American Literature

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."

Winston Churchill 

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter 
saying that I approved of it. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

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

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. 
Truth isn't. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

It could probably be shown by facts and figures 
that there is no distinctly American criminal 
class except Congress. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 


Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw 
those in authority off their guard and give 
you an opportunity to commit more. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

In the first place, God made idiots. That was 
for practice. Then he made school boards. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

It is easier to stay out than get out. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. 
I said I don't know. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

The man who doesn't read good books has no 
advantage over the man who can't read them. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Wagner's music is better than it sounds. 

Bill Nye (1850 - 1896), quoted in Mark Twain's 
Autobiography, 1924

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

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

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

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

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Often it does seem a pity that Noah and 
his party did not miss the boat. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

Often it does seem a pity that Noah and 
his party did not miss the boat. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do 
the day after tomorrow. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do 
the day after tomorrow. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do 
the day after tomorrow. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 


My mother had a great deal of trouble with 
me, but I think she enjoyed it. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone 
would make a fairly good library out of a 
library that hadn't a book in it. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

It usually takes more than three weeks to 
prepare a good impromptu speech. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let 
people think you are a fool than to open it and 
remove all doubt.  

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them 
in French; I never did succeed in making those 
idiots understand their language. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, 
he will not bite you. This is the principal difference 
between a dog and a man. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man 
should challenge me, I would take him kindly 
and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a 
quiet place and kill him. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 
Be careful about reading health books. 
You may die of a misprint. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)


Always do right. This will gratify some people 
and astonish the rest. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

All you need in this life is ignorance and 
confidence; then success is sure. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Letter to Mrs 
Foote, Dec. 2, 1887

A banker is a fellow who lends you his 
umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants 
it back the minute it begins to rain. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)   

Few things are harder to put up with than the 
annoyance of a good example. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)   

Good breeding consists of concealing how 
much we think of ourselves and how little 
we think of the other person. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Notebooks (1935)  

Familiarity breeds contempt - and children. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Notebooks (1935) 


The report of my death was an exaggeration. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), New York Journal, June 2, 1897

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Following the Equator (1897)

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. 

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Many forms of Government have been tried, 
and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. 
No one pretends that democracy is perfect or 
all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy 
is the worst form of government except all those 
other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947

I would say to the House, as I said to 
those who have joined this Government: 
'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, 
tears, and sweat."

Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, May 13, 1940 

The British nation is unique in this respect. 
They are the only people who like to be told 
how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.

Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, June 10, 1941 

Don't talk to me about naval tradition. 
It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.

Sir Winston Churchill 

When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.

Sir Winston Churchill 

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule 
never to criticize or attack the government 
of my own country. I make up for lost time 
when I come home.

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Sir Winston Churchill

There are a terrible lot of lies going around 
the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.

Sir Winston Churchill 


Success is the ability to go from one failure 
to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

Sir Winston Churchill

Personally I'm always ready to learn, 
although I do not always like being taught.

Sir Winston Churchill  

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes 
pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being
 contradicted leads the writer to strip himself 
of almost all sense and meaning.

Sir Winston Churchill


One ought never to turn one's back on a 
threatened danger and try to run away from 
it. If you do that, you will double the danger. 
But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, 
you will reduce the danger by half.

Sir Winston Churchill 

Never, never, never believe any war will be 
smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks 
on the strange voyage can measure the tides 
and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman 
who yields to war fever must realize that once 
the signal is given, he is no longer the master 
of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and 
uncontrollable events.

Sir Winston Churchill

Never, never, never believe any war will be 
smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks 
on the strange voyage can measure the tides 
and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman 
who yields to war fever must realize that once 
the signal is given, he is no longer the master 
of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and 
uncontrollable events.

Sir Winston Churchill

Never hold discussions with the monkey 
when the organ grinder is in the room.

Sir Winston Churchill

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but 
most of them pick themselves up and hurry off 
as if nothing ever happened.

Sir Winston Churchill

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look 
down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

Sir Winston Churchill

I have always felt that a politician is to be 
judged by the animosities he excites among his 
opponents.

Sir Winston Churchill 

I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colours. 
I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely 
sorry for the poor browns.

Sir Winston Churchill 

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

Sir Winston Churchill

He has all the virtues I dislike and none 
of the vices I admire.

Sir Winston Churchill

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition 
is something up with which I will not put.

Sir Winston Churchill 


Every day you may make progress. Every step 
may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out 
before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, 
ever-improving path. You know you will never 
get to the end of the journey. But this, so 
far from discouraging, only adds to the joy 
and glory of the climb.

Sir Winston Churchill

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, 
and the old words best of all.

Sir Winston Churchill

Never give in--never, never, never, never, 
in nothing great or small, large or petty, 
never give in except to convictions of honour 
and good sense. Never yield to force; never 
yield to the apparently overwhelming might 
of the enemy.

Sir Winston Churchill, Speech, 1941, Harrow School 

A love of tradition has never weakened a nation, 
indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour 
of peril; but the new view must come, the world 
must roll forward.

Sir Winston Churchill, speech in the House of 
Commons, November 29, 1944 

We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.

Sir Winston Churchill, speech in the House of 
Commons, July 14, 1940

Now this is not the end. It is not even the 
beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the 
end of the beginning.

Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in November 1942 


From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the 
Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across 
the Continent.

Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in March 1946 

For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem 
to be much use being anything else.

Sir Winston Churchill, speech at the Lord Mayor's 
banquet, London, November 9, 1954

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

Sir Winston Churchill, Speech at Harvard University, 
September 6, 1943

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was 
asking publicly for suggestions about what the 
war should be called. I said at once 
'The Unnecessary War'.

Sir Winston Churchill, Second World War (1948)

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to 
read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar 
Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied 
it intently. The quotations when engraved upon 
the memory give you good thoughts. They also 
make you anxious to read the authors and look 
for more.

Sir Winston Churchill, Roving Commission: 
My Early Life, 1930, Chapter 9

Here is the answer which I will give to President 
Roosevelt... We shall not fail or falter; we shall 
not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of 
battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and 
exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and 
we will finish the job.

Sir Winston Churchill, Radio speech, 1941 

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. 
It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an 
enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key 
is Russian national interest.

Sir Winston Churchill, Radio speech, 1939 

I am reminded of the professor who, in his 
declining hours, was asked by his devoted 
pupils for his final counsel. He replied, 
'Verify your quotations.'

Winston Churchill

I am prepared to meet my Maker. 
Whether my Maker is prepared for 
the great ordeal of meeting me 
is another matter.

Sir Winston Churchill, on the eve 
of his 75th birthday 

So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, 
decided only to be undecided, resolved to be 
irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, 
all-powerful to be impotent.

Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 12, 1936

I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart: 
but the saying is true 'The empty vessel makes the greatest sound'.

William Shakespeare


I am not bound to please thee with my answers.

William Shakespeare

How use doth breed a habit in a man.

William Shakespeare

How poor are they who have not patience! 
What wound did ever heal but by degrees.

William Shakespeare

His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!

William Shakespeare

He who has injured thee was either stronger or 
weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; 
if stronger, spare thyself.

William Shakespeare

He is winding the watch of his wit; 
by and by it will strike.

William Shakespeare


God bless thee; and put meekness in thy 
mind, love, charity, obedience, and true duty!

William Shakespeare

Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperses to naught.

William Shakespeare

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; 
take each man's censure but reserve thy judgement.

William Shakespeare

Free from gross passion or of mirth or anger
constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood,
garnish'd and deck'd in modest compliment,
not working with the eye without the ear,
and but in purged judgement trusting neither?
Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem.

William Shakespeare

For they are yet ear-kissing arguments.

William Shakespeare

Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.

William Shakespeare

Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind,
As man's ingratitude.

William Shakespeare

Be great in act, as you have been in thought.

William Shakespeare

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

William Shakespeare

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol'n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

William Shakespeare

And since you know you cannot see yourself,
so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself,
that of yourself which you yet know not of.

William Shakespeare


A wretched soul, bruised with adversity,
We bid be quiet when we hear it cry; 
But were we burdened with like weight of pain,
As much or more we should ourselves complain.

William Shakespeare

The beauty of the world has two edges, one 
of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart 
asunder. 

Wolf, Virginia

Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, 
than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the 
great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, 
or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell 
we call the moon. 

Wilde, Oscar 

No object is so beautiful that, under 
certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Wilde, Oscar 

Is there anything in the universe more beautiful 
and protective than the simple complexity of a 
spider's web? 

White, E.B. 

Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the 
feeling heart.

von Schiller, Johann 


Someday there is going to be a book about a 
middle-aged man with a good job, a beautiful 
wife and two lovely children who still manages 
to be happy.  

Vaughan, Bill 

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. 

Tolstoy, Leo 

It is something to be able to paint a particular 
picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few 
objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to 
carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium 
through which we look, which morally we can do. 
To affect the quality of the day, that is the 
highest of arts. 

Thoreau, Henry David 

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, 
the true empire of beauty.

Steele, Richard 


I would warn you that I do not attribute 
to nature either beauty or deformity, order 
or confusion. Only in relation to our 
imagination can things be called beautiful 
or ugly, well-ordered or confused. 

Spinoza, Benedict 

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. 

Socrates 

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason; 
how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how 
express and admirable! In action, how like an angel; 
in apprenhension, how like a god; the beauty of the 
world the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is 
this quintessence of dust? 

Shakespeare, William 

Honesty coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar.

Shakespeare, William 

A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that 
he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.  

