon

Humor results when society says you can't scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public. ~Tom Walsh

Humor has a way of bringing people together. It unites people. In fact, I'm rather serious when I suggest that someone should plant a few whoopee cushions in the United Nations. ~Ron Dentinger

Every survival kit should include a sense of humor. ~Author Unknown

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place. ~Mark Twain

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity. ~James Thurber

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. ~William James

After God created the world, He made man and woman. Then, to keep the whole thing from collapsing, He invented humor. ~Bill Kelly, "Mordillo"

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. ~Mahatma Gandhi

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance. ~Peter De Vries

Humor is just another defense against the universe. ~Mel Brooks

Humor is reason gone mad. ~Groucho Marx

A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. ~Peter Ustinov

Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end. ~Sid Caesar

Warning: Humor may be hazardous to your illness. ~Ellie Katz

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that humor excites in those who lack it. ~George Saintsbury

Humor is... despair refusing to take itself seriously. ~Arland Ussher

Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood. ~Mary Hirsch

The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes. ~William Davis

Many a true word is spoken in jest. ~English Proverb

I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it. ~Frank A. Clark

Above all else: go out with a sense of humor. It is needed armor. Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life. ~Hugh Sidey

There is no defense against adverse fortune which is so effectual as an habitual sense of humor. ~Thomas W. Higginson

Let your humour always be good-humour, in the double sense of the phrase: if it comes from a bad humour, it is almost sure to be bad humour. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Humor prevents one from becoming a tragic figure even though he/she is involved in tragic events. ~E.T. "Cy" Eberhart

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully. ~Max Eastman

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

There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth. ~Victor Borge, London Times, 3 January 1984

Someone once defined humor as a way to keep from killing yourself. I keep my sense of humor and I stay alive. ~Abe Burrows

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him. ~Roman Gary

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers. ~Leo Rosten

Quotations about Humility

2008-11-21T09:16:00.001-08:00

Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all. ~William Temple

Swallow your pride occasionally, it's non-fattening! ~Author Unknown

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others. ~Andrew J. Holmes, Wisdom in Small Doses

What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself. ~Abraham Lincoln

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle. ~Benjamin Franklin

Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

It wasn't until quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say "I don't know!" ~Somerset Maugham

Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self. ~Charles Haddon Spurgeon

If I only had a little humility, I would be perfect. ~Ted Turner

There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us. ~Laurence J. Peter

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are. ~Malcolm S. Forbes

There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a BILLION people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you. ~A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture

We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm. ~Winston Churchill

Don't talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave. ~Wilson Mizner

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles. ~Niccolo Machiavelli

True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes. ~Edward Frederick Halifax

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity. ~Frank Leahy, Look, 10 January 1955

It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help. ~Author Unknown

It is always the secure who are humble. ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton

In all that surrounds him the egotist sees only the frame of his own portrait. ~J. Petit-Senn

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. ~Barry Switzer

When science discovers the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to find they are not it. ~Bernard Baily

To have a thing is little, if you're not allowed to show it, to know a thing, is nothing unless others know you know it. ~Charles Neaves

Blushing is the color of virtue. ~Diogenes

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience. ~Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951

When someone sings his own praises, he always gets the tune too high. ~Mary H. Waldrip

With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy. ~Arthur Schopenhauer

None are so empty as those who are full of themselves. ~Benjamin Whichcote

We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket; and do not pull it out, and strike it, merely to show that you have one. ~Lord Chesterfield

Wash out your ego every once in a while, as cleanliness is next to godliness not just in body but in humility as well. ~Abbe Yeux-verdi

Lord, where we are wrong, make us willing to change; where we are right, make us easy to live with. ~Peter Marshall

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The man who thinks he can live without others is mistaken; the one who thinks others can't live without him is even more deluded. ~Hasidic Saying

Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought. ~Dwight Morrow

If every fool wore a crown, we should all be kings. ~Welsh Proverb

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. ~George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring. ~James McNeill Whistler

You shouldn't gloat about anything you've done; you ought to keep going and find something better to do. ~David Packard

Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected. ~William Safire

Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly overvalued by others. ~William Hazlitt

Modesty is the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it. ~Oliver Herford

Modesty: The art of encouraging people to find out for themselves how wonderful you are. ~Source Unknown

Flattery is all right so long as you don't inhale. ~Adlai Stevenson

Quotations about Human Rights

2008-11-21T09:15:00.002-08:00

The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting. ~Justice William J. Brennan, 1982

