The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

—Robin Sharma

He not busy being born is busy dying.

—Bob Dylan

Most of us spend our lives as if we had another one in the bank.

—Ben Irwin

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

—Anaïs Nin

What to do with your one life? The same thing you would do if you had two lives, and this were the second.

—Robert Brault

One’s only real life is the life one never leads.

—Oscar Wilde

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.

—Indian Saying

Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.

—Jack London

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

—O. Henry, The Gifts of the Magi

The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.

—Bernard M. Baruch

Things happen in life that make us question our faith when perhaps they ought to make us question our life.

—Robert Brault

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

—Jean Cocteau

A simple definition of life: The chance you’ve been waiting for.

—Robert Brault

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

—Annie Dillard

I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I’ve written for myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.

—Shirley MacLaine

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

—Albert Camus, a Happy Death

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

—Diane Ackerman

There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

—Jean de la Bruyère

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

—Fr. Alfred D’Souza

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.

—Ruth E. Renkl

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

—Margaret Fuller

When one has a great deal to put into it, a day has a hundred pockets.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Fear not that life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.

—John Henry Cardinal Newman

But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honorable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone “This Man Died from Living Too Much.”

—Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

—William Hazlitt, On the Love of Life, 1815

If life has those moments—ecstasies of health, youth and peace...—treasure them.

—Byron Caldwell Smith, letter to Kate Stephens

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

—Author unknown

Live as you will wish to have lived when you are dying.

—Christian Furchtegott Gellert

If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand.

—Righteous Brothers, “Rock & Roll Heaven”

Life is change.

—Heraclitus of Ephesus

Life is a series of tasks that you absolutely must get done before they don’t matter anymore.

—Robert Brault

Is there life before death?

—Author Unknown

May you live all the days of your life.

—Jonathan Swift

You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now.

—Joan Baez

Life, if well lived, is long enough.

—Seneca, De Ira

Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours should not be numbered by years, days, and hours.

—Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, 1578

Don’t ever save anything for a special occasion. Being alive is the special occasion.

—Author Unknown

Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

—Thomas Merton

Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them.

—Martin Amis

Tough times never last. Tough people do.

—Author Unknown

Problems are not stop signs. They are guidelines.

—Robert Schuller

Don’t let a bad day make you feel like you have a bad life.

—Author Unknown

The only thing that’s the end of the world is the end of the world.

—President Barack Obama, farewell press conference, January 18, 2017

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

—Hugh Miller, Snow on the Wind

You will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity.

—J.K. Rowling

In prosperity our friends know us. In adversity we know our friends.

—John Churton Collins

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

—Confucius

If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?

—Rumi

Ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders.

—Jewish Proverb

Bad is never good until worse happens.

—Danish Proverb

Problems are the price you pay for progress.

—Branch Rickey

Pain is weakness leaving the body.

—United States Marine Corps

The distinguishing mark of true adventures is that it is often no fun at all while they are actually happening.

—Kim Stanley Robinson

Adventure is just bad planning.

—Roald Amundsen

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

—G.K. Chesterton

Look back at your life. It’s always the hardest times that made you who you are.

—Casey Neistat

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

—Sophocles

Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.

—Author Unknown

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

—Duke Ellington

Scars are tattoos with better stories.

—From a Toyota advertisement in Sports Illustrated magazine

Every flower must grow through dirt.

—Proverb

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

—Aviva Kaufman

Pain is sometimes the cost of a meaningful existence. I can handle that.

—Jeb Dickerson

Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

—Josephine Hart

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

—Horace

Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.

—Stephen Covey

…once the storm is over you won’ remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That what this storm’s all about.

—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Sometimes you have to breakdown before you can breakthrough.

—Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008)

Problems are messages.

—Shakti Gawain

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

—Niccolo Machiavelli

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

—Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don’t have any problems, you don’t get any seeds.

—Norman Vincent Peale

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

—Author Unknown

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adversity is the first path to truth.

—Lord Byron

A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity ‘til he has tasted adversity.

—Sa’di

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

—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas

Sleep, riches, and health to be truly enjoyed must be interrupted.

—Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Flower, Fruit, and Thorn

There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.

—Washington Irving, The Sketch Book, 1820

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

—Josh Billings

Turn your wounds into wisdom.

—Oprah Winfrey

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

—Oscar Wilde

He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how’.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?

—Rose F. Kennedy

Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise.

—Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

As long as you keep getting born, it’s alright to die some times.

—Orson Scott Card

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.

—African Proverb

May you get what you wish for.

—Old Chinese Curse

Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together.

—Charles Caleb Colton

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

—Kenji Miyazawa

Use your enemy’s arrows for firewood.

—Matshona Dhliwayo

It just wouldn’t be a picnic without the ants.

—Author Unknown

The Lord gives us friends to push us to our potential—and enemies to push us beyond it.

—Robert Brault

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

—Duke Ellington

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

—Francis Bacon

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

—William James

Scars remind us where we’ve been—they don’t have to dictate where we’re going.

—Jeff

And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.

—Lord Byron

Criminal Minds.

—Davis, Rick Dunkle, and Oanh Ly

When you’re feeling your worst, that’s when you get to know yourself the best.

—Leslie Grossman

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

—Cicero

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

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

—Joseph Heller

Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.

—Maurice Chevalier

Age is something that doesn’t matter unless you are a cheese.

—Luis Bunuel

You can live to be 100 if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be 100.

—Woody Allen

Very few people do anything creative after the age of 35. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of 35.

—Joel Hildebrand

When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret. Now that I am 50 I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness.

—C.S. Lewis

The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

—T.S. Eliot

Inside every older woman is a young girl wondering what the hell happened?.

—Cora Harvey Armstrong

I feel an army in my fist.

—Friedrich Schiller

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

—Ambrose Bierce

Anger is short-lived madness.

—Horace

It is wise to direct your anger towards problems—not people, to focus your energies on answers—not excuses.

—William Arthur Ward

Anger is the only thing to put off till tomorrow.

—Czech proverb

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

—Sydney J. Harris

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

—Benjamin Franklin

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

—Buddha

Anger and worry are the most unprofitable conditions known to man. They are like thieves that steal precious time and energy from life. Anger is a highway robber and worry is a sneak thief.

—Horace Fletcher, Menticulture, 1895

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

—Marcus Aurelius

He who angers you conquers you.

—Elizabeth Kenny

Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

—Malachy McCourt

Not the fastest horse can catch a word spoken in anger.

—Chinese Proverb

Count up the days in which you have not been angry. I used to get angry every day, then every other day, then every three or four days. If you manage not to be angry for as long as thirty days offer a sacrifice to the Gods.

—Epictetus, Greek philosopher

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

—Buddha

For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

—Author Unknown

Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, and eventually poisonous. I have no desire to make my own toxins.

—Neil Kinnock

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

—Baptist Beacon

If you kick a stone in anger, you’ll hurt your own foot.

—Korean Proverb

Before you give someone a piece of your mind, make sure you can get by with what is left.

—Author Unknown

Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry.

—Lyman Abbott

All of the evil passions are traceable to one of two roots. Anger is the root of all the aggressive passions. Worry is the root of all the cowardly passions.... It is not necessary to engage in battle the small army of lesser passions if you concentrate your efforts against anger and worry, for they are all children of these parents.

—Horace Fletcher, Menticulture, 1895

If you are patient in a moment of anger, you will escape one hundred days of sorrow.

—Chinese proverb

I don’t have to attend every argument I’m invited to.

—Author unknown

Anything done in anger can be done better without it.

—Dallas Willard

Never strike your wife—even with a flower.

—Hindu Proverb

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

—James Matthew Barrie

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.

—Judy Garland

You were born an original.—Don’t die a copy.

—John Mason

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

—François VI de la Rochefoucault

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

—Kurt Vonnegut

There is just one life for each of us: our own.

—Euripides

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.

—Andre Gide

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.

—Honoré de Balzac, Scènes de la vie Parisienne

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

—Oscar Wilde

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

—Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel

We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.

—André Berthiaume, Contretemps

What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.

—Carl Rogers

Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.

—Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.

—Homer

Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.