Rowland, Helen

Beauty attracts us men; but if, like an armed 
magnet it is pointed, beside, with gold and 
silver, it attracts with tenfold power. 

Richter, Jean Paul 


Beauty is power; a smile is its sword. 

Reade, Charles 

Remember if you marry for beauty, thou bindest 
thyself all thy life for that which perchance, 
will neither last nor please thee one year: and 
when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price 
at all. 

Raleigh, Walter 

For, when with beauty we can virtue join, 
We paint the semblance of a form divine. 

Prior, Matthew 

Conceit is to nature what paint is to beauty; 
it is not only needless, but impairs what it 
would improve 

Pope, Alexander 

Age before beauty ... And pearls before swine. 

Parker, Dorothy  

We live in a wonderful world that is full 
of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no 
end to the adventures that we can have if 
only we seek then with our eyes open. 

Nehru, Jawaharial 

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, 
and all about you will be beauty. There is a way 
out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail. 

Navajo Song 



In every man's heart there is a secret nerve 
that answers to the vibrations of beauty. 

Morley, Christopher






Beauty is nature's brag, and must be shown in courts, 
at feasts, and high solemnities, where most may wonder 
at the workmanship. 

Milton, John 






Beauty is the first present nature gives to 
woman and the first it takes away. 

Méré, George Brossin  







Time's gradual touch has moulder'd into beauty 
many a tower which when it frown'd with all its 
battlements, was only terrible.  

Mason 






There are three great questions which in life we have 
over and over again to answer: Is it right or wrong? 
Is it true or false? Is it beautiful or ugly? Our 
education ought ot help us to answer these questions. 

Lubbock, John 






Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful 
sentiments in the world weigh less than a single 
lovely action.  
 
Lowell, James Russell  






Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than 
the belief she is beautiful. 

Loren, Sophia 







Delusions are often functional. A mother's 
opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, 
goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from 
drowning them at birth. 

Long, Lazarus 






My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry 
blossoms -- will it return to my body when they 
scatter? 

Kotomichi 






I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being 
only skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want,
an adorable pancreas? 

Kerr, Jean 






Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

Keats, John 






Rare is the union of beauty and purity.

Juvenal  




 

Beauty is only skin deep, but it's a valuable 
asset if you're poor or haven't any sense. 

Hubbard, Kin 






Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

Horace 







Plain women know more about men than beautiful 
ones do. But beautiful women don't need to know 
about men. It's the men who have to know about 
beautiful women. 

Hepburn, Katherine 






The criterion of true beauty is, that it 
increases in examination; of false, that 
it lessens. There is something, therefore, 
in true beauty that corresponds with the 
right reason, and it is not merely the 
creature of fancy. 

Grenville 






When a girl ceases to blush, she has lost 
the most powerful charm of her beauty.

Gregory I 






Beauty is an outward gift which is seldom despised, 
except by those to whom it has been refused. 

Gibbon, Edward   






Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way 
of telling you to stop writing. 

Geis, R.   






The vain beauty cares most for the conquest 
which employed the whole artillery of her charms. 

Garrett, Edward  







Beauty and folly are old companions. 

Franklin, Benjamin 






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

Erskine, John 






Love that has nothing but beauty to keep it in 
good health is short lived, and apt to have ague 
fits. 

Erasmus 






A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; 
it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; 
it is the finest of the fine arts. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 







Beauty without grace is the hook without 
the bait.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 






It seems to me we can never give up longing 
and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. 
There are certain things we feel to be beautiful 
and good, and we must hunger after them.  

Eliot, George 






It is good that the young are beautiful; 
it is the only advantage they have. 

Duchess of Windsor 






Beauty, like ice, our footing does betray; 
Who can tread sure on the smooth, slippery way: 
Pleased with the surface, we glide swiftly on, 
And see the dangers that we cannot shun. 

Dryden, John 






Love built on beauty, soon as beauty dies. 

Donne, John  






The average man is more interested in a woman 
who is interested in him than he is in a woman, 
any woman, with beautiful legs.  

Dietrich. Marlene 






Beauty is not caused. It is. 

Dickinson, Emily 







Champagne is the only wine a woman can drink 
and still remain beautiful.

de Pompadour, Madame 






Imagination is the one weapon in the war 
against reality. 

de Gaultier, Jules  







There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness. 

Countess of Blessington 







Pleasure is to Women what the Sun is to 
the Flower; if moderately enjoyed, it 
beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; 
if immoderately, it withers, etiolates, 
and destroys.  

Colton






Let no man value at a little price a virtuous 
woman's counsel; her winged spirit is feathered 
often times with heavenly words, and, like her 
beauty, ravishing and pure.  

Chapman 






Everything beautiful has its moment and then passes away 

Cernuda, Luis 






Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, 
offering us for a minute the glimpse of an 
eternity that we should like to stretch out 
over the whole of time. 

Camus, Albert 






Beauty's tears are lovelier than her smile.

Campbell Thomas 






In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves. 

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Robert 






The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, 
and the feeble wrong because of weakness. 

Browning, Elizabeth B. 







Exuberance is beauty.

Blake, William  






Beauty, n: the power by which a woman 
charms a lover and terrifies a husband.     

Bierce, Ambrose 






 ...It's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you 
have it you don't need to have anything else; 
and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter 
what else you have.    

Barrie, James Matthew







Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite. 

Bancroft, George 






The beautiful are never desolate, but someone 
always loves them. 

Bailey 






The best part of beauty is that which no 
picture can express. 

Bacon, Francis 






There is no excellent beauty that hath 
not some strangeness in the proportion.

Bacon, Francis 






Personal beauty is a greater recommendation 
than any letter of reference. 

Aristotle 






Two stones build two houses, three stones 
build six houses, four build twenty-four houses, 
five build one hundred and twenty houses, 
six build seven hundred and twenty houses and 
seven build five thousand and forty houses. From 
thence further go and reckon what the mouth cannot 
express and the ear cannot hear.  

Yezirah, Sepher 






Knowledge is not achieved until shared.

Unknown  







Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments 
give lustre, and many more people see than weigh 

Stanhope, Philip D. 






The learning and knowledge that we have, is, 
at the most, but little compared with that of 
which we are ignorant. 

Plato 






Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

Phillips, Wendell 






In expanding the field of knowledge we but 
increase the horizon of ignorance. 

Miller, Henry 






The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.

Laertius, Diogenes 






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







Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: 
to know so much and to have control over nothing. 

Herodotus 






Much learning does not teach understanding. 

Heraclitus 






Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

Hazlitt, William 






Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, 
but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel 
is lost in concealment.

Hall, Joseph 







The one self-knowledge worth having 
is to know one’s own mind. 

Bradley, F.H. 






If thou would'st have that stream of 
hard-earn'd knowledge, of Wisdom heaven-born, 
remain sweet running waters, thou should'st not 
leave it to become a stagnant pond. 

Blavatsky, H. P. 






He that hath knowledge spareth his words. (Proverbs 17:27) 

Bible






I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions 
saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who 
asked why. 

Baruch, Bernard Mannes 






If a man will begin with certainties, he will 
end in doubts; but if he will be content to 
begin with doubts, he will end in certainties. 

Bacon, Francis 





If a man will begin with certainties, he will 
end in doubts; but if he will be content to 
begin with doubts, he will end in certainties. 

Bacon, Francis 






Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. 

Addison, Joseph 







There is a point at which even justice does injury. 

Sophocles 






Justice without force is powerless; 
force without justice is tyrannical. 

Blaise Pascal 






Justice is an unassailable fortress, built 
on the brow of a mountain which cannot be 
overthrown by the violence of torrents, 
nor demolished by the force of armies. 

Koran 






Fidelity is the sister of justice. 

Horace  






If we are to keep our democracy, there must 
be one commandment: "Thou shalt not ration justice." 

Learned Hand  






Justice delayed, is justice denied. 

William E. Gladstone  







We win justice quickest by rendering 
justice to the other party. 

Mahatma Gandhi 






There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court. 

Clarence S. Darrow 






Justice, sir, is the great interest of man 
on earth. It is the ligament which holds 
civilized beings and civilized nations together. 

Daniel Webster  






Justice consists in doing no injury to men; 
decency in giving them no offense.

Cicero 








He who is only just is cruel. Who on earth 
could live were all judged justly? 

Lord Byron 






Judges must beware of hard constructions and 
strained inferences, for there is no worse 
torture than that of laws.

Francis Bacon  






To be perfectly just is an attribute of the 
divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our 
abilities, is the glory of man.  

Joseph Addison 






A child is a gift from God. 
He is not an accident or a consequence. 

Unknown






Children are the keys of paradise. 

Stoddard, Richard 






Call not that man wretched, who whatever 
ills he suffers, has a child to love. 

Southey, Robert 







That children link us with the future is 
hardly news. . . . When we participate in 
the growth of children, a sense of wonder 
must take hold of us, providing for us a 
sense of future. 

Nemiroff, Greta Hofmann 






A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words 
bruise the heart of a child. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 






Children are remarkable for their intelligence 
and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance 
of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their 
vision. 

Huxley, Aldous 






It is the malady of our age that the young are 
so busy teaching us that they have no time left 
to learn.

Hoffer, Eric 







Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity. 

Bovee, Christian Nestell 






A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. 

Stalin, Joseph 







The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, 
Which hurts and is desired. 
 
Shakespeare, William 







That which is so universal as death must be a benefit.

Schiller, Johann Von  






He whom the gods love dies young, while 
he is in health, has his senses and his 
judgments sound.