You are a human being. You have rights inherent in that reality. You have dignity and worth that exists prior to law. ~Lyn Beth Neylon

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. ~Abraham Lincoln

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. ~Barry Goldwater

By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two. So in the wonderful reciprocities of being, we can never reach the higher levels until all our fellows ascend with us. ~Edwin Markham

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights. ~Bishop Desmond Tutu, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself. ~Robert Ingersoll

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. ~Gandhi

And we who have toiled for freedom's law, have we sought for freedom's soul?
Have we learned at last that human right is not a part but the whole?
~John Boyle O'Reilly

It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home. ~Carl T. Rowan

No man is above the law and no man below it. ~Theodore Roosevelt

Of equality - As if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself - As if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same. ~Walt Whitman

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way. ~Robert Frost

Silence never won rights. They are not handed down from above; they are forced by pressures from below. ~Roger Baldwin

If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed. ~Howard Mumford Jones

I have always claimed Americans didn't want a drink as bad as they wanted the right to take a drink if they did happen to want one. ~Will Rogers

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. ~Horace Greeley

Quotations about Humankind

2008-11-21T09:15:00.001-08:00

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am. ~Joseph Baretti, quoted by James Boswell, 1766, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson* (Thank you, Frank Lynch of SamuelJohnson.com)

Man is harder than rock and more fragile than an egg. ~Yugoslav Proverb

That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is. ~Albert Camus

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing. ~Christopher Morley, Human Being

The true man walks the earth as the stars walk the heavens, grandly obedient to those laws which are implanted in his nature. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours. ~Bertrand Russell

Ocean: A body of water occupying two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills. ~Ambrose Bierce

Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone and more fragile than a rose. ~Turkish Proverb

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it. ~John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with humans it is the other way around: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar. ~Anton Chekhov

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs. ~Aldous Huxley

We are perverse creatures and never satisfied. ~Nan Fairbrother

Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings. ~Author Unknown

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. ~Stephen Jay Gould, "Our Allotted Lifetimes," The Panda's Thumb, 1980

Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah... didn't miss the boat. ~Mark Twain

There are too many people, and too few human beings. ~Robert Zend

It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump. ~David Ormsby Gore

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love. ~George Bernard Shaw

The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes. ~Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up

Men! The only animal in the world to fear. ~D.H. Lawrence

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race. ~Don Marquis

Man embraces in his makeup all the natural orders; he's a squid, a mollusk, a sucker and a buzzard; sometimes he's a cerebrate. ~Martin H. Fischer

Men are cruel, but Man is kind. ~Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 1916

Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind. ~David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978

Human nature, if healthy, demands excitement; and if it does not obtain its thrilling excitement in the right way, it will seek it in the wrong. God never makes bloodless stoics; He makes no passionless saints. ~Oswald Chambers

Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Monkeys are superior to men in this: When a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey. ~Malcolm de Chazal

It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing. ~Mariane Moore, "A Grave," Collected Poems, 1951

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner. ~Mark Twain, "Reflections on Being the Delight of God."

Adam ate the apple, and our teeth still ache. ~Hungarian Proverb

Why was man created on the last day? So that he can be told, when pride possesses him: God created the gnat before thee. ~The Talmud

Man - a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired. ~Mark Twain

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated His ability. ~Oscar Wilde

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other. ~Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol. I, book II, chapter 1

God pulled an all-nighter on the sixth day. ~Author Unknown

Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings. ~Evan Esar

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant [is] alone enough to upset Darwin. ~Henry Adams, Education, 1907

Man - a being in search of meaning. ~Plato

Ultimately, aren't we all just talking monkeys with an attitude problem? ~"Uncle" Ben, as seen on quotes‑r‑us.org

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded. ~Gustave Flaubert

Nothing feebler does earth nurture than man,
Of all things breathing and moving.
~Homer, Odyssey

Everyone is as God made him, and often a good deal worse. ~Miguel de Cervantes

Man is a strange animal, he doesn't like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it. ~Adlai Stevenson

It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man. ~Albert Einstein

God doesn't measure His bounty, but oh how we do! ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. ~Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, 1911

The human race is governed by its imagination. ~Napoleon

Man uses his intelligence less in the care of his own species than he does in his care of anything else he owns or governs. ~Abraham Meyerson

Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face. ~Sydney Smith

Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him? ~Pierre Troubetzkoy

The small percentage of dogs that bite people is monumental proof that the dog is the most benign, forgiving creature on earth. ~W.R. Koehler, The Koehler Method of Dog Training

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

We have no choice but to be guilty.
God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
~Archibald MacLeish, JB, 1958

Human beings invent just as many ways to sabotage their lives as to improve them. ~Mark Goulston, Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior, 1996

As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly. ~Samuel Johnson

What is man's greatest bane? His brother man alone. ~Bias of Priene, Maxims

Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. ~Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse? ~John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960

God has given a great deal to man, but man would like something from man. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker; for it was not on the door of heaven. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers. ~Albert Camus

Man, when he is merely what he seems to be, is almost nothing. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Give a man secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert. ~Arthur Young, Travels in France, 1792

Our behavior is human with a sliver of animal, our souls animal with a sliver of human. ~Carrie Latet

Occident: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce." These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. ~William Hazlitt, The English Comic Writers, 1819

Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls. ~Adlai Stevenson

A simple and irrefutable argument to knock creationism on its ass: (1) Humans are a mistake - subproof: opposable thumbs and enlarged brain capacity are the combined number one factor in the increasingly speedy destruction of planet Earth. (2) God doesn't make mistakes. (3) Therefore, God couldn't have created people. ~Cassus Garrulitas

Man talks about everything, and he talks about everything as though the understanding of everything were all inside him. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

My dog is usually pleased with what I do, because she is not infected with the concept of what I "should" be doing. ~Lonzo Idolswine

Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied. ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897

We are all parasites; we humans, the greatest. ~Martin H. Fischer

Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong. ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "The Paradoxes of Christianity," Orthodoxy

It is the nature of mortals to kick a fallen man. ~Aeschylus, Agamemnon

God is less careful than General Motors, for He floods the world with factory rejects. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Man's highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky. ~Russell Baker, New York Times, 21 July 1969

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. ~Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, 1947

When freedom from want and freedom from fear are achieved, man's remains will be in rigor mortis. ~Martin H. Fischer

Man is nature's sole mistake. ~W.S. Gilbert

The average man's judgment is so poor, he runs a risk every time he uses it. ~E.W. Howe

Man - a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal. ~Alexander Hamilton

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. ~Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, 1871

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

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

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts. ~David Herbert Lawrence, White Peacock, 1911

The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I am on the side of the angels. ~Benjamin Disraeli

I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape. ~Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape

Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease... and throw himself into roils and labors. ~Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, 1787

The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. ~T.H. Huxley, "Evolution and Ethics," 1893

Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man. ~William Ralph Inge

People are like birds: on the wing, all beautiful; up close, all beady little eyes. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Evolution is individual - devolution is collective. ~Martin H. Fischer

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd. I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition.... Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. ~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. ~Voltaire

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. ~Carl Linnaeus, 1788

In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark. ~Arthur Koestler

Evolution: that last step was a doozy! ~Astrid Alauda

We have a world for each one, but we do not have a world for all. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite. ~Henry David Thoreau, journal, 2 April 1852

Nature does not deceive us; it is we who deceive ourselves. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles. ~Niccolo Machiavelli

Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better. ~Author Unknown

Quotations about Hugs

2008-11-21T09:14:00.004-08:00

A hug is like a boomerang - you get it back right away. ~Bil Keane, "Family Circus"

Millions and millions of years would still not give me half enough time to describe that tiny instant of all eternity when you put your arms around me and I put my arms around you. ~Jacques Prévert

Everybody needs a hug. It changes your metabolism. ~Leo Buscaglia

You can't wrap love in a box, but you can wrap a person in a hug. ~Author Unknown

Hug Department: Always Open ~Author Unknown

I love hugging. I wish I was an octopus, so I could hug ten people at a time. ~Drew Barrymore

No matter how hard you hug your money, it never hugs back. ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

I will not play at tug o' war
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs....
~Shel Silverstein

Arm ourselves for war? No! All the arms we need are for hugging. ~Author Unknown

A hug is a handshake from the heart. ~Author Unknown

You can't give a hug without getting a hug. ~Author Unknown

A hug delights and warms and charms,
that must be why God gave us arms.
~Author Unknown

Hugs are the universal medicine. ~Author Unknown

A hug is a great gift - one size fits all, and it's easy to exchange. ~Author Unknown