—Marianne Moore

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.

—Harvey Fierstein

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

—Steve Jobs

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

—Anaïs Nin

Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.

—Julius Charles Hare

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind!

—Author unknown

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.

—Desiderius Erasmus

Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.

—François de la Rochefoucault

When you dance to your own rhythm,
Life taps its toes to your beat.

—Terri Guillemets

Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him, not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.

—Walter Kaufmann

Our arms start from the back because they were once wings.

—Martha Graham

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

—Henry Miller

Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.

—Frank Gillette Burgess

Sometimes your body is smarter than you are.

—Author Unknown

The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.

—Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms

I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.

—Herman Hesse

Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.

—Jim Rohn

The way he treats his body, you’d think he was renting.

—Robert Brault

Emotion always has its roots in the unconscious and manifests itself in the body.

—Irene Claremont de Castillejo

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

—Aldous Huxley

I’m emotions and bones held together by skin and reality.

—Terri Guillemets

The dumbest kidney is smarter than the smartest nephrologist.

—Unknown physician

The body is not a permanent dwelling, but a sort of inn which is to be left behind when one perceives that one is a burden to the host.

—Seneca

There is a wisdom in the body that is older and more reliable than clocks and calendars.

—John Harold Johnson

We have a pharmacy inside us that is absolutely exquisite. It makes the right medicine, for the precise time, for the right target organ—with no side effects.

—Deepak Chopra

Hormones, vitamines, stimulants and depressives are oils upon the creaky machinery of life. Principal item, however, is the machinery.

—Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

The trouble with having a body is that people know it’s where you hang out and you don’t get any privacy.

—Robert Brault

Many people can listen to their cat more intelligently than they can listen to their own despised body. Because they attend to their pet in a cherishing way, it returns their love. Their body, however, may have to let out an earth-shattering scream in order to be heard at all.

—Marion Woodman

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is nobler than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed?

—Michelangelo

The Church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.

—Eduardo Galeano

Our body is a machine for living. It is geared towards it; it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself; it will be more effective than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.

—Leo Tolstoy

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.

—Henry David Thoreau

Massage is the only form of physical pleasure to which nature forgot to attach consequences.

—Robert Brault

Some patients I see are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds.

—Zacharty Bercovitz

Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.

—William Osler

Your cells are as depressed as you are, and your cells are as happy and frisky as you are.

—Abraham–Hicks

My entire approach to my body and to fitness in general had been based on the concept of deficit. I thought of aerobics classes and how I had panted my way through movements just to give myself smaller thighs, pumping iron to shape my narrow back, dieting to lower my fat level. I had always approached my body as if it were a problem needing to be solved.... This attitude was not really different from the notion of original sin, forever reaching for an ideal we are constitutionally incapable of attaining. But here I was, truly broken now, weak, emaciated, yet in front of me this teacher was saying that just by the virtue of my being, I was complete. I always had been. The only thing I needed to do was honor that.

—Samantha Dunn, “Brick by Brick”

So long as we are in conflict with our body, we cannot find peace of mind.

—Georg Feuerstein

Attention to the human body brings healing and regeneration. Through awareness of the body we remember who we really are.

—Jack Kornfield

Abdicate, v.: to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

—Author Unknown

Why do we pay for psychotherapy when massages cost half as much?

—Jason Love

But one thing, at least, is certain, that no system can be satisfactory, much less successful, which does not provide for the healthy training of the whole being of the child, dividing and distinguishing mental and bodily exercise if it will, but at the same time co-ordinating them in due relations to each other...

—E. Warre, 1884

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

—W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand

Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.

—Ken Wilbur

Most psychologists treat the mind as disembodied, a phenomenon with little or no connection to the physical body. Conversely physicians treat the body with no regard to the mind or the emotions. But the body and mind are not separate, and we cannot treat one without the other.

—Candace Pert

Your body is a temple but only if you treat it as one.

—Terri Guillemets

The man who doesn’t read has no advantage over the man who can’t read.

—Author unknown

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

—Stephen King

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

—Milan Kundera

Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.

—Plato

Miss a meal if you have to but don’t miss a book.

—Jim Rohn

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

—Clifton Fadiman

A good book has no ending.

—R.D. Cumming

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

—Richard Steele

Women and books should be looked at daily.

—Dutch Proverb

“Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.

—François Mauriac

A book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us.

—Franz Kafka

Never judge a book by its movie.

—J.W. Eagan

Assimilate ubiquitously. Doublethink. To deliberately believe in lies, while knowing they’re false…Examples of this in everyday life: “oh, I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable…This is a marketing holocaust. Twenty-four hours a day for the rest of our lives, these powers hard at work dumbing us to death. So to defend ourselves, and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read. To stimulate our own imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need skills to defend, to preserve, our own minds.”

—Henry Barthes

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

—Lin Yutang

To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.

—Chinese Saying

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

—G.K. Chesterton

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

—Chinese Proverb

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

—W. Somerset Maugham

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

—Edmund Burke

Reading—the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

—William Styron

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

—Mark Twain

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

—Oscar Wilde

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one mind to another.

—James Russell Lowell

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

—Amos Bronson Alcott

A writer only begins a book, it is the reader who completes it; for the reader takes up where the writer left off as new thoughts stir within him.

—David Harris Russell (1906–1965), Children Learn to Read, 1949

What the candystore was to other kids, the bookstore was to me. The library was my vacation.

—Terri Guillemets, “Young bookworm,” 1998

I don’t think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer knew before he wrote them.

—Carlos Fuentes

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

—Jessamyn West

Some books are undeservedly forgotten but none are undeservedly remembered.

—W.H. Auden

Don’t just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

—Jim Rohn

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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

—Joseph Joubert

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

—Groucho Marx

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare.

—Kenko Yoshida

A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

—William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.

—Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life, 1998

If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

—Toni Morrison

My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.

—Thomas Helm

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

—William Hazlitt

You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.

—Paul Sweeney

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.

—Abraham Lincoln

There are more truths in a good book than its author meant to put into it.

—Marie Dubsky

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies... I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.”

—Jorge Luis Borges

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

—Wisława Szymborska

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

—E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

—Elbert Hubbard

Reading means borrowing.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

—William Lyon Phelps

From every book invisible threads reach out to other books; and as the mind comes to use and control those threads the whole panorama of the world’s life, past and present, becomes constantly more varied and interesting, while at the same time the mind’s own powers of reflection and judgment are exercised and strengthened.

—Helen E. Haines

Book lovers never go to bed alone.

—Author unknown

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.

—Clifton Fadiman

A book that is shut is but a block.

—Thomas Fuller

I find it necessary to confine my purchases strictly to books. My me! Yes, strictly to books.

—Munson Havens, Old Valentines:
A Love Story, 1914

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

—Joseph Brodsky

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

—E.B. White

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

—Henry Ward Beecher

When a new book is published, read an old one.

—Samuel Rogers

From my point of view, a book is a literary prescription put up for the benefit of someone who needs it.

—S.M. Crothers

There are many persons pretending to have a refined literary taste, who seldom read any books but those which are fashionable...

—Charles Lanman

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books... which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal. It wasn’t even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author... seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways.

—John Green

He fed his spirit with the bread of books.

—Edwin Markham

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

—Henry Ward Beecher

There is reading, and there is reading. Reading as a means to an end, for information, to cultivate oneself; reading as an end in itself, a process, a compulsion.

—Sven Birkerts

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

—John LeCarre

He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot.

—Arabic proverb

Never lend books; no one ever returns them. The only books I have in my library are books other people have lent me.

—Anatole France

One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else’s imaginary friends, at all hours of the night.

—Dr. SunWolf

Books, too, begin like the week—with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

—Walter Benjamin

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we inquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and the backs of books in libraries.

—Samuel Johnson, 1775, quoted by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.

—Karl Lagerfeld

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

—Ishmael Reed

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

—Francis Bacon

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.

—Woodrow Wilson

It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle.

—Sutton Elbert Griggs

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.

—Holbrook Jackson

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

—Homer, Iliad

Boredom: the desire for desires.