Plautus, Titus Maccius 






Property is unstable, and youth perishes in 
a moment. Life itself is held in the grinning 
fangs of Death, Yet men delay to obtain release 
from the world. Alas, the conduct of mankind
is surprising.

Nagarjuna  






Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

Montaigne, Michel De 






If you don't know how to die, don't worry; 
Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, 
fully and adequately. She will do this job 
perfectly for you; don't bother your head 
about it. 

Montaigne, Michel De 






It is not death, it is dying that alarms me. 
 
Montaigne, Michel De 






Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking 
from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light. 

Miller, Joaquin 








Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

Mencken, H.L.  






We begin to die as soon as we are born, 
and the end is linked to the beginning. 

Manilius 






The gods conceal from men the happiness of 
death, that they may endure life. 

Lucan 







We look at death through the cheap-glazed 
windows of the flesh, and believe him the 
monster which the flawed and cracked glass 
represents him.

Lowell, James Russell  






Dying is like getting out of a car. You 
leave a shell behind, but you're the same 
person as ever. 

Klein 







Strange - is it not? - that of the myriads 
who Before us passed the door of Darkness 
through, Not one returns to tell us of the 
road Which to discover we must travel too. 

Khayyam, Omar 






Pale death, with impartial step, knocks at 
the hut of the poor and the towers of kings. 

Horace







This man is freed from servile bands, 
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; 
Lord of himself, though not of lands, 
And leaving nothing, yet hath all. 

Herrick, Robert 







We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the 
moment of waking from a troubled dream; 
it may be so at the moment after death.  

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 







And I hear from the outgoing ship in the bay 
The song of the sailors in glee: 
So I think of the luminous footprints that bore 
The comfort o'er dark Galilee, 
And wait for the signal to go to the shore, 
To the ship that is waiting for me. 

Harte, Bret 







Man has the possibility of existence after death. 
But possibility is one thing and the realization 
of the possibility is quite a different thing.

Gurdjieff  







Death is a commingling of eternity with time; 
in the death of a good man, eternity is seen 
looking through time.  

Goethe, Johann Von 








The goal of all life is death.

Freud, Sigmund  






We do not know what to do with this short life, 
yet we yearn for another that will be eternal. 

France, Antole 







All changes, even the most longed for, have 
their melancholy; for what we leave behind 
us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one 
life before we can enter another. 

France, Antole 








The The path of immortality is hard, and 
only a few find it. The rest await the Great 
Day when the wheels of the universe shall be 
stopped and the immortal sparks shall escape 
from the sheaths of substance. Woe unto those 
who wait, for they must return again, unconscious 
and unknowing, to the seed-ground of stars, and 
await a new beginning. 

Divine Pymander






The Few cross the river of time and are able 
to reach non-being. Most of them run up and 
down only on this side of the river. But those 
who when they know the law follow the path of 
the law, they shall reach the other shore and 
go beyond the realm of death. 

Dhammapada







The life of the dead is placed in the memory 
of the living. 

Cicero 








That last day does not bring extinction to 
us, but change of place. 

Cicero 






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.  

Camus, Albert 







Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, 
And yet a third of life is passed in sleep. 

Byron, Lord 








There are five things which no one is able 
to accomplish in this world: first, to cease 
growing old when he is growing old; second, 
to cease being sick; third, to cease dying; 
fourth, to deny dissolution when there is 
dissolution; fifth, to deny non-being.

Buddha







The mark of your ignorance is the depth of 
your belief in in justice and tragedy. What 
the caterpillar calls the end of the world, 
the master calls a butterfly.  
 
Bach, Richard 






Labour not after riches first, and think thou 
afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth 
the present moment, throweth away all that he 
hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, 
while the warrior knew not that it was coming; 
so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth 
that he hath it.

Akhenaton  








The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. 

Wilde, Oscar 







I generally avoid temptation unless I can't 
resist it. 

West, Mae 







If you haven't all the things you want, 
be grateful for the things you don't have 
that you wouldn't want. 

Unknown 







Help me to resist temptation, Lord, 
especially when I know no one is looking. 

Unknown 







What is my loftiest ambition? I've always 
wanted to throw an egg at an electric fan.

Unknown 







I never resist temptation, because I have 
found that things that are bad for me do 
not tempt me.

Shaw, George Bernard








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

Shaw, George Bernard 







I'm a simple man. All I want is enough sleep 
for two normal men, enough whiskey for three, 
and enough women for four. 

Rosenberg, Joel 






Whatever you want too much you can't have, 
so when you REALLY want something, try to 
want it a little less. 

Rosenberg, Joel 







Those who flee temptation generally leave a 
forwarding address.

Olinghouse, Lane  







Lord, grant that I may always desire more 
than I accomplish.

Michelangelo  






Ambition is a poor excuse for not having 
sense enough to be lazy. 

McCarthy, Charlie 







It's not peace I want, not mere contentment. 
It's boundless joy and ecstasy for me. 

Kugell 







You know, sometimes a man just can't satisfy 
all of a woman's desires. Which is why God 
invented dental floss.

Kollrack , Susanne 






Love and desire are the spirit's wings 
to great deeds. 

Goethe, Johann Von 






Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his 
grasp -- or what's a heaven for?

Browning, Robert 







Better murder an infant in its cradle than 
nurse an unacted desire.

Blake, William 







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.  

Bell, Alexander Graham 







what a tangled web we weave when first we 
practise to deceive! 

Sir Walter Scott 







I believed thee true, 
And I was blest in thus believing; 
But now I mourn that ever I knew 
A girl so fair and so deceiving. 

Thomas Moore 





One who deceives will always find those 
who allow themselves to be deceived. 

Niccolo Machiavelli 







It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

La Fontaine, Jean 







Distrust all those who love you extremely 
upon a very slight acquaintance and without 
any visible reason. 

Lord Chesterfield 







The road goes ever on and on down from
the door where it began. Now far ahead 
the road has gone and I must follow if 
I can. Pursuing it with weary feet until 
it joins some larger way, where many paths 
and errands meet -and whither then, I cannot say.

Tolkien, J.R.R. 








Fate is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity. 

Syrus, Publilius 






Immortality--a fate worse than death.

Shoaff, Edgar A.  






There is no armor against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings.

Shirley, James 







Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings. 

Shakespeare, William 







Fate leads the willing and drags along 
the unwilling.

Seneca 







We may become the makers of our fate when 
we have ceased to pose as its prophets. 

Popper, Karl  








But blind to former as to future fate, 
What mortal knows his pre-existent state? 

Pope, Alexander 







There's someone out there for everyone-even 
if you need a pickaxe, a compass, and night 
goggles to find them. (L.A. Story) 
 
Martin, Steve 







It matters not how straight the gate 
How charged with punishments the scroll 
I am the master of my fate 
I am the captain of my soul.

Henley, William E.  








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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 







Death and life have their determined 
appointments; riches and honours depend 
upon heaven. 

Confucius 








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







There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

Camus, Albert   







Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a 
matter of choice; it is not a thing to be 
waited for, it is a thing to be achieved. 

Bryan, William Jennings 







Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat. 

Bowen, Elizabeth 






Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and 
a fool's excuse for failure. 

Bierce, Ambrose 







Ability lies in the mind and the heart. 
To tell your mind to limit your abilities 
and to ignore the calls of your heart is 
only disabling yourself. 

Unknown 






No one knows what he can do until he tries. 

Syrus, Publilius  








Ability is the art of getting credit for all 
the home runs somebody else hits. 

Stengel, Casey 






Competence, like truth, beauty and contact 
lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

Peter, Laurence J. 






Ability hits the mark where presumption 
overshoots and diffidence falls short.

Newman, John Henry 








From each according to his abilities, 
to each according to his needs.

Marx, Karl 







Ability wins us the esteem of the true men; 
luck that of the people. 

La Rochefoucauld, François 






There is great ability in knowing how to conveal 
one's ability. 
  
La Rochefoucauld, François  








The extraordinary ability of a woman to 
forget is not the same as the talent of 
a lady not to be able to remember.

Kraus, Karl  







When people find a man of the most distinguished 
abilities as a writer their inferior while he is 
with them, it must be highly gratifying to them. 

Johnson, Samuel 







A man dies still if he has done nothing, 
as one who has done much.

Homer 







Skill and confidence are an unconquered army.

Herbert, George 







The carpenter is not the best who makes more 
chips than all the rest. 

Guiterman, Arthur 







Reason and the ability to use it are two separate skills.

Grillparzer, Franz 








The winds and the waves are always on the side of 
the ablest navigators. 

Gibbon, Edward  







'Tis skill not strength that governs a ship.

 Fuller, Thomas  








Education is the ability to listen to almost 
anything without losing your temper or your 
self-confidence. 

Frost, Robert 







If they try to rush me, I always say, I've only 
got one other speed and it's slower. 

Ford, Glenn 







Our chief want in life is somebody who 
shall make us do what we can.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 







People are always ready to admit a man's ability 
after he gets there. 

Edwards, Bob 







The ability to get to the verge without getting 
into the war is the necessary art.... If you try 
to run away from it, if you are scared to go to 
the brink, you are lost. 

Dulles, John Foster 







If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy 
doing it badly. 

Brilliant, Ashleigh 






Men take only their needs into consideration 
never their abilities. 

Bonaparte, Napoleon 






Ability is of little account without opportunity.

Bonaparte, Napoleon 







Ability is commonly found to consist mainly 
in a high degree of solemnity.

Bierce, Ambrose







Natural abilities are like natural plants, 
that need pruning by study; and studies themselves 
do give forth directions too much at large, except 
they be bounded in by experience. 