A kiss without a hug is like a flower without the fragrance. ~Proverb

If you're angry at a loved one, hug that person. And mean it. You may not want to hug - which is all the more reason to do so. It's hard to stay angry when someone shows they love you, and that's precisely what happens when we hug each other. ~Walter Anderson, The Confidence Course, 1997

There's nothing like a mama-hug. ~Adabella Radici

Hugs grease the wheels of the world. ~Author Unknown

Hug someone your appreciation. ~Violet Gartenlicht

A hug is worth a thousand words. ~Author Unknown

A hug is a smile with arms, a laugh with a stronger grip. ~The Quote Garden

Have you hugged yourself today? ~Anonymous

A hug is two hearts wrapped in arms. ~Author Unknown

I don't discriminate - I'm an equal-opportunity hugger. ~Author Unknown

Hugging has no unpleasant side effects and is all natural. There are no batteries to replace, it's inflation-proof and non-fattening with no monthly payments. It's non-taxable, non-polluting, and is, of course, fully refundable. ~Author Unknown

Never wait until tomorrow to hug someone you could hug today,
because when you give one, you get one right back your way.
~Author Unknown

Be a love pharmacist: dispense hugs like medicine - they are! ~The Quote Garden

Sometimes it's better to put love into hugs than to put it into words. ~Author Unknown

A hug is the shortest distance between friends. ~Author Unknown

Quotations: “How True!”

2008-11-21T09:14:00.003-08:00

If an article is attractive, or useful, or inexpensive, they'll stop making it tomorrow; if it's all three, they stopped making it yesterday. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch it to be sure. ~Murphy's Law

If there is something you must do and you cannot do it, you cannot do anything else. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

How is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person? ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one. ~Erma Bombeck

I tell you this, and I tell you plain:
What you have done, you will do again;
You will bite your tongue, careful or not,
Upon the already-bitten spot.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold. ~Author Unknown

A bargain is something you can't use at a price you can't resist. ~Franklin P. Jones

It's always been and always will be the same in the world: The horse does the work and the coachman is tipped. ~Author Unknown

An unwatched pot boils immediately. ~H.F. Ellis

If you wonder where your child left his roller skates, try walking around the house in the dark. ~Leopold Fechtner

Anything you lose automatically doubles in value. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else. ~Will Rogers

When the plane you are on is late, the plane you want to transfer to is on time. ~Author Unknown

Never do anything that you wouldn't want to explain to the paramedics. ~Author Unknown

Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark. ~Author Unknown

Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late, and not in the barroom downstairs? ~Christopher Morley, Contribution to a Contribution

It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. ~Grace Hopper

The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance. ~Author Unknown

It's frustrating when you know all the answers, but nobody bothers to ask you the questions. ~Author Unknown

If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire. ~Author Unknown

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered. ~Edgar Allan Poe

People who snore always fall asleep first. ~Author Unknown

The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement. ~Author Unknown

There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed for example that we all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter. ~Bat Masterson

No one is listening until you fart. ~Author Unknown

Keep a thing seven years and it's bound to come in handy. ~Russian Proverb

Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object. ~Joseph Addison, The Spectator

There are men whom you will never dislodge from an opinion, except by taking possession of it yourself. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror. ~Elaine Dundy

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. ~Dave Barry

The Act of God designation on all insurance policies... means roughly that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you. If your ox kicks a hole in your neighbor's Maserati, however, indemnity is instantaneous. ~Alan Coren, The Lady from Stalingrad Mansions, 1977

Quotations about Hope

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Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Once you choose hope, anything's possible. ~Christopher Reeve

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Things which you do not hope happen more frequently than things which you do hope. ~Titus Maccius Plautus

Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them. ~Vincent McNabb

In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man's torments. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878

When the world says, "Give up,"
Hope whispers, "Try it one more time."
~Author Unknown

Love floods us with hope. ~Jareb Teague

There is nothing so well known as that we should not expect something for nothing - but we all do and call it Hope. ~Edgar Howe

Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain. ~Samuel Johnson

Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops... at all. ~Emily Dickinson

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. ~Anne Lamott

The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope.
~William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination. ~Marian Zimmer Bradley

You've gotta have hope. Without hope life is meaningless. Without hope life is meaning less and less. ~Author Unknown

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Lord save us all from... a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms. ~Mark Twain

Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark. ~George Iles

When hope is hungry, everything feeds it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier. ~Author Unknown