—Leo Tolstoy

Boredom flourishes when you feel safe. It’s a symptom of security.

—Eugene Ionesco

Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

—Thomas Szasz

Boredom is rage spread thin.

—Paul Tillich

We have a world of pleasures to win but nothing to lose but boredom.

—Raoul Vaneigem

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

—Thomas Szasz

A man can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days.

—Attributed to Goethe, by Huebsch

I am never bored anywhere: being bored is an insult to oneself.

—Jules Renard

Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.

—C.C. Colton

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

—Evelyn Waugh

Boredom is a sickness the cure for which is work; pleasure is only a palliative.

—Le Duc de Lévis

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

—Dorothy Parker

When I bore people at a party they think it is their fault.

—Henry Kissinger

Earth’s nothing more than a rotating ball of boredom.

—Star Trek: Deep Space Nin

When I get really bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I’m leaving.

—Steven Wright

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.

—Braveheart

Each moment is a place you’ve never been.

—Mark Strand

Either you run the day or the day runs you.

—Jim Rohn

Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.

—Chinese Proverb

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

—Stephen Vincent Benet

The important thing is not how many years in your life but how much life in your years.

—Edward J. Stieglitz

Live every day as if it were going to be your last; for one day you’re sure to be right.

—Anonymous Author

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.

—John Burroughs

Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.

—Wayne Dyer

Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

—Annie Dillard

A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he has lost no time.

—Francis Bacon

I’m less interested in why we’re here. I’m wholly devoted to while we’re here.

—Erika Harris

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

—Elbert Hubbard

There are a million ways to waste a day, but not even a single way to get one back.

—Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?

—David Brin

He who buys what he does not need steals from himself.

—Author Unknown

The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more.

—Kin Hubbard

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi, quoted in E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.

—Vernon Howard

There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.

—William Dean Howells

The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.

—Mad Magazine

You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.

—Eric Hoffer

Who covets more, is evermore a slave.

—Robert Herrick

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

—Henry David Thoreau

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

—E.B. White

Stuffocation: being overwhelmed by the stuff one has bought or accumulated.

—Author Unknown

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

—Francis H. Bradley

The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have—and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.

—Paul Heyne

Be glad that you’re greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren’t.

—Mignon McLaughlin

We realize we can’t have everything, and so begins the mad scramble to have everything else.

—Robert Brault

There must be more to life than having everything!

—Maurice Sendak

What a unique treasure are the things we have learned to live without, for no thief can take them from us.

—Robert Brault

Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

—Lao Tzu

We don’t need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.

—Donald Horban

Somebody has to teach Americans that we don’t always have to have something newer, better every year. Or in the case of our upside-down economic system, every quarter.... Somewhere along the way we bought into this insane idea that everything always has to get bigger, especially sales. Having a really good year and then just repeating it—not good enough. In corporate America, the stock market is the tail that wags the dog. Growth, growth, holy growth, is the only thing that ever matters. Better than last quarter, beat expectations, eat more hamburgers...

—Bill Maher, “New Rule: Growth At Any Cost,” Real Time (HBO), September 23, 2016

He who doesn’t fear death dies only once.

—Giovanni Falcone

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident—It is as common as life.

—Henry David Thoreau

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

—Leonardo Da Vinci

No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well.

—Plato

And they die an equal death—the idler and the man of mighty deeds.

—Homer, Iliad

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

—Ashley Montagu

Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.

—Henry Van Dyke

There’s nothing certain in a man’s life except this: That he must lose it.

—Aeschylus, Agamemnon

The goal of all life is death.

—Sigmund Freud

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

—Vladimir Nabokov

Is there anyone so foolish, even though he is young, as to feel absolutely sure that he will be alive when evening comes?

—Cicero

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

—Percival Arland Ussher

When we fear death, we are letting him wrap his bony hands around our necks during the best times of our lives, choking us with imaginary threats and preventing us from breathing from pure air of now.

—Terri Guillemets

For three days after death, hair and fingernails grow but phone calls taper off.

—Johnny Carson

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go.

—Jean de La Fontaine

All say: ‘how hard it is that we have to die’ – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

—Mark Twain

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

—Marcel Proust

Everybody has got to die, but I’ve always believed an exception would be made in my case.

—William Saroyan

Death is not warden of life, not thief, nor enemy—but Life’s most equal partner.

—Terri Guillemets

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

—Edvard Munch

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

—Willa Cather

We never bury the dead, son. We take them with us. It’s the price of living.

—Mark Goffman and Jose Molina

Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.

—Herodotus

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.

—George Bernard Shaw

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

—Norman Cousins

Death is not poison but merely life’s final remedy.

—Terri Guillemets

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

—Seneca

Death is patiently making my mask as I sleep. Each morning I awake to discover in the corners of my eyes the small tears of his wax.

—Philip Dow

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

—Socrates

Death bumps into life many times as just a passerby.

—Terri Guillemets

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them.

—Yevgeny Yevtushenko

To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one’s own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man

Dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.

—Stewart Alsop

To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.

—C.G. Jung

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.

—Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

God made death so we’d know when to stop.

—Steven Stiles

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.

—Leonardo da Vinci

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

—Steven Wright

Happy the man who dies before he prays for death.

—Publilius Syrus

If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

—André Maurois

Desire is the very essence of man.

—Baruch Spinoza

Suffering is caused by desire.

—Buddha

Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.

—Henry George

The desire engendered in the male glands is a hundred times more difficult to control than the desire bred in the female glands. All girls who limit their actions to arousing desire and then defending their honor should be horsewhipped.

—Marlene Dietrich

If you don’t get what you want, it’s a sign that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.

—Rudyard Kipling

Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.

—Edgar Cayce

If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.

—Ellen Jonson Sirleaf

I dream my painting and then paint my dream.

—Vincent Van Gogh

All men dream but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous man, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

—T.E. Lawrence

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

—Charles William Dement

The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary.

—Ashleigh Brilliant

Dreams say what they mean, but they don’t say it in daytime language.

—Gail Godwin

Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.

—H.F. Hedge

Some colors exist in dreams that are not present in the waking spectrum.

—Terri Guillemets

We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more intelligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake.

—Erich Fromm

Only in our dreams are we free, the rest of the time we need wages.

—Terry Pratchett

I have dreamed in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.

—Emily Brontë

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right.... We sleeping wake, and waking sleep.

—Michel de Montaigne

To teach is to learn.

—Japanese Proverb

The problem it is not people being uneducated. The problem is that they are just educated enough to believe what they’ve been taught and not educated enough to question what they’ve been taught.

—Author Unknown

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.

—Thomas Carruthers

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

—Aristotle

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

—G.M. Trevelyan

The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.

—Mandell Creighton

Exams and grades are temporary, but education is permanent.

—Author Unknown

What will matter is not what you learned but what you taught.

—Michael Josephson

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

—Roger Lewin

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

—Mark Twain, 1900

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

—John Dewey

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find I within himself.

—Galileo Galilei

No man who worships education has got the best out of education.... Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

—G.K. Chesterton

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

—Aristotle

When you know better, you do better.

—Maya Angelou

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

—George Santayana

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.

—Robert G. Ingersoll

The tragedy of education is played in two scenes—incompetent pupils facing competent teachers and incompetent teachers facing competent pupils.

—Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

Education spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.

—Will Rogers

My parents told me: “Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.” I tell my daughters: “Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job.”

—Thomas L. Friedman

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

—Michel de Montaigne

They say that we are better educated than our parents’ generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing.

—Richard Yates

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

—Abraham Flexner

Who knows the difference between education and training? For those of you with daughters, would you rather have them take sex education or sex training? Need I say more?

—Dennis Rubin

Education should be exercise; it has become massage.

—Martin H. Fischer

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

—Ezra Pound

There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.

—Will Rogers

Education is learning what you didn’t know you didn’t know.

—George Boas

Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

—William Haley

You send your child to the schoolmaster, but it’s the schoolboys who educate him.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.

—William R. Inge

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

—Erich Fromm

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion.

—Muriel Spark

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

—John W. Gardner

A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.

—Martin H

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.