Bacon, Francis 







Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow 
will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own 
trouble be sufficient for the day. 

Christ, Jesus 







Heaven lent you a soul Earth will lend a grave. 

-- Chinese Proverb 






Earth took her shining station as a star, 
In Heaven's dark hall, high up the crowd of 
worlds. 

-- Gamaliel Bailey 






Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, 
there is no straight world. There's a world, 
you see, which has people in it who believe in 
a variety of different things. Everybody believes 
in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact 
that they believe in something, use that something 
to support their own existence.  

Zappa, Frank  






At the core of all well founded belief, 
lies belief that is unfounded. 

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 







A thing is not necessarily true because a 
man dies for it. 

Wilde, Oscar 






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







Man can believe the impossible, but can never 
believe the improbable.  

Wilde, Oscar 







We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves. 

von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 







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

von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 







Doubt is not a pleasant condition, 
but certainty is absurd. 

Voltaire 






If you resist reading what you disagree with, 
how will you ever acquire deeper insights into 
what you believe? The things most worth reading 
are precisely those that challenge our convictions.

Unknown 







We all live in the protection of certain 
cowardices which we call our principles.

Twain, Mark 






Most people are bothered by those passages 
of Scripture they do not understand, but the 
passages that bother me are those I do 
understand.

Twain, Mark 







I know that most men, including those at 
ease with problems of the greatest complexity, 
can seldom accept even the simplest and most 
obvious truth if it be such as would oblige 
them to admit the falsity of conclusions which 
they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, 
which they have proudly taught to others, and 
which they have woven, thread by thread, into the 
fabric of their lives.

Tolstoy, Leo 







You believe that easily which you hope for 
earnestly.

Terence 






The man scarce lives who is not more credulous 
than he ought to be. The natural disposition is 
always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and 
experience only that teach incredulity, and they 
very seldom teach it enough. 

Smith, Adam 







Martyrdom has always been a proof of the 
intensity, never of the correctness of a belief. 

Schnitzler, Arthur 







In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then 
to hang a question mark on the things you have 
long taken for granted. 

Russell, Bertrand 







What we think, or what we know, or what we 
believe is, in the end, of little consequence. 
The only consequence is what we do. 

Ruskin, John 






Those who obstinately oppose the most widely 
held opinions more often do so because of pride 
than lack of intelligence. They find the best 
places in the right set already taken, and they 
do not want backseats.

Rochefoucauld, Francois 







So as this only point among the rest remaineth 
sure and certain, namely, that nothing is certain... 


Pliny the Elder 







A very popular error: having the courage of 
one's convictions; rather it is a matter of 
having the courage for an attack on one's 
convictions.

Nietzsche, Friedrich 







One person with a belief is equal to a force 
of ninety-nine who have only interests. 

Mill, John Stuart 







The public demands certainties; it must be 
told definitely and a bit raucously that this 
is true and that is false. But there are no 
certainties. 

Mencken, H.L. 







You can always pick up your needle 
and move to another groove. 

Leery, Timothy 








Credulity is the man's weakness, but the 
child's strength.

Lamb, Charles 







There are two ways to slide easily through life; 
to believe everything or to doubt everything. 
Both ways save us from thinking.  

Korzybski, Alfred 







If a man hasn't discovered something that he
will die for, he isn't fit to live. 

King Jr, Martin Luther 







Believe that life is worth living, and 
your belief will help create the fact. 

James, William 







The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.  

Hungarian Proverb 







I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: 
believe life; it teaches better than book or orator.

Goethe, Johann Von  








Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is. 

Gita, Bhagavad 







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

Galsworthy, John 








The practical effect of a belief is the 
real test of its soundness. 

Froude, James A. 






To die for an idea is to place a pretty high 
price upon conjectures. 

France, Antole 







There is a certain impertinence in allowing 
oneself to be burned for an opinion. 

France, Antole 






We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, 
as a tree bears beauty.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 








Man is ready to die for an idea, provided 
that idea is not quite clear to him.

Eldridge, Paul 







Conceptions without experience are void; 
experience without conceptions is blind. 

Einstein, Albert 








The Bible is a window in this prison of hope, 
through which we look into eternity. 

Dwight, John Sullivan 







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

de Montaigne, Michel 







I hear and I forget. I see and I believe. 
I do and I understand.

Confucious 







The final delusion is the belief that one 
has lost all delusions. 
 
Chapelain, Maurice 







It is always easier to believe than to deny. 
Our minds are naturally affirmative.

Burroughs, John 







Every time a child says, "I don't believe 
in fairies" there is a little fairy somewhere 
that falls down dead.  

Barrie, James Matthew 






If a man will begin incertainties he shall 
end in doubts; but if he will be content to 
begin in doubts he shall end in certainties 

Bacon, Francis 







Theory: when you have ideas. 
Ideology: when ideas have you.

Anon.  







It is easier to fight for principles 
than to live up to them. 

Adler, Alfred 







Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: 
this apodictic rock beneath my feet. 

Abbey, Edward 







Men love their ideas more than their lives. 
And the more preposterous the idea, the more 
eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.

Abbey, Edward 






That depends on what your definition of 'is' is.

President Clinton







Nought shall prevail against us, 
or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.  
Young Faith is not reason's labor, but repose.  

Wordsworth, William 







When faith is lost, when honor dies, 
the man is dead. 

Whittier, John Greenleaf 







Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; 
it is an element of faith.  

Tillich, Paul 







The smallest seed of faith is better than 
the largest fruit of happiness.

Thoreau, Henry David 







It's not dying for faith that's so hard, 
it's living up to it.

Thackeray, William Makepeace 






Kind hearts are more than coronets, 
And simple faith than Norman blood. 

Tennyson 







Alas, reason is not effective against faith, 
or against searches for miracles by the desperate. 

Shimkin, Dr. Michael B. 






We have not lost faith, but we have 
transferred it from God to the medical profession.   

Shaw, George Bernard 







Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

Santayana, George 







For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, 
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.

Alexander Pope 


If the work of God could be comprehended by 
reason, it would be no longer wonderful, and 
faith would have no merit if reason provided proof. 

Pope Gregory I 







Faith: not wanting to know what is true. 

Nietzsche, Friedrich 








Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical 
belief in the occurrence of the improbable. 

Mencken, H.L. 







The world cannot always understand a person's 
profession of faith, but it can understand service. 

Maclaren, Ian  







A wise ruler ought never to keep faith 
when by doing so it would be against his 
interests. 

Machiavelli, Nicolo 







There is no wild beast so ferocious as 
Christians who differ concerning their faith.

Lecky, W.E.H 







Faith is often the boast of the man 
who is too lazy to investigate. 

Knowles, F.M. 







I always prefer to believe the best of 
everybody - it saves so much trouble. 

Kipling, Rudyard 






Without risk there is no faith. Faith is 
precisely the contradiction between the 
infinite passion of the individual's inwardness 
and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable 
of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, 
but precisely because I cannot do this I must 
believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith 
I must constantly be intent upon holding fast 
the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out 
upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of 
water, still preserving my faith. 

Kierkegaard, Soren 








Faith means intense, usually confident, belief 
that is not based on evidence sufficient to command 
assent from every reasonable person. 

Kauffman, Walter  







Faith means belief in something concerning which 
doubt is theoretically possible.

James, William 







Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable 
extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

Hoffer, Eric 







Faith is the substance of things hoped for, 
the evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews






Treat the other man's faith gently: 
it is all he has to believe with. 

Haskins, Henry S.







Cutting the space budget really restores my 
faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals,
and ideals and lets us get straight to the 
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation.  


Hart, Johnny 







Faith is one of those words that 
connotes, however irrationally, 
some kind of virtue in itself.
Halle, Louis J. 








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

Gibran, Kahlil 








The faith that stands on authority is not faith.  
 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 







Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.

de Unamuno, Miguel 






Faith lights us through the dark to Deity. 

Davenant 








Faith is love taking the form of aspiration. 

Channing, William Ellery







Faith is the soul going out of itself for all its wants.  

Boston







Faith: Belief without evidence in what 
is told by one who speaks, without knowledge, 
of things without parallel.  

Bierce, Ambrose 








If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, 
that giveth to all men liberally and 
upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. 
But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. 

(James I, 5&6) 


 




And now abideth faith, hope and charity, 
these three; but the greatest of these is charity. 

(I Corinthians)


 



Cast thy bread upon the waters: 
for thou shalt find it after many days. 

(Ecclesiastes 11:1) 


 




Faith is the substance of things hoped for, 
the evidence of things not seen. 

(Hebrews 11 1) 


 




Faith is never identical with piety.  

Barth, Karl 



 




I am mortified to be told that, in the 
United States of America, the sale of 
a book can become a subject of inquiry, 
and of criminal inquiry too. 

Thomas Jefferson


 





Not in the clamor of the crowded street, 
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, 
But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


 




Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; 
love your fellows; console the afflicted; 
pardon those who have done you wrong.

Zoroaster


 




Diligence is the mother of good fortune. 

Cervantes


 





Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter

Harrison


 




Don't let grass grow on the path of friendship. 

(Blackfoot Indian)


 




You can't see the whole sky through a bamboo tube. 

(Japanese)


 




People show their character by what they laugh at. 

(German)


 



 
Spending is quick, earning is slow. 

(Russian)


 




It is better to prevent than to cure. 

(Peruvian)


 




Promise little and do much. 

(Hebrew)


 




What one hopes for is always better than one has. 

(Ethiopian)



 



 
A good example is the best sermon. 