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so. ~Eric Bentley

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes. ~Thomas Hardy

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic. ~Norman Cousins

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be. ~Don Quixote

It's all one thing - both tend into one scope -
To live upon Tobacco and on Hope,
The one's but smoke, the other is but wind.
~Sir Robert Aytoun of Kincaldie, "Sonnet on Tobacco"

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness, of captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable. ~Samuel Johnson

Hope is the physician of each misery. ~Irish Proverb

Hope deceives more men than cunning does. ~Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims, 1746

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey. ~Ouida

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate. ~Eric Hoffer

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death. ~Pearl S. Buck

Hope is but the dream of those who wake. ~Matthew Prior

Hope is grief's best music. ~Author Unknown

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope. ~Baruch Spinoza

He that lives upon hope will die fasting. ~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you're slamming the door in the face of God. ~Charles L. Allen

Hope never abandons you, you abandon it. ~George Weinberg

Some see a hopeless end, while others see an endless hope. ~Author Unknown

Hope is patience with the lamp lit. ~Tertullian

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence. ~Lin Yutang

Hope is the poor man's bread. ~Gary Herbert

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man. ~Victor Hugo

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers. ~Robert Ingersoll

Quotations about Honesty

2008-11-21T09:13:00.002-08:00

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. ~Henry Louis Mencken, A Little Book in C Major, 1916

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything. ~Mark Twain

Who lies for you will lie against you. ~Bosnian Proverb

No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar. ~Abraham Lincoln

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world. ~Thomas Carlyle

A half truth is a whole lie. ~Yiddish Proverb

A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie. ~Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment

Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind. ~Austin O'Malley

A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent. ~William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence," Poems from the Pickering Manuscript

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold. ~Aristotle

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Dare to be true: nothing can need a lie: A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby. ~George Herbert

With lies you may get ahead in the world - but you can never go back. ~Russian proverb

Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain't lawful tender for a loaf of bread. ~Josh Billings

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff. ~Ambrose Bierce

A lie has speed, but truth has endurance. ~Edgar J. Mohn

When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback. ~Bill Copeland

Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it. ~Mark Twain

Honesty is never seen sitting astride the fence. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911

A lie may take care of the present, but it has no future. ~Author Unknown

We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger. ~Tad Williams

Truth fears no questions. ~Unknown

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously. ~Thomas Sowell

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom. ~Thomas Jefferson

I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy. ~Samuel Butler, Note-Books, 1912

There is no well-defined boundary between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other. ~O. Henry, Rolling Stones, 1912

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

The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always. ~R.D. Laing

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. ~Winston Churchill

If you want to ruin the truth, stretch it. ~Author Unknown

The truth is more important than the facts. ~Frank Lloyd Wright

Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited. ~James Cardinal Gibbons

Respect for the truth is an acquired taste. ~Mark Van Doren, Liberal Education, 1943

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field. ~Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

When a man lies, he murders some part of the world. ~Rospo Pallenberg and John Boorman, Excalibur, based on Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory

It is not without good reason said, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty. ~Richard J. Needham

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships. ~Bertrand Russell

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. ~Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

Beware of the half truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half. ~Author Unknown

When truth is divided, errors multiply. ~Eli Siegel, Damned Welcome

Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it. ~Emily Dickinson

Honesty pays, but it don't seem to pay enough to suit some people. ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard

A little candor never leaves me. It is what protects me. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian. ~John Updike

No mask like open truth to cover lies,
As to go naked is the best disguise.
~William Congreve

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so. ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935

Reality is bad enough. Why should I tell the truth? ~Patrick Sky

Speak the truth, but leave immediately after. ~Slovenian Proverb

Always tell the truth. Even if you have to make it up. ~Author Unknown

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. ~Adlai Stevenson

The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do. ~E.V. Lucas

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth. ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. ~Oscar Wilde

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true. ~Robert Brault

The truth needs so little rehearsal. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. ~Mark Twain

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks. ~Lin Yutang

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. ~Saki

Some people will not tolerate such emotional honesty in communication. They would rather defend their dishonesty on the grounds that it might hurt others. Therefore, having rationalized their phoniness into nobility, they settle for superficial relationships. ~Author Unknown

It takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen. ~"Homer Simpson," from the television show The Simpsons

There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says, "Yes," you know he is a crook. ~Groucho Marx

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives. ~Mark Twain

It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar. ~Jerome K. Jerome

Always tell the truth. If you can't always tell the truth, don't lie. ~Author Unknown

I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't. ~Mark Twain