—Jim Rohn

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

—Arnold Bennett

Too much emotion is like none at all.

—Du Mu

Feelings are much like waves, we can’t stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf.

—Jonatan Mårtensson

Feelings are just visitors, let the come and go.

—Mooji

Sometimes we can’t let go of the pain because we think it’s the one thing holding us together.

—Terri Guillemets

We might be the master of our thoughts, still we are the slaves of or emotions.

—Author Unknown

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.

—Albert Einstein

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

—Roger Ebert

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.

—Andre Gide

People cry not because they are weak but because they have been strong for too long.

—Author Unknown

The purpose of thinking is to so arrange the world in our minds that we can apply emotion effectively. In the end, it is emotion that makes the choices and decisions.

—Edward De Bono

If you don’t manage your emotions, then your emotions will manage you.

—Deborah Rozman

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

—Dale Carnegie

Guilt is always hungry—don’t let it consume you.

—Terri Guillemets

I don’t believe in hope. Hope is a beggar. Hope walks through the fire. Faith leaps over it.

—Jim Carrey

Faith is spiritualized imagination.

—Henry Ward Beecher

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

—J.R.R. Tolkien

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

—Blaise Pascal

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

—R. Buckminster Fuller

Faith is reason grown courageous.

—Sherwood Eddy

Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.

—Rabindranath Tagore

To me faith means not worrying.

—John Dewey

Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.

—George Seaton

There is nothing more perplexing in life than to know at what point you should surrender your intellect to your faith.

—Margot Asquith

Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it by the handle of anxiety, or by the handle of faith.

—Author Unknown

Faith... must be enforced by reason.... When faith becomes blind it dies.

—Mahatma Gandhi

Faith enables persons to be persons because it lets God be God.

—Carter Lindberg

Faith is not about everything turning out okay, faith is about being okay no matter how things turn out.

—Author Unknown

Of course I doubt. I do not practice a certainty. I practice a faith.

—Robert Brault

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Faith and prayer are the vitamins of the soul; man cannot live in health without them.

—Mahalia Jackson

The opposite of faith isn’t doubt. It’s certainty.

—Author Unknown

Aversion is a form of bondage. We are tied to what we hate or fear. That is why, in our lives, the same problem, the same danger or difficulty, will present itself over and over again in various prospects, as long as we continue to resist or run away from it instead of examining it and solving it.

—Patañjali

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

—Marie Curie

Fear: False Evidence Appearing Real.

—Author Unknown

To lead is difficult when you’re a follower of fear.

—T.A. Sachs

Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

—Mark Twain

There are only two forces that unite men – fear and interest.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop.

—Usman B. Asif

He who fears to suffer, suffers from fear.

—French Proverb

Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.

—Bill Cosby

A cat bitten once by a snake dreads even rope.

—Arab Proverb

I prefer my people to be loyal out of fear rather than conviction. Convictions can change, but fear remains.

—Josef Stalin

There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear.

—George S. Patton

If a man harbors any sort of fear, it makes him landlord to a ghost.

—Lloyd Douglas

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.

—Arnold Glasow

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

—Eric Hoffer

There is much in the world to make us afraid. There is much more in our faith to make us unafraid.

—Frederick W. Cropp

Fear is the highest fence.

—Dudley Nichols

I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear.

—Rosa Parks

Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.

—German Proverb

You are the one giving fear a leg to stand on.

—Dodinsky

Feed your faith and your fears will starve to death.

—Author Unknown

The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.

—Lady Bird Johnson

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

—Frank Herbert (1920–1986), Dune

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

A life lived in fear is a life half lived.

—Spanish proverb

Most people will give up an acre of freedom for a closet of security.

—Dr. Idel Dreimer

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

A man’s worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

—T.X. Huxley

Freedom is never free.

—Author Unknown

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.

—Lenin

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.

—Abraham Lincoln

Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.

—Andre Gide

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.

—John Diefenbaker

Everyone appears to be noticing only the statue’s torch and not the manacles on her ankles.

—Roger L. Green

All mankind is divided as it is always has been into slaves and freemen. Whoever has less than two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave, be he a statesman, a merchant, an official or a scholar.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

—Adlai Stevenson

Freedom means choosing your burden.

—Hephzibah Menuhin

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are.

—Jim Morrison

Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

—Will Rogers

We feel free when we escape—even if it be but from the frying pan into the fire.

—Eric Hoffer

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.

—Jeffrey Borenstein

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

—William Faulkner

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

—Frederick Douglass, speech, Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Washington, D.C., 1883

Power is duty; freedom is responsibility.

—Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), translated by Mrs Annis Lee Wister, 1882

We are free, truly free, when we don’t need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.

—Ricardo Flores Magon, speech, May 31, 1914

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

—George Orwell

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing from something.

—Wilson Mizner

Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.

—From the movie The Color of Money

In a bet there is a fool and a thief.

—Proverb

The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.

—Kin Hubbard

No wife can endure a gambling husband, unless he is a steady winner.

—Thomas Robert Dewar

The better the gambler, the worse the man.

—Publilius Syrus

The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice is so pleasurable, that I assume it must be evil.

—Heywood Broun

A gambler is nothing but a man who makes his living out of hope.

—William Bolitho

You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it.

—Albert Einstein

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.

—Author Unknown

The house doesn’t beat the player. It just gives him the opportunity to beat himself.

—Nick Dandalos

At the gambling table, there are no fathers and sons.

—Chinese Proverb

A racehorse is an animal that can take several thousand people for a ride at the same time.

—Author Unknown

The happiest people don’t have the best of everything, they just make the best of everything.

—Author Unknown

Happiness is a form of courage.

—Holbrook Jackson

When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse.

—Sophocles

Happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.

—Aristotle

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

—William Shakespeare

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

—André Gide, L’Immoraliste

Happiness is an inside job.
If you want to live a happy life, tie it to goals, not people or objects.

—Author Unknown

Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

—Marcel Proust

Don’t put the key to happiness in someone else’s pocket.

—Author Unknown

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.

—Jacques Prévert

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

—W.B. Yeats

Happiness is an occasional brief glance into how simple it all can be.

—Robert Brault

You need to learn to be happy by nature, because you’ll seldom have the chance to be happy by circumstance.

—Lavetta Sue Wegman

Happiness consists more in conveniences of pleasure that occur every day than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.

—Benjamin Franklin

We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.

—Walter Savage Landor

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

—Epictetus

When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.

—Niccolo Machiavelli

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

—George Bernard Shaw

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

—Bertrand Russell

I don’t think most people want to be unhappy. It’s just something they’ve gotten good at.

—Robert Brault

Happiness is not a goal. It is a by-product.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

I hope everybody could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of, so they will know that is not the answer.

—Jim Carrey

Don’t confuse fun with fulfillment, or pleasure with happiness.

—Michael Josephson

I never ask God to give me anything; I only ask him to put me where things are.

—Mexican Proverb

Certain people think they will feel good if certain things happen…the trick is: you have to feel good for no reason.

—Richard Bandler

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.

—James Openheim

It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed.

—Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

—Seneca

Be happy, and a reason will come along.

—Robert Brault

Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.

—Sherwood Anderson

People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.

—Anton Chekhov

All persons carry with them some means of happiness.

—James Lendall Basford

A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.

—Bernard de Fontenelle

A full heart has room for everything and an empty heart has room for nothing.

—Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.

—St. Augustine

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.

—Lady Blessington

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.

—Charles Caleb Colton

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

—Albert Camus

Some pursue happiness, others create it.

—Author Unknown

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

—Robert Frost

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.

—John Barrymore

If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

—Edith Wharton

Happiness is a well-balanced combination of love, labour, and luck.

—Mary Wilson Little

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

—Abraham Lincoln

Find a place where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

—Joseph Campbell

Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.

—Norm Papernick

There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

—Salvador Dali

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

—Bertrand Russell

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

—Mother Teresa

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

—Albert Camus

Happiness is usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

—Thomas Szasz

One joy scatters a hundred griefs.

—Chinese Proverb

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

—Hosea Ballou

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.

—Don Herold

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

—Logan Pearsall

The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.