(English)





There is often wisdom under a shaggy coat. 

(Latin)


 




Prayer only from the mouth is no prayer. 

(Jamaican)


 



 
Prayer only from the mouth is no prayer. 

(Jamaican)


 



 

Postpone today's anger until tomorrow. 

(Tagalog, Filipino)


 



 
Doubt is the key to knowledge. 

(Iranian)


 




Liberty has no price. 

(Spanish)



 




Children have more need of models than of critics. 

(French)


 




Success has many parents, but failure is an orphan 

(American)


 



Better to suffer for truth than to prosper by falsehood 

(Danish)


 



 
Heroism consists of hanging on one minute longer 

(Norwegian)


 



 

One head cannot hold all wisdom 

(Maasai, East Africa)


 



 
We've got to judge the judge

Pete Townshend


 




Take this bus to Cuba.

Monty Python



 




You're crashing by design.

Pete Townshend


 



 
And you, without question, know your first
love is your last, and you, you will never,
you will never, you will never, you will 
never love again!

Pete Townshend



 



 
The White City, that's a joke of a name,
It's a black violent place if I remember the game.

Pete Townshend


 




you gotta fool the fool...

Pete Townshend


 


 
He's a lumberjack and he's OK
He sleeps all night and he works all day.

Monty Python


 




Now if anybody else pinches my phrase I'll 
throw them under a camel

Monty Python


 





Give blood, and some will say blood's not enough...

Pete Townshend


 



 
In my life I've loved them all

Lennon/MaCartney


 


 
Didn't anybody tell her, didn't anybody see...

Lennon/MaCartney



 




Elenor Rigby wearing a face that she 
keeps in a jar by the door

Lennon/MaCartney


 



 
Aint it just like the night to play tricks 
when your trying to be so quiet

Bob Dylan


 




His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean.
Bob Dylan


 



 
 I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift  of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount  to something; I don't know where I would be without it.  Thomas Mann  

 



We always love those who admire us; we do not 
always love those whom we admire.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld







Oh! death will find me long before I tire of watching you.

Rupert Brooke 







The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

Francis H. Bradley






Admiration is a very short-lived passion 
that immediately decays upon growing familiar 
with its object, unless it be still fed with 
fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new 
perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.

Joseph Addison






As a rule, I am very careful to be shallow and 
conventional where depth and originality are wasted.

Lucy Maud Montgomery 







To the man who only has a hammer, everything 
he encounters begins to look like a nail.

Abraham H. Maslow






A well adjusted person is one who makes the same 
mistake twice without getting nervous.

Jane Heard 






We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.

Alexander Hamilton 






Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.

Clarissa 







One learns to itch where one can scratch.

Ernest Bramah 







I found out that if you are going to win games, 
you had better be ready to adapt.

Scotty Bowman 







Learn to adjust yourself to the conditions you 
have to endure, but make a point of trying to 
alter or correct conditions so that they are most 
favorable to you.

William Frederick Book






Ability is a poor man's wealth.

M. Wren







Ability may get you to the top, but it takes 
character to keep you there.

John Wooden 







We all have ability. The difference is how we use it.

Stevie Wonder  







Whatever women do they must do twice as well as 
men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is 
not difficult.

Charlotte Whitton 







The world cares very little about what a man or 
woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able 
to do that counts.

Booker T. Washington







They are able because they think they are able.

Virgil 








Wicked people are always surprised to 
find ability in those that are good.

Marquis De Vauvenargues 







God does not ask about our ability, but our availability.

Source Unknown 







I know of no more encouraging fact than the 
unquestionable ability of man to elevate his 
life by conscious endeavor.

Henry David Thoreau 








A genius can't be forced; nor can you make 
an ape an alderman.

Thomas Somerville







Martyrdom is the only way a man can become 
famous without ability.

George Bernard Shaw








Natural abilities can almost compensate for the 
want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation 
of the mind can make up for the want of natural 
abilities.

Arthur Schopenhauer







When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

John Ruskin 







No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

John Ruskin 







The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, 
the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation.
It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it 
fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, 
try something.

Theodore Roosevelt 







If you count all your assets you always show a profit.

Robert Quillen 







When one must, one can.

Yiddish Proverb 






Behind every able man, there are always other able men.

Chinese Proverb







Executive ability is deciding quickly and 
getting somebody else to do the work.

John G. Pollard







The boy was as useless as rubber lips on a woodpecker.

Earl Pitts 






Man cannot live by incompetence alone.

Laurence J. Peter 







Ability is sexless.

Christabel Pankhurst







Ability hits the mark where presumption 
overshoots and diffidence falls short.

John Henry Newman 







Analyzing what you haven't got as well as what
you have is a necessary ingredient of a career.

Grace Moore 







The Creator has not given you a longing to do 
that which you have no ability to do.

Orison Swett Marden 







Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.

Titus Livy 








To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld 







The height of ability consists in a thorough knowledge 
of the real value of things, and of the genius of the 
age in which we live.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld 







It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.

Kin Hubbard 








It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability 
to discover ability in others is the true test.

Elbert Hubbard 







I won't accept anything less than the best a 
player's capable of doing... and he has the 
right to expect the best that I can do for 
him and the team!

Lou Holtz 








As life is action and passion, it is required 
of a man that he should share the passion and 
action of his time, at the peril of being not 
to have lived.

Oliver Wendell Holmes 







Never tell a young person that anything cannot 
be done. God may have been waiting centuries for 
someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do 
that very thing.

John Andrew Holmes 







Every person is responsible for all the good within 
the scope of his abilities, and for no more, and none 
can tell whose sphere is the largest.

Gail Hamilton 







There is something that is much more scarce, 
something rarer than ability. It is the ability 
to recognize ability.

Robert Half 







The person born with a talent they are meant to 
use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe 







Our work is the presentation of our capabilities.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe 






The winds and waves are always on the side of 
the ablest navigators.

Edward Gibbon 







I know I have the ability to do so much more 
than just stand in front of the camera the rest 
of my life.

Jennie Garth 







As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

James A. Froude







Whether you think you can or whether you think 
you can't, you're right!

Henry Ford







It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing 
Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.

Henry Ford 







Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.

Malcolm S. Forbes   








Others have done it before me. I can, too.

Corporal John Faunce  







When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.

William Faulkner 







There are some people who live in a dream world,
and there are some who face reality; and then 
there are those who turn one into the other.

Douglas Everett 








The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. 
But that is the best of all.

Desiderius Erasmus 







People with great gifts are easy to find, 
but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Ralph Waldo Emerson








Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their 
ability to outgrow small ones.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 







The first requisite for success is the ability to 
apply your physical and mental energies to one 
problem incessantly without growing weary.

Thomas A. Edison 







To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery 
of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.

Charles Caleb Colton 







Aptitude found in the understanding and is often 
inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, 
rarely.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 






I add this, that rational ability without education 
has oftener raised man to glory and virtue, than 
education without natural ability.

Marcus T. Cicero







I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the 
things that, as one might put it, me can do, but 
I cannot do the things that me would like to do.

Agatha Christie







When it is a question of God's almighty Spirit, never say, "I can't."

Oswald Chambers 







No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

Andrew Carnegie 







The king is the man who can.

Thomas Carlyle 







What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.

Thomas Carlyle 







The extent of your consciousness is limited only by 
your ability to love and to embrace with your love 
the space around you, and all it contains

Ken Carey 







Ability is of little account without opportunity.

Napoleon Bonaparte







Knowing what you can not do is more important than 
knowing what you can do. In fact, that's good taste.

Lucille Ball







I thought he was a young man of promise, but it 
appears he is a young man of promises. 
[Speaking Of Winston Churchill]

Arthur James Balfour 






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

Francis Bacon 







Just do what you do best.

Red Auerbach







In my hut this spring, there is nothing -- there is everything!

Sodo






The universe is full of magical things patiently 
waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Eden Phillpotts







Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

John Petit-Senn







Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is to little.

Epicurus 






Everything you need you already have. You are 
complete right now, you are a whole, total person, 
not an apprentice person on the way to someplace 
else. Your completeness must be understood by you 
and experienced in your thoughts as your own 
personal reality.

Wayne Dyer 







A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of 
the things which he possesseth. [Luke 12:15]

Bible







Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous 
body of Christianity.

Oscar Wilde






Always rise from the table with an appetite, 
and you will never sit down without one.

William Penn






Abstaining is favorable both to the head and the pocket.

Horace Greeley 







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

W. C. Fields   







All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

Epictetus  







Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

George Eliot 







Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.

Charles Dickens







The best thing to do with the best things in life 
is to give them up.

Dorothy Day 








With renunciation life begins.

Amelia E. Barr 







Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

Natalie Clifford Barney 







Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.

St. Augustine 








Greater things are believed of those who are absent.

Publius Cornelius Tacitus  







How like a winter hath my absence been. 
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! 
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, 
What old December's bareness everywhere!

William Shakespeare 








Failing to be there when a man wants her is a 
woman's greatest sin, except to be there when 
he doesn't want her.

Helen Rowland 







Never find fault with the absent.

Proverb 







A short absence is the safest.

Ovid  







Absence and death are the same -- only that in death 
there is no suffering.

Walter Savage Landor 







When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.

Thomas ã Kempis 







Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.

Sir Matthew Hale 






The people who are absent are the ideal; those 
who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe 







Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.

Thomas Fuller 






The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse.

Benjamin Franklin 






Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Michael Crichton 







Absence from whom we love is worse than death, 
and frustrates hope severer than despair.