—Doug Larson

Happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.

—Gretta Brooker Palmer

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

—Seneca

Joy is not in things; it is in us.

—Richard Wagner

If you want to be happy, be.

—Leo Tolstoy

Don’t put the key to happiness in someone else’s pocket.

—Author Unknown

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.

—Jacques Prévert

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

—Mahatma Gandhi

Happiness is never stopping to think if you are.

—Palmer Sondreal

Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.

—Robert Anthony

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.

—Mark Twain, 1896

If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

—Edith Wharton

Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place. But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.

—E.L. Konigsburg

Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy.

—Cynthia Nelms

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

—Robertson Davies

Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.

—Norm Papernick

All persons carry with them some means of happiness.

—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher’s Stone, 1882

I don’t think you can feel a sense of entitlement and still be happy. Happiness always comes from feeling that you’ve been blessed.

—Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Happiness is not something you postpone for the future. It’s something you design for the present.

—Jim Rohn

What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.

—Colette

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.

—James Openheim

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.

—John Barrymore

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you actually were, but he didn’t know what it was called.

—A.A. Milne

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.

—H. Jackson Brown

It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed.

—Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard

Happiness and sadness run parallel to each other. When one takes a rest, the other one tends to take up the slack.

—Hazelmarie Elliott (“Mattie”)

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

—George Bernard Shaw

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

—Ambrose Bierce

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

—Joseph Addison

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

—Margaret Young

If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.

—Taisen Deshimaru

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.

—H. Jackson Brown

There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.

—Freya Stark, The Journey’s Echo

The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash.

—Author Unknown

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

—Don Marquis

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

—Albert Camus

We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.

—Mignon McLaughlin

Happiness is the feeling you’re feeling when you want to keep feeling it.

—Author Unknown

Most of us believe in trying to make other people happy only if they can be happy in ways which we approve.

—Robert S. Lynd

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.

—William Saroyan

Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.

—Colette

Sometimes we don’t find the thing that will make us happy because we can’t give up the thing that was supposed to.

—Robert Brault

Learn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want.

—Jim Rohn

Speak the truth but leave immediately afterwards.

—Slovenian Proverb

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.

—Richard J. Needham

Honesty is a very expensive gift. Don’t expect it from cheap people.

—Warren Buffett

Worse than telling a lie is spending the rest of your life staying true to a lie.

—Robert Brault

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.

—Winston Churchill

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Honesty doesn’t always pay, but dishonesty always costs.

—Michael Josephson

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

—William Blake (1757–1827), “Auguries of Innocence”

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

—Aristotle

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

—Mark Twain, 1894

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

A half-truth is a whole lie.

—Yiddish Proverb

A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.

—Edgar J. Mohn

Every lie is two lies—the lie we tell others and the lie we tell ourselves to justify it.

—Robert Brault

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

—Oscar Wilde

With lies you may get ahead in the world—but you can never go back.

—Russian Proverb

When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback.

—Bill Copeland

A lie may take care of the present, but it has no future.

—Author Unknown

Worse than telling a lie is spending the rest of your life staying true to a lie.

—Robert Brault

Always telling the truth is no doubt better than always lying, although equally pathological.

—Robert Brault

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.

—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

A lie is just the truth waiting to be itself.

—Terri Guillemets

Am I lying to you if I tell you the same lie I tell myself?

—Robert Brault

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.

—Bertrand Russell

Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.

—Emily Dickinson

Reality is bad enough. Why should I tell the truth?

—Patrick Sky

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

—Lin Yutang

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.

—Bertrand Russell

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

—Saki

It takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen.

—Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

As important in a trusting relationship as the truths you share are the lies you never have to tell.

—Robert Brault

Someday a computer will give a wrong answer to spare someone’s feelings, and man will have invented artificial intelligence.

—Robert Brault

In each generation the human mind in every man reverts to its starting-point; each new man is a primitive man.

—Alexandre Vinet

Man—a being in search of meaning.

—Plato

There are too many people, and too few human beings.

—Robert Zend

Man is harder than rock and more fragile than an egg.

—Yugoslav Proverb

One man is equivalent to all creation. One man is the world in miniature.

—Albert Pike

I am not a human being; I am a human becoming.

—Author Unknown

Every human being is a repeated question asked to the spirit of the Universe.

—Mihai Eminescu

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated His ability.

—Oscar Wilde

We may be the intelligent species, but we are certainly not the smartest!

—Kyle Short

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

—Albert Camus

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

—Bertrand Russell

Adam ate the apple, and our teeth still ache.

—Hungarian Proverb

Not every great man is a grand human being.

—Marie Dubsky

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with humans it is the other way around: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

—Anton Chekhov

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

—George Bernard Shaw

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

—Rabindranath Tagore

Monkeys are superior to men in this: When a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.

—Malcolm de Chazal

Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.

—Sydney Smith

Human beings invent just as many ways to sabotage their lives as to improve them.

—Mark Goulston

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers.

—Albert Camus

That’s it! When you come to know men, that’s how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place.

—D.H. Lawrence

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

—William Hazlitt

Man talks about everything, and he talks about everything as though the understanding of everything were all inside him.

—Antonio Porchia

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.

—Stephen Hawking

Swallow your pride occasionally, it’s non-fattening!

—Author Unknown

Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self.

—Charles Haddon Spurgeon

We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm.

—Winston Churchill

None are so empty as those who are full of themselves.

—Benjamin Whichcote

The selfish man looks into the world as he looks into his mirror: only to see himself.

—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher’s Stone, 1882

Don’t look for more honor than your learning merits.

—Jewish Proverb

Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

—G.K. Chesterton

We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.

—François VI de la Rochefoucault, Maxims

Modesty: The art of encouraging people to find out for themselves how wonderful you are.

—Author Unknown

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

I believe that the first great test of a truly great man is his humility. I don’t mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.

—John Ruskin

The man who thinks he can live without others is mistaken; the one who thinks others can’t live without him is even more deluded.

—Hasidic Saying

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

—Norman Vincent Peale

With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Don’t talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave.

—Wilson Mizner

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.

—Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951

One learns to ignore criticism by first learning to ignore applause.

—Robert Brault

Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.

—Dwight Morrow

I can’t tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.

—James McNeill Whistler

Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.

—Ann Landers

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

—James Thurber

I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.

—Frank A. Clark

Humor is reason gone mad.

—Groucho Marx

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

—Christopher Morley

Humor results when society says you can’t scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public.

—Tom Walsh

Humor prevents one from becoming a tragic figure even though they are involved in tragic events.

—E.T. “Cy” Eberhart

Every survival kit should include a sense of humor.

—Author Unknown

There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.

—Victor Borge

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

—Mel Brooks

Serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without opposites.

—Plato

Humor is not a mood, but a way of looking at the world.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the whole New Testament there is not a single joke. That fact alone would invalidate any book.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Humor is... despair refusing to take itself seriously.

—Arland Ussher

If you want to make people weep, you must weep yourself. If you want to make people laugh, your face must remain serious.

—Giacomo Casanova

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

—Mahatma Gandhi

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

—Peter Ustinov

If money makes the world go round, it’s humor that keeps it from spinning out of control.

—Craig Kimberley

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

—Leo Rosten

Ideas come from space.

—Thomas Edison

If the idea is not at first absurd, then there is no hope for it.

—Albert Einstein

Two ideas are always needed: one to kill the other.

—Georges Braque

Ideas are information taking shape.

—Jim Rohn

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

—Victor Hugo

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

—Paul Vallely

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange them then you and I will still have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

—George Bernard Shaw

An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe it.

—Don Marquis

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen of them.

—John Steinbeck

Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.

—Victor Hugo

When I am completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep. It is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come I know not, nor can I force them…

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Drawing is putting a line round an idea.

—Henri Matisse

We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always the present – that is, living is always the present. We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us.

—J. Krishnamurti

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

—Oscar Wilde

Money never starts an idea. It is always the idea that starts the money.

—Owen Laughlin

When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.

—Michael Leboeuf

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straightjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

—William Golding

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

—Ezra Pound

Convictions are more dangerous enemies to truth than lies.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

A great many people think they are thinking, when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

—William James

If you wish to find, you must search. Rarely does a good idea interrupt you.

—Jim Rohn

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I am frightened of the old ones.

—John Cage

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

—Dale Carnegie

Humor is a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one’s bottom.

—Taki

The little I know, I owe to ignorance.

—Sacha Guitry

Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.

—Tobias Smollett

There is no darkness but ignorance.

—William Shakespeare

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

—Alfred North Whitehead

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don’t know.

—Ambrose Bierce

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

—Anatole France

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

—Aldous Huxley

Before we work on artificial intelligence why don’t we do something about natural stupidity?

—Steve Polyak

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

—Socrates

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.

—Daniel J. Boorstin

It’s innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn’t.

—Mignon McLaughlin

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

—Mark Twain

At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.

—Virginia Postrel

If ignorance is bliss, there should be more happy people.

—Victor Cousins

Everybody is ignorant. Only on different subjects.

—Will Rogers

Whenever people attack not the idea—but its source—you know they’ve hit the brick wall of their intellectual limitations.

—Dr. Idel Dreimer

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

—Bertrand Russell

Light travels faster than sound. That’s why most people seem bright until you hear them speak.

—Author Unknown

Jealousy is a mental cancer.

—B.C. Forbes

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

—Lawrence Durrell, Justine, 1957

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.

—Josh Billings

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

—Ovid

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

—Aeschylus

Envy is ignorance.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

—Danish Proverb

A show of envy is an insult to oneself.

—Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko

Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.

—Harold Coffin

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

—François de La Rochefoucauld

Envy is thin because it bites but never eats.

—Spanish Proverb

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

—Ambrose Bierce

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

—Honore de Balzac

The truest mark of being born with great qualities is being born without envy.

—Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

Language is the dress of thought.

—Samuel Johnson

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

—Charlemagne

A different language is a different vision of life.

—Federico Fellini

If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible.

—Robert Brault

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.

—Julia Penelope

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

—George Orwell

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise—that which is common to you, me, and everybody.

—Thomas Earnest Hulme, Speculations, 1923

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

—Edward R. Murrow

Words signify man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.

—Walter Kaufmann

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

—Max Weinrich

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

—Jane Wagner

Almost all words do have color and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too.

—Gladys Taber

Language was invented to ask questions. Answered may be given grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question.

—Eric Hoffer

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

—Steven Wright

Words, too, have genuine substance—mass and weight and specific gravity.

—Tim O’Brien, Tomcat in Love

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

—Winston Churchill

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

—Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

—Karl Kraus

What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.

—Antonio Porchia

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide—that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are alike forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man’s laughter, which is the end of the other.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

If I could but entice you with sentences and tongue tie you with words.

—Jamie Lynn Morris

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

—Walter Benjamin

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Some translators turn an author’s words from gold to stone, others from stone to gold.

—Terri Guillemets

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

—George Orwell

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum

He swore at us in German (which I should judge to be a singularly effective language for that purpose)...

—Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), 1889

Oaths are but words, and words but wind.

—Samuel Butler (1612–1680), Hudribas

“If you can’t say something nice, say it in French,” my mother advised...

—Vicki Linder, “In Praise of Gossip,” Cosmopolitan, 1982

Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.

—Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.

—Alfred North Whitehead

Anthropologically speaking, the human race can be said to have evolved from primitive ton civilized states, but there is no sign of language having gone through the same evolution. There are no ‘bronze age’ or ‘stone age’ languages.

—David Crystal

Love is metaphysical gravity.

—R. Buckminster Fuller

A man is not where he lives, but where he loves.

—Latin Proverb

Love is what makes two people sit in the middle of a bench when there is plenty of room at both ends.

—Author Unknown

Less is more, unless it’s love.

—Ben Mittleman

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

—Robert Frost

Who, being loved, is poor?

—Oscar Wilde

True love is a delightful slavery.

—James Lendall Basford

An old man in love is like a flower in winter.

—Portuguese Proverb

I love you not because of who you are but because of who I am when I am with you.

—Roy Croft

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

—Rumi

Love is when you can be your true self with someone, and you only want to be your true self because of them.

—Terri Guillemets

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.

—François de la Rochefoucault

Love me and the world is mine.

—David Reed

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

—J.D. Salinger

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

—Lao Tzu

Once a man has won a woman’s love, the love is his forever. He can only lose the woman.

—Robert Brault

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

—Margaret Atwood

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

—Eva Gabor

You know it’s true love when reality sets in and it doesn’t change a thing.

—Robert Brault

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

—William Butler Yeats

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

—Honoré de Balzac

You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.

—Dr. Seuss

Forget love—I’d rather fall in chocolate!

—Sandra J. Dykes

We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.

—Mignon McLaughlin

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

—Leo Tolstoy

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

—W. Somerset Maugham

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

—Author Unknown

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

—Voltaire

Lust fades, so you’d better be with someone who can stand you.

—Alan Zweibel

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

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

—John Ciardi

Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict.

—Rabindranath Tagore

It would be impossible to “love” anyone or anything one knew completely. Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object.

—Paul Valéry

Platonic love is love from the neck up.

—Thyra Smater Winsolow

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from.

—Werner Erhard

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

—Ben Hech

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

—David Byrne

Love makes time pass; time makes love pass.

—French Proverb

If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life.

—Cher

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

—W. Somerset Maugham

I love you as you are, but do not tell me how that is.

—Antonio Porchia

Love cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.

—Karl Menninger

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones.

—François de la Rochefoucault

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

—Malagasy Proverb

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

—Mother Teresa

We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.

—Robert Fulghum

Take love as a sober man takes wine; do not become a drunkard. If your mistress is sincere and faithful, love her for that; but if she is not, if she is merely young and beautiful, love her for that; if she is agreeable and spirituelle, love her for that; if she is none of these things but merely loves you, love her for that. Love does not come to us every day.

—Alfred de Musset

Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

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

—Robert Heinlein

Love does not make the world go round. It makes the ride worthwhile.

—Author Unknown

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Love can only end in indifference. If it ends in hate, it hasn’t ended.

—Robert Brault

Love is friendship that has caught fire. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.

—Ann Landers

When love is not madness, it is not love.

—Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Love is not blind—it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.

—Julins Gordon

He gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle.

—Ring Lardner

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.

—Theodor Reik

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

—George Bernard Shaw

I wish people love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.

—Muhammad Ali

It is not that love is blind. It is that love sees with a painter’s eye, finding the essence that renders all else background.

—Robert Brault

Memory is second sight.

—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897

God gave us memories so that we might enjoy roses in December.

—J.M. Barrie

Memory is time folding back on itself.

—Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain, 2008

Hmmm, how to “can a day?” You know, those days that seem just perfect you want access to them whenever the need arises.

—Jeb Dickerson

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

—Salvador Dali

What are memories but dreams of a better past?

—Robert Brault

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

—Edward de Bono

Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.

—Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

—George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.

—Seneca

The best way to remember your wife’s birthday is to forget it once.

—Joseph Cossman

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.

—Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest”

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

—P.D. James

You can be sad recalling sad times, but if you really want to be sad, recall happy times.

—Robert Brault

Those who receive with most pains and difficulty remember best; every one thing they learn being, as it were, burned and branded on their minds.

—Plutarch

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

—Aldous Huxley

The next best thing to the enjoyment of a good time, is the recollection of it.

—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915)

To expect a man to remember everything he has read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The work of memory collapses time.

—Walter Benjamin

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

—Josh Billings

I have memories—but only a fool stores his past in the future.

—David Gerrold

Recalling days of sadness, memories haunt me. Recalling days of happiness, I haunt my memories.

—Robert Brault

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

—William Faulkner

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

—John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1989

Living in memories is an empty gesture.

—Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

The happiest memories are of moments that ended when they should have.

—Robert Brault

All our lives we are engaged in preserving our experiences and keeping them fresh by artificially sprinkling the water of memory over them. They have ceased to retain their original smell and fragrance. Do you call it life—this effort at the preservation of a phantom freshness in something that is withered and gone?