William Cowper







It takes time for the absent to assume their true 
shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a 
firmer outline and then cease to change.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette 







Our hours in love have wings; in absence, crutches.

Colley Cibber 







Absence -- that common cure of love.

Miguel De Cervantes 







No man is so perfect, so necessary to his friends, 
as to give them no cause to miss him less.

Jean De La Bruyère 








Sometimes I need what only you can provide, your absence.

Ashleigh Brilliant 







Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

Elizabeth Bowen   







Woman absent is woman dead.

Ambrose Bierce   








Separation penetrates the disappearing person 
like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

Walter Benjamin  







I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced 
to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot 
me in my absence.

Brendan F. Behan   








Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, 
but it sure heats up the blood.

Elizabeth Ashley  







Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Source Unknown  







Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to 
a lady, but a newspaper can always print a 
retraction.

Adlai E. Stevenson  







Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, 
of dishonesty.

Charles Simmons  







From principles is derived probability, 
but truth or certainty is obtained only 
from facts.

Nathaniel Hawthorne  







Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements 
of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood.

Tryon Edwards  






We must accept life for what it actually is -- a 
challenge to our quality without which we should 
never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to 
our full stature.

Ida R. Wylie 







Some people swallow the universe like a pill; 
they travel on through the world, like smiling 
images pushed from behind.

Robert Louis Stevenson







Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

Denis De Rougamont 







For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow 
circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions 
or local politics) he feels himself master of his 
fate, but against major events he is as helpless 
as against the elements. So far from endeavoring 
to influence the future, he simply lies down and 
lets things happen to him.

George Orwell 







Accept everything about yourself -- I mean everything, 
You are you and that is the beginning and the end -- no 
apologies, no regrets.

Clark Moustakas 







The art of acceptance is the art of making someone 
who has just done you a small favor wish that he 
might have done you a greater one.

Russell Lynes 








We will have to repent in this generation not merely 
for the hateful words and actions of the bad people 
but for the appalling silence of the good people.

Martin Luther King Jr.







Ah, when to the heart of man was it ever less than 
a treason to go with the drift of things to yield 
with a grace to reason and bow and accept at the 
end of a love or a season.

Robert Frost  







Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

Brendan Francis  







One must not attempt to justify them, but rather 
to sense their nature simply and clearly.

Albert Einstein 






How can men who've never seen light be enlightened?

Pete Townshend  






The minute you settle for less than you deserve, 
you get even less than you settled for.

Maureen Dowd  







To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, 
is a very different thing from being a passive object.

Simone De Beauvoir   







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

Mark Twain  







If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, 
you'll never end up with a nag. 

Zig Ziglar 








For what it's worth, it was worth all the while.

Green Day








If you choose not to decide, you still 
have made a choice.

Neal Peart








Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a 
College Education. 

Mark Twain 







A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, 
science into superstition, and art into pedantry. 
Hence University education. 

George Bernard Shaw







A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, 
science into superstition, and art into pedantry. 
Hence University education. 

George Bernard Shaw







The telephone is a good way to talk to people without 
having to offer them a drink. 

Fran Leibowitz






Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach. 

H. L. Mencken 







Success is going from failure to failure 
without losing enthusiasm. 

Winston Churchill 







When I hear a man preach, I like to see 
him act as if he were fighting bees. 

Abraham Lincoln 







There's no one... no one, loves you like yourself. 

Brendan Behan 







The trouble with the rat race is that even if you 
win you are still a rat. 

Lily Tomlin 






Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve 
at a funeral? It is because we are not the person 
involved. 

Mark Twain 







I do not object to people looking at their watches 
when I am speaking. But I do strongly object when 
they start shaking them to make sure they are still 
going. 

Lord Birkett  







I've been on a calendar, but never on time. 

Marilyn Monroe 







There are two things in this life for which we 
are never fully prepared and that is twins. 

Josh Billings







It is impossible to travel faster than light, 
and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps 
blowing off. 

Woody Allen 







Everything is miraculous. It is miraculous that one 
does not melt in ones' bath. 

Pablo Picasso








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

Mark Twain 







For those who like this sort of thing, this is 
the sort of thing they like. 

Abraham Lincoln







Life was a funny thing that occurred on the way to the grave. 

Quentin Crisp








She had a penetrating sort of laugh. 
Rather like a train going into a tunnel. 

P.G. Wodehouse 







Anything aweful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once 
at a funeral. 

Charles Lamb








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

Mark Twain 







The government is the only known vessel that 
leaks from the top. 

James Reston







Why is it when we talk to God, we're said to be 
praying, but when God talks to us, we're schizophrenic. 

Lily Tomlin 







As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" -- probably 
because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. 

Woody Allen 







Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the 
test first, the lesson afterward. 

Vernon Law 







When in doubt, tell the truth. 

Mark Twain






It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't 
want to be there when it happens. 

Woody Allen 







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

Henry Kissinger 







Conscience is the inner voice that warns us 
somebody may be looking. 

H. L. Mencken 







He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents, 
and then, when sentence was about to be pronounced pleaded 
for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. 

Abraham Lincoln 
 






I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread 
one day at a time. 

Charles Schultz 
 






Having a baby is like taking your lower lip 
and forcing it over your head. 

Carol Burnett 
 







A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella 
in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins 
to rain. 

Robert Frost 







The best audience is intelligent, well-educated 
and a little drunk. 

Alben W. Barkley (U.S. Vice President)







A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come 
on the same person. 

Zig Ziglar   








I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, 
and I did. I said I didn't know. 

Mark Twain  







Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket. 

Mark Twain 








Always do right! This will gratify some people and 
astonish the rest. 

Mark Twain 







One of the most important things to remember about 
infant care is never change diapers in midstream. 

Don Marquis







Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your 
time and it annoys the pig. 

Paul Dickson 







Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you 
want to test a man's character, give him power. 

Abraham Lincoln 







My dear boy, forget about the motivation. Just 
say the lines and don't trip over the furniture. 

Noel Coward







Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, 
on the day the first book was written.

Yevgeny Zamyatin 






Choose an author as you choose a friend.

Sir Christopher Wren 







Old books that have ceased to be of service should 
no more be abandoned than should old friends who 
have ceased to give pleasure.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne 







Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Bert Williams  






Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.

Walt Whitman 







Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Jessamyn West







Ideally a book would have no order to it, 
and the reader would have to discover his own.

Raoul Vaneigem 







My books are water; those of the great geniuses 
are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Mark Twain  







One half who graduate from college never read another book.

Herbert True 







Education... has produced a vast population able to read 
but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy 
prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

G. M. Trevelyan 








No matter how busy you may think you are, you must 
find time for reading, or surrender yourself to 
self-chosen ignorance.

Atwood H. Townsend 







Read the best books first, or you may not have a 
chance to read them at all.

Henry David Thoreau 







What is a diary as a rule? A document useful 
to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary 
who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries 
afterwards, who treasures it.

Helen Terry  








Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value 
from the stamp and esteem of the ages through 
which they have passed

Sir William Temple 







Most books, like their authors, are born to die; 
of only a few books can it be said that death has 
no dominion over them; they live, and their 
influence lives forever.

J. Swartz 








A great book should leave you with many experiences 
and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live 
several lives while reading it.

William Styron 







Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? 
Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?

Fred Stoller







Only a generation of readers will span a 
generation of writers.

Steven Spielberg 







People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith 







What is the most precious, the most exciting 
smell awaiting you in the house when you return 
to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of 
roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Andre Sinyavsky 







How can you dare teach a man to read until 
you've taught him everything else first?

George Bernard Shaw 






Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is 
made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've 
been reading all my life.

Giorgos Seferis 







I've never know any trouble than an hour's 
reading didn't assuage.

Charles de Secondat 







I am what libraries and librarians have made me, 
with little assistance from a professor of Greek 
and poets.

B. K. Sandwell 







A library is thought in cold storage.

Herbert Samuel 







Be sure that you go to the author to get at 
his meaning, not to find yours.

John Ruskin







Prerequisite for rereadability in books: 
that they be forgettable.

Jean Rostand








Very young children eat their books, literally 
devouring their contents. This is one reason for 
the scarcity of first editions of Alice in 
Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

A. S. W. Rosenbach 







The reason that fiction is more interesting than 
any other form of literature, to those who really 
like to study people, is that in fiction the author 
can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Eleanor Roosevelt 







Everything you need for better future and 
success has already been written. And guess 
what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Jim Rohn 








Upon books the collective education of the 
race depends; they are the sole instruments 
of registering, perpetuating and transmitting 
thought.

Henry C. Rogers 







The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

American Proverb 






Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us 
away from home, but more important, it finds homes 
for us everywhere.

Hazel Rochman 








No one can read with profit that which he 
cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Noah Porter 







The last thing one discovers in composing a 
work is what to put first.

Blaise Pascal








A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. 
Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through 
the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Pablo Neruda 






A dose of poison can do its work but once. 
A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

William Murray 







Books and marriage go ill together.

Molière 








Deep versed in books and shallow in himself.

John Milton 







Any book that helps a child to form a habit of 
reading, to make reading one of his deep and 
continuing needs, is good for him.

Richard McKenna 







The book to read is not the one which thinks 
for you, but the one which makes you think. 
No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh   







Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Harriet Martineau  







Once we have learned to read, meaning of 
words can somehow register without consciousness.

Anthony Marcel 







The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives 
with another who shares the same books.

Katherine Mansfield  






Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Stephane Mallarme 







A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long 
as the average cat.

Hugh Maclennan 







In science, read by preference the newest works. 
In literature, read the oldest. The classics are 
always modern.