—Vimala Thakar

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

—Michel de Montaigne

It’s a man’s world, and you men can have it.

—Katherine Anne Porter

Many a man owes his success to his first wife, and his second wife to his success.

—Jim Backus

A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire, women will like him.

—Mae West

What is the difference between men and women? A woman wants one man to satisfy her every need, and a man wants every woman to satisfy his one need.

—Author Unknown

A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.

—Oscar Wilde

God gave us all a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time.

—Robin Williams

A gentleman is simply a patient wolf.

—Lana Turner

I wonder why men get serious at all. They have this delicate, long thing hanging outside their bodies which goes up and down by its own will. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself.

—Yoko Ono

The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.

—Germaine de Staël

Part of the reason that men seem so much less loving than women is that men’s behavior is measured with a feminine ruler.

—Francesca M. Cancian

Marrying a man is like buying something you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house.

—Jean Kerr

Women may be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.

—James Shubert

The old theory was “Marry an older man, because they’re more mature.” But the new theory is: “Men don’t mature. Marry a younger one.”

—Rita Rudner

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

—Oscar Wilde

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

—Marlene Dietrich

Stop? I’m the guy. I don’t stop! That’s the woman’s job. We’re the gas, they’re the brakes.

—Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel

Men are only as loyal as their options.

—Bill Maher

Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.

—Katharine Hepburn

Why do men chase women they have no intention of marrying? The same urge that makes dogs chase cars they have no intention of driving.

—Author Unknown

The hardest task in a girl’s life is to prove to a man that his intentions are serious.

—Helen Rowland

It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.

—Helen Rowland

Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near.

—Helen Rowland

Men want the same thing from their underwear that they want from women: a little bit of support, and a little bit of freedom.

—Jerry Seinfeld

Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life.

—Alice Thomas Ellis

Macho doesn’t prove mucho.

—Zsa Zsa Gabor

You men are not our protectors.... If you were, who would there be to protect us from?

—Mary Edwards Walker

A man would create another man if one did not already exist, but a woman might live an eternity without even thinking of reproducing her own sex.

—Goethe

It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men.

—Mae West

A retired husband is often a wife’s full-time job.

—Ella Harris

They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.

—Clare Boothe Luce

Women are never disarmed by compliments; men always are.

—Oscar Wilde

When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.

—Jean Giraudoux

He is every other inch a gentleman.

—Rebecca West

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.

—D.H. Lawrence

Men are like a fine wine. They start out like grapes, and it’s our job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you’d like to have dinner with.

—Author Unknown

My theory is that men are no more liberated than women.

—Indira Gandhi

All men are not slimy warthogs. Some men are silly giraffes, some woebegone puppies, some insecure frogs. But if one is not careful, those slimy warthogs can ruin it for all the others.

—Cynthia Heimel

Men live by forgetting – women live on memories.

—T.S. Eliot

When a woman is very, very bad, she is awful, but when a man is correspondingly good he is weird.

—Minna Antrim

A single Man.... is an incomplete Animal. He resembles the odd Half of a Pair of Scissors.

—Benjamin Franklin

When a man of forty falls in love with a girl of twenty, it isn’t her youth he is seeking but his own.

—Lenore Coffee

The first time you buy a house you see how pretty the paint is and buy it. The second time you look to see if the basement has termites. It’s the same with men.

—Lupe Velez

I want a man who’s kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?

—Zsa Zsa Gabor

Men wake up aroused in the morning. We can’t help it. We just wake up and we want you. And the women are thinking, “How can he want me the way I look in the morning?” It’s because we can’t see you. We have no blood anywhere near our optic nerve.

—Sean Morey

Women are the right age for just a few years; men, for most of their lives.

—Mignon McLaughlin

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

—Honoré de Balzac

Renew your passions daily.

—Terri Guillemets

Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one: through their excess.

—Christian Nestell Bovee

Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.

—Jean de la Fontaine

We got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout.

—June Carter Cash

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

—Aldous Huxley

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.

—Benjamin Franklin

No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

The most beautiful make-up of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.

—Yves Saint Laurent

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

—Attributed to Howard Thurman

Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place.

—Ice-T, The Ice Opinion

You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.

—Sheila Graham

Love is often gentle, desire always a rage.

—Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion.

—Garrison Keillor

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.

—Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal, December 17, 1856

Chase down your passion like it’s the last bus of the night.

—Terri Guillemets

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

—Jack Kerouac

Gold cannot be pure, and people cannot be perfect.

—Chinese Proverb

Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.

—Harriet Braiker

Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.

—Vince Lombardi

It’s better to be perfectly useful than uselessly perfect.

—Dr. Idel Dreimer

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

—Goethe

I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.

—Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus, 1894

Unless I accept my faults I will most certainly doubt my virtues.

—Hugh Prather

They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.

—Wilt Chamberlain

Nothing that is complete breathes.

—Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Mistakes are the very base of human thought feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done.

—Lewis Thomas

You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.

—Martha Graham

When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target.

—George Fisher

Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.

—Salvador Dali

To escape criticism—do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

—Elbert Hubbard

Even the best needles are not sharp at both ends.

—Chinese Proverb

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

—William Safire

Always live up to your standards—by lowering them, if necessary.

—Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.

—John Henry Newman

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

—Confucius, Analects

It’s not that perfection cannot be achieved. It’s that it’s so hard to stop there.

—Robert Brault

Once you accept the fact that you’re not perfect, then you develop some confidence.

—Rosalynn Carter

Ideals are absolutes—they are like round holes of perfection into which the square, rough-hewn pegs of reality can never be successfully fitted.

—Dr. Idel Dreimer

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

—Leonard Cohen

There are no perfect men in this world, only perfect intentions.

—Pen Densham, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Sometimes... when you hold out for everything, you walk away with nothing.

—Author Unknown

The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.

—Stanley J. Randall

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.

—Bernard Baruch

Be curious always! For knowledge will not acquire you; you must acquire it.

—Sudie Back

‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ are words so important that they cannot be too often used.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

You can tell if a man is clever by his answers. You can tell if a man is wise by his questions.

—Naguib Mahfouz

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

—James Thurber

It is not the answer than enlightens but the question.

—Eugene Ionesco

I keep six honest serving-men. They taught me all I knew. Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

—Rudyard Kipling

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

—Albert Einstein

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul is: What does a woman want?

—Sigmund Freud

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It’s fiction’s business to ask them.

—Richard Hughes

The ‘’silly’’ question is the intimation of some totally new development.

—A.N. Whitehead

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

—Samuel Johnson

Curiosity is a willing, a proud, an eager confession of ignorance.

—S. Leonard Rubinstein, Writing: A Habit of Mind

A sense of curiosity is nature’s original school of education.

—Smiley Blanton

Every sentence that I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.

—Niels Bohr

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

—Ellen Parr, quoted in Reader’s Digest “Quotable Quotes,” December 1980

To be curious about that which is not one’s concern while still in ignorance of oneself is absurd.

—Plato

Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given. For you wouldn’t be able to live with them. And the point is to live everything, live the questions now and perhaps without knowing it, you will live along someday into the answers.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

—Thorstein Veblen

To realize that the question does not matter is the first step towards answering it correctly.

—G.K. Chesterton

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

—Ralph W. Sockman

There are no foolish questions, and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.

—Charles Proteus Steinmetz

In the search for truth, there are certain questions that are not important. Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal? Are there limits or not to the universe? What is the ideal form of organization for human society? If a man were to postpone his search for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.

—Buddha

A proverb is an exploding atom of wisdom.

—Gaston Kaboré

Short sentences drawn from long experience.

—Miguel de Cervantes

A proverb is to speech what salt is to food.

—Arabic Proverb

Quotationality defines us. We are what we quote.

—Gary Saul Morson

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.

—John Green

There are gems of thought that are ageless and eternal.

—Cicero

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

—Marlene Dietrich

A quotation at the right moment is like bread in a famine.

—Yiddish Proverb

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

—Author unknown

You might not be able to answer a question with a question but you can always answer a question with a quote!

—Hunter Brinkmeier

Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have “quotation” thrust upon them.