Lord Edward Lytton 







For books are more than books, they are the life, 
the very heart and core of ages past, the reason 
why men lived and worked and died, the essence and 
quintessence of their lives.

Amy Lowell 







A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, 
you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Georg C. Lichtenberg 







You've really got to start hitting the books 
because it's no joke out here.

Spike Lee  








Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved 
to read. One does not love breathing.

Harper Lee 







What is reading, but silent conversation.

Walter Savage Landor 









I am a part of everything that I have read.

John Kieran 







Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, 
except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Thomas ã Kempis 







The worst thing about new books is that they keep 
us from reading the old ones.

Joseph Joubert







Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

Joineriana







Books that you carry to the fire, and hold 
readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Samuel Johnson 







Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as 
long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, 
then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of 
capital, and often in the case of professional men, 
setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Thomas Jefferson






Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or 
enjoy friendship, love or life.

Holbrook Jackson 







The newest books are those that never grow old.

George Holbrook Jackson 







A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Anthony Hope 







The books we read should be chosen with great care, 
that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his 
library, "The medicines of the soul."

Paxton Hood 








The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, 
but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of 
music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes 









Books give not wisdom where none was before. 
But where some is, there reading makes it more.

John Harington







The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is 
cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives 
you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. 
It is a moral illumination.

Elizabeth Hardwick







The first time I read an excellent work, it is 
to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when 
I read over a book I have perused before, it 
resembles the meeting of an old one.

Sir James Goldsmith 







I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have 
but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded 
of all sorts of things.

George Robert Gissing 







When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact 
no longer be reading numbers, any more than you 
read words when reading books You will be reading 
meanings.

Harold S. Geneen 







A house is not a home unless it contains food 
and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Margaret Fuller 






Read much, but not many books.

Benjamin Franklin 








Read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert 







If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all 
the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in 
exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.

Francois FéNelon 









There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 







Our high respect for a well read person is praise 
enough for literature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 








Never judge a book by its movie.

J. W. Eagan 







There is an art of reading, as well as an art 
of thinking, and an art of writing.

Isaac Disraeli







The man who is fond of books is usually a man 
of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.

Christopher Dawson 







Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Paul Davies







The great American novel has not only already 
been written, it has already been rejected.

Frank Dane






You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you 
spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Jim Critchfield 







The book salesman should be honored because he 
brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books 
we need most and neglect most.

Frank Crane 







I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio 







Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more 
truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

William Cobbett 






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

Marcus T. Cicero 







The mere brute pleasure of reading --
the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Gilbert K. Chesterton







Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Lord Chesterfield







The flood of print has turned reading into a 
process of gulping rather than savoring.

Warren Chappell 







A good title is the title of a successful book.

Raymond Chandler 







Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Robert Chambers 








Books are standing counselors and preachers, 
always at hand, and always disinterested; having 
this advantage over oral instructors, that they 
are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Oswald Chambers 







The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, 
television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good 
feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old 
lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. 
Finished.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine 







After all manner of professors have done their
best for us, the place we are to get knowledge 
is in books. The true university of these days 
is a collection of books.

Thomas Carlyle 








A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put 
into images.

Albert Camus 







It is well to read everything of something, 
and something of everything.

Lord Henry P. Brougham 






There are worse crimes than burning books. 
One of them is not reading them.

Joseph Brodsky







You don't have to burn books to destroy a 
culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury 







Reading is not a duty, and has consequently 
no business to be made disagreeable.

Augustine Birrell 









I read the newspaper avidly. It is my 
one form of continuous fiction.

Aneurin Bevan 







All the best stories in the world are but 
one story in reality -- the story of escape. 
It is the only thing which interests us all 
and at all times, how to escape.

Arthur Christopher Benson 







Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Stephen Vincent Benet







A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, 
a party, a company by the way, a counselor, 
a multitude of counselors.

Henry Ward Beecher







Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Charles Baudelaire 








The world may be full of fourth-rate writers 
but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Stan Barstow








He that loves a book will never want a faithful 
friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, 
an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by 
thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly 
entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all 
fortunes.

Barrow 







To feel most beautifully alive means to be 
reading something beautiful, ready always 
to apprehend in the flow of language the 
sudden flash of poetry.

Gaston Bachelard  






The printing press is either the greatest 
blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, 
sometimes one forgets which it is.

Sir James M. Barrie 








Books are men of higher stature; the only men 
that speak aloud for future times to hear.

E.S. Barrett 







To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading 
something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in 
the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.


Gaston Bachelard 







He had read much, if one considers his long life; 
but his contemplation was much more than his reading. 
He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other 
men he should have known no more than other men.

John Aubrey 








I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Isaac Asimov 







Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Mortimer J. Adler 








Of all the diversions of life, there is none 
so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the 
reading of useful and entertaining authors.

Joseph Addison 







Show me the books he loves and I shall know 
the man far better than through mortal friends.

Dawn Adams 








I never worry about action; only inaction

Winston Churchill






If one is master of one thing and understands 
one thing well, one has at the same time, insight 
into and understanding of many things. 

Van Gogh 







Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. 
It would seem strange if old friends lacked 
certain quirks. 

Goethe 







There are people who strictly deprive themselves 
of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable 
which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. 
They pay this price for health. And health is all 
they get for it. How strange it is. It is like 
paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has 
gone dry. 

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 







Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. 

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 







The secret source of humour itself is not 
joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.
 
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 







It is not best that we should all think 
alike; it is difference of opinion that 
make horseraces. 

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), 
from Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar(1894) 








Let us endeavor to live that when we 
come to die even the undertaker will 
be sorry. 

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), 
from Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar(1894) 







The radical of one century is the conservative 
of the next. The radical invents the views. 
When he has worn them out, the conservative 
adopts them. 

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)







Good friends, good books and a sleepy 
conscience: this is the ideal life. 
(The conviction of the rich that the 
poor are happier is no more foolish 
than the conviction of the poor that 
the rich are.) 

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 








It is better to deserve honours and not 
have them than to have them and not to 
deserve them. 

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 







Good breeding consists in concealing 
how much we think of ourselves and how 
little we think of the other person.
 
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), Notebooks(1935) 








The fact that man knows right from wrong 
proves his intellectual superiority to other 
creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong 
proves his moral inferiority to any creature 
that cannot. 

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), What Is Man?(1906) 







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

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), 
Inscription beneath his bust in the 
Hall of Fame. 







Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. 
The minute it crops up, all our irritations 
and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit 
takes their place 

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 







It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
 
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), spoken by Huck Finn, 
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 







Take Nothing but Pictures. Leave nothing 
but footprints. Kill nothing but time. 

Motto of the National Speleological Society 







The man who goes alone can start today; but 
he who travels with another must wait till 
that other is ready. 

Henry David Thoreau, Walden(1854),I,Economy 






Civilization is the progress toward a 
society of privacy. The savage's whole 
existence is public, ruled by the laws 
of his tribe. Civilization is the process 
of setting man free from men. 

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943) 







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

Thomas Paine 







In wildness is the preservation of the world. 

Henry David Thoreau, Walking(1862) 







Money often costs too much. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 







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

Thomas Paine 







One man scorned and covered with scars
still strove with his last ounce of courage
to reach the unreachable stars;
and the world will be better for this.
 
Mitch Leigh, The Quest, based on Cervantes 








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

William Shakespeare, spoken by Macbeth, 
Macbeth,(Act V, scene v) 






He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again. 

William Shakespeare, Hamlet,(Act I, scene ii) 







What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! 
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how 
express and admirable! in action how like an angel! 
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the 
world, the paragon of animals! 

William Shakespeare, spoken by Hamlet, 
Hamlet,(Act II, scene ii) 








This above all: to thine own self be true 

William Shakespeare, Hamlet,(Act I, scene iii) 







What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet. 

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet,(Act II, scene ii)  







Everything should be as simple as possible, 
but no simpler. 

Albert Einstein 








How I wish that somewhere there existed 
an island for those who are wise and of 
good will. 

Albert Einstein 







Never do anything against conscience even 
if the state demands it. 

Albert Einstein  








Heroism on command, senseless violence, 
and all the loathsome nonsense that goes 
by the name of patriotism -- how passionately 
I hate them! 

Albert Einstein 







Great spirits have always found violent opposition 
from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it 
when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary 
prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his 
intelligence. 

Albert Einstein 






The further the spiritual evolution of 
mankind advances, the more certain it 
seems to me that the path to genuine 
religiosity does not lie through the 
fear of life, and the fear of death, 
and blind faith, but through striving 
after rational knowledge. 

Albert Einstein 








A man's ethical behavior should be based 
effectually on sympathy, education, and 
social ties; no religious basis is necessary. 
Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had 
to be restrained by fear of punishment and 
hope of reward after death. 

Albert Einstein 







Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. 

Henry David Thoreau, Walden(1854),I,Economy 







Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, 
have governed my life: the longing for love, the 
search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the 
suffering of mankind. 

Bertrand Russell, Autobiography 







What a poor appearance the tales of poets 
make when stripped of the colours which 
music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
 
Plato, The Republic. Book X. 601B 







Democracy, which is a charming form of government, 
full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort 
of equality to equals and unequals alike. 

Plato, The Republic. Book VIII. 558 







Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no 
harm to the body; but knowledge which is 
acquired under compulsion obtains no hold 
on the mind. 

Plato, The Republic. Book VII. 536 






Astronomy compels the soul to look 
upwards and leads us from this world 
to another. 

Plato, The Republic. Book VII. 529 







If at first you don't succeed, well, 
so much for skydiving. 

Victor O'Reilly, Games of the Hangman 







In a mad world, only the mad are sane. 

Akiro Kurosawa 






Our care should not be to have lived long 
as to have lived enough. 

Seneca 







I think; therefore I am. 

Rene Descartes 







Every man is the architect of his own fortune. 

Appius Claudius 






No man ever steps in the same river twice, 
for it's not the same river and he's not the 
same man. 

Heraclitus 







Nothing endures but change. 

Heraclitus 







Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven. 

Milton 







"A is A"

Poster on wall of Ayn Rand preschool on
The Simpsons.







Necessity, who is the mother of invention. 

Plato, The Republic. Book II. 369C 







It is a far, far better thing that I do, 
than I have ever done; it is a far, far better 
rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
 
Charles Dickens, end of A Tale of Two Cities 








The books that the world calls immoral are 
the books that show the world its own shame. 

Oscar Wilde 







Let deeds match words.

Platus







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

Oscar Wilde 








"When the first baby laughed for the first 
time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces 
and they all went skipping about, and that 
was the beginning of fairies. And now when 
every new baby is born its first laugh becomes 
a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for 
every boy or girl."

-- James Matthew Barrie Peter Pan 







"One unquenchable longing has the mastery 
of me, which hitherto I neither would nor 
could repress; 'tis an insatiable craving 
for books, although, perhaps, I already 
have more than I ought."

-- Francesco Petrarch, in Francesco 
Petrarca by E.H.R. Tatham 








"There are some people... who are 
constantly drunk on books, as other 
men are drunk on whiskey or religion. 
They wander through this most diverting 
and stimulating of worlds in a haze, 
seeing nothing and hearing nothing."

-- H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: 
H.L. Mencken's Notebooks, 1956 







"An inconvenience is only an adventure 
wrongly considered; an adventure is an 
inconvenience rightly considered."

-- On Running After Ones Hat, All 
Things Considered, G.K. Chesterton 







"Outside of a dog, a book is Man's best 
friend. And inside of a dog, it's too 
dark to read."

-- Groucho Marx 







"When I want a book, it is as a tiger 
wants a sheep. I must have it with one 
spring, and, if I miss it, go away 
defeated and hungry."

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The 
Poet at the Breakfast-Table, 1872 






"There is no true love without some 
sensuality. One is not happy in books 
unless one loves to caress them."

-- Anatole France, On Life and 
Letters, 1914  







"What wild desires, what restless torments seize
The hapless man, who feels the book-disease."

-- Dr. John Ferriar, "The Bibliomania: 
An Epistle to Richard Herber, Esq.," 1863 







"Bibliomaniac: A victim of the 
obsessive-compulsive neurosis characterized 
by a congested library and an atrophied 
bank account"

-- Maurice Dunbar, Hooked on Books, 1997  







"The bibliophile is the master of 
his books, the bibliomaniac their 
slave."

-- Hanns Bohatta 







"Where is human nature so weak as 
in the bookstore!"

-- Henry Ward Beecher, Star Papers; 
or Experiences of Art and Nature, 1855 







"She is too fond of books, and it has 
turned her brain."

-- Louisa May Alcott 






"There are two ways of disliking poetry, 
one way is to dislike it, the other is 
to read Pope."

-- Oscar Wilde 






"You will find poetry nowhere unless you 
bring some with you."

-- Joubert (1754-1824) 






"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

-- Paul Valery, 1874-1945 







"The man who does not read good books 
has no advantage over the man who cannot 
read them."

-- Mark Twain 







"My books are water; those of the great 
geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water."

-- Mark Twain






"A classic is something that everybody 
wants to have read and nobody has read."

-- Mark Twain 







"A bookstore is one of the only pieces 
of evidence we have that people are still 
thinking."

--Jerry Seinfeld 






""Classic": a book which people praise 
and don't read."

-- Mark Twain 






"Outside of a dog, a book is Man's 
best friend. And inside of a dog, 
it's too dark to read."

-- Groucho Marx 






Steal not this book, my worthy friend
For fear the gallows will be your end;
Up the ladder, and down the rope,
There you'll hang until you choke;
Then I'll come along and say -
"Where's that book you stole away?"

-- Medieval Book Curse 






He who steals this book
may he die the death
may he be frizzled in a pan...

-- Medieval Book Curse  







"Oh for a book and a shady nook, either in 
door or out."

-- John Wilson, poem for a catalogue of 
secondhand books.  






"A book is a mirror: If an ass peers 
into it, you can't expect an apostle 
to look out."

-- Georg Lichtenberg, 1742-1799 






"There is no such thing as a moral or 
an immoral book. Books are well written, 
or badly written."

-- Oscar Wilde 






"When you read a classic you do not see 
in the book more than you did before. 
You see more in you than there was before."

-- Clifton Fadiman (American Essayist) 







"Censorship always defeats its own purpose, 
for it creates in the end the kind of 
society that is incapable of exercising 
real discretion."

-- Henry Steele Commager (Historian)







"Just the knowledge that a good book is 
waiting one at the end of a long day 
makes that day happier."

-- Kathleen Norris (1880-1966)






"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators 
of the world."

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) 







"It is only by the love of reading 
that the evil resulting from the 
association with little minds can 
be counteracted."

-- Elizabeth Hamilton







"A book is the only immortality."

-- Rufus Choate 






"Eliminate all other factors, and the 
one which remains must be the truth."

-- Sherlock Holmes to Watson, in 
The Sign of Four(1890) by 
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle







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

-- Mortimer Jerome Adler







"Where they have burned books, 
they will end in burning human beings."

-Heinrich Heine 







"Without free speech no search for 
truth is possible... no discovery 
of truth is useful... Better a 
thousandfold abuse of free speech 
than denial of free speech. The abuse 
dies in a day, but the denial slays 
the life of the people, and entombs 
the hope of the race."
     
-Charles Bradlaugh 






"If there had been a censorship of the 
press in Rome we should have had today 
neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the 
philosophical writings of Cicero."
     
-Voltaire 







"Censorship reflects a society's lack 
of confidence in itself."

-Potter Stewart 







"Only the suppressed word is dangerous."
     
-Ludwig Börne 







"I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' 
for adults exclusively, and it always 
distressed me when I find that boys 
and girls have been allowed access 
to them. The mind that becomes soiled 
in youth can never again be washed clean." 
     
-Mark Twain 






"You have not converted a man because 
you have silenced him." 

-John Morley 






"Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work 
had better be banned because I might read 
it and it might be very damaging to me'?" 
     
-Joseph Henry Jackson 






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

-Voltaire 







"Free speech is the whole thing, the 
whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."
     
-Salman Rushdie







"If we don't believe in freedom 
of expression for people we despise, 
we don't believe in it at all."
     
-Noam Chomsky 








The tallest blade of grass is the 
first to be cut by the scythe.

-- Russian Proverb 







All foods are good to eat, 
but not all words are fit to speak.

-- Haitian proverb 







He who does not honor his wife dishonors himself.

-- Mexican proverb 








All good things come to those who wait.

-- English proverb 







A happy heart is better than a full purse.

-- Italian probverb 







"God could not be everywhere and 
therefore he made mothers."

-- Jewish Proverb  








You can't dance at two weddings at the 
same time; nor can you sit on two horses 
with one behind.

-- Yiddish Proverb 







Don't spit into the well--you might drink from it later.

-- Yiddish Proverb 








In a restaurant choose a table near a waiter.

-- Jewish proverb 







A person who gets used to telling lies 
will always be enticed to falsehood.

--Jewish proverb 







Let him who dictates the letter be the carrier.

-- Jewish proverb 







Light is not recognized except through darkness.

-- Jewish proverb 






A timely verse is as good as bread in famine.

-- Jewish proverb 







A dog with two homes is never any good.

-- Irish proverb 







The fox never found a better messenger than himself.

-- Irish proverb 







Everyone is nice till the cow gets 
into the garden.

-- Irish proverb 







The best horse doesn't always win the race.

-- Irish proverb 






A man is known by his company. 

-- Irish proverb 







Never buy through your ears but through your eyes.

-- Irish proverb 







"Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself."

-- Chinese Proverb 







"Learning is a treasure that will follow 
its owner everywhere."

-- Chinese Proverb 







A day of sorrow is longer than a month of joy.

-- Chinese Proverb 







Those who play the game do not see 
it as clearly as those who watch.

-- Chinese Proverb 








One who damages the character of another damages his own.

-- Yoruba of Nigeria proverb







The way you bring up a child is the way it grows up.

-- Swahili proverb 







Peace is costly but it is worth the expense.

-- Kikuyu of Kenya proverb 








Turina keessatt killen millaan adeemti. 
(By persevering the egg walks on legs.)

-- Oromo (Ethiopia) Proverb 







You lament not the dead, but lament the 
trouble of making a grave; the way of 
the ghost is longer than the grave.

-- Efik  








Because friendship is pleasant, we partake 
of our friend's entertainment; not because 
we have not enough to eat in our own house.

-- Yoruba 







The house-roof fights with the rain, 
but he who is sheltered ignores it.

-- Wolof 







It is the fool whose own tomatoes are sold to him.

-- Akan proverb 







When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.

-- Kikuyu proverb







What is wrong today won't be right tomorrow.

-- Dutch proverb 







"A nickel will get you on the subway, 
but garlic will get you a seat."

-- old New York proverb 







"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever 
may be our wishes, our inclinations, or 
the dictates of our passions, they cannot 
alter the state of the facts and evidence."