—Gary Saul Morson

Proverbs are the literature of reason.

—French Proverb

The maxims of men disclose their hearts.

—French Proverb

When two seemingly conflicting thoughts have made it to proverb or aphorism status, usually, in the ambivalence of life, both are true.

—Robert Irvine Fitzhenry

Apothegms form a short cut to much knowledge.

—Thomas Hood

I always love to quote Albert Einstein because nobody dares contradict him.

—Studs Terkel

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced—even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it.

—John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, February 24, 1819

Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come.

—W. Gates

In quoting others we cite ourselves.

—Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words, but cannot a few well-spoken words convey as many pictures?

—Author Unknown

The proper proportions of a maxim: a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.

—Mark Twain

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

—George Bernard Shaw

There are but few proverbial sayings that are not true, for they are all drawn from experience itself, which is the mother of all sciences.

—Miguel de Cervantes

Centuries have not worm-eaten the solidity of this ancient furniture of the mind.

—Isaac D’Israeli

Proverbs are in the world of thought what gold coin is in the world of business—great value in small compass, and equally current among all people. Sometimes the proverb may be false, the coin counterfeit, but in both cases the false proves the value of the true.

—Attributed to D. March in A Dictionary of Thoughts: A Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern by Tryon Edwards, 1908

Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.

—Agnes Sybil Thorndike (1882–1976)

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it...

—George Santayana,

Proverbs are potted wisdom.

—Charles Buxton

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Plato; or, The Philosopher”

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember.

—John Mason Brown

Quotes are nothing but inspiration for the uninspired.

—Attributed to Richard Kemph

An aphorism is never exactly true.
It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.

—Karl Kraus

I quote others in order to better express myself.

—Michel de Montaigne

Different people have different quotational gravity.

—Willis Goth Regier

The lips of the wise are as the doors of a cabinet; no sooner are they opened, but treasures are poured out before thee. Like unto trees of gold arranged in beds of silver, are wise sentences uttered in due season.

—The Economy of Human Life, from an Indian manuscript

Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author.

—André-Marie Ampère

He picked something out of everything he read.

—Pliny

Quotations calcify into clichés.

—Willis Goth Regier

You may get a large amount of truth into a brief space.

—Attributed to Beecher in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1899

People will accept your idea more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

—David H. Comins

I am fully conscious of the fact, that aphorisms are like wandering Gypsies. They must always be published without guarantee of the authenticity.

—Erkki Melartin

Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.

—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas

The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.

—William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

Most collectors collect tangibles. As a quotation collector, I collect wisdom, life, invisible beauty, souls alive in ink.

—Terri Guillemets

The proverbs of a nation furnish the index to its spirit and the results of its civilization.

—Timothy Titcomb

Books are the beehives of thought; laconics, the honey taken from them.

—James Ellis, quoted in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1899

A quote is just a tattoo on the tongue.

—Attributed to William F. DeVault

It is a pleasure to be able to quote lines to fit any occasion...

—Abraham Lincoln

When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

—Anatole France

Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine that the thrill of making an anthology includes the opportunity to become such a coauthor.

—Gary Saul Morson

Anatole France frankly advised, “When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.” Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Pierce them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul. As anthologies can never be complete, we will never exhaust the ways quotations can enrich our lives.

—Gary Saul Morson

Life itself is a quotation.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Quotation brings to many people one of the intensest joys of living.... This innocent vanity often helps us over the hard places in life; it gives us a warm little glow against the coldness of the world and keeps us snug and happy.

—Bernard Darwin

He wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

—Rudyard Kipling

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

—Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, 1873

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

—W. Sommerset Maugham

A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.

—Joseph Epstein

A book of quotations... can never be complete.

—Robert M. Hamilton

Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning.

—Samuel Johnson, 1760

I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can’t unplug me.

—Joseph Epstein

Language would be tolerable without spicy, epigrammatic sayings, and life could no doubt be carried on by means of plain language wholly bereft of ornament. But if we wish to relish language, if we wish to give it point and piquancy, and if we want to drive home a truth, to whip up the flagging attention of our listener, to point a moral or adorn a tale, we must flavour our speech with proverbs.

—John Christian, “Introduction,” Behar Proverbs, 1891

Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

—Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Liberation of Mankind, 1926

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.

—Mark Twain

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid because it ornaments a man’s speech with other men’s jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

—Robertson Davies

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.

—Elias Canetti

Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

Like your body your mind also gets tired so refresh it by wise sayings.

—Hazrat Ali

Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

—Alexander Smith

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book, & ransack every page.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, c.1867

In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.

—George Orwell, review of Cricket Country by Edmund Blunden

The chief ingredients which go to make a true proverb are: sense, shortness, and salt.

—James Howell, Paroimiografia, 1659

The taste of the finely-worded truth rolled upon the tongue as its thought is revolved in the mind.

—William Francis Henry King, “Introduction,” Classical and Foreign Quotations, 1889

I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to find his Works respectfully quoted by other learned Authors.

—Benjamin Franklin, “Preface,” Poor Richard Improved

The only way to read a book of aphorisms without being bored is to open it at random and, having found something that interests you, close the book and meditate.

—Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne, 1796

My readers, who may at first be apt to consider Quotation as downright pedantry, will be surprised when I assure them, that next to the simple imitation of sounds and gestures, Quotation is the most natural and most frequent habitude of human nature. For, Quotation must not be confined to passages adduced out of authors. He who cites the opinion, or remark, or saying of another, whether it has been written or spoken, is certainly one who quotes; and this we shall find to be universally practiced.

—James Boswell, “The Hypochondriack,” 1779

I enjoy collecting quotations. When I find a choice one I pounce on it like a lepidopterist. My day is made. When I lose one because I did not copy it out at once I feel bereft.

—R.I. Fitzhenry, preface to The David & Charles Book of Quotations, September 1981

We love quotations; they strengthen us in our own belief; they show that some other spirit, perhaps a master-spirit, has gone thus far with us.

—S.J.W., “On Female Education,” 1835

It is bad enough to see one’s own good things fathered on other people, but it is worse to have other people’s rubbish fathered upon oneself.

—Samuel Butler

When I hear or read a good line I can hardly wait to tell it to somebody else...

—Robert Byrne

Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads....

—Joseph Epstein

A true quotation cannot be divorced from the character who uttered or scribbled it; it should say as much about the person quoted as about the particular subject referred to, and for this reason an anthology of quotations should be a kind of portrait gallery.

—Robert Andrews

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

—Democritus

It may be a good thing to copy reality; but to invent reality is much, much better.

—Giuseppe Verdi

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

—Albert Einstein

We are all captives of the picture in our head – our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

—Walter Lippmann

Objectivity has about as much substance as the emperor’s new clothes.

—Connie Miller

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

—John Lennon

Nothing exists but thoughts! The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!

—Sir Humphrey Davy

Few people have the imagination for reality.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If a dream is realistic, it’s not really a dream. It’s a to-do.

—Kim and Jason Kotecki

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

—Joseph Campbell (1904–1987)

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another.

—John Burroughs

Reality bites... and doesn’t let go.

—Author Unknown

Seems like nothing ever brings you back to reality that makes you want to stay there.

—Robert Brault

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

—Salvador Dali

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

—T.S. Eliot

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

—Voltaire

Being realistic is the most commonly traveled way to mediocrity.

—Will Smith

There are no facts, only interpretations.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you’re just a reflection of him?

—Calvin and Hobbes

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.

—Louise Nevelson

Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.

—Jane Wagner

How reluctantly the mind consents to reality!

—Norman Douglas

It must be hard to be a model, because you’d want to be like the photograph of you, and you can’t ever look that way.

—Andy Warhol

Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides.

—Frank Tyger

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

—Tom Robbins

All the mind’s activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

—Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past:
Cities of the Plain

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

—African Proverb

To know when to go away and when to come closer is the key to any lasting relationship.

—Doménico Cieri Estrada

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.

—Swedish Proverb

Having someone wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night is a very old human need.

—Margaret Mead

Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.

—Arthur Helps

Helping others out of trouble generally helps the helper into trouble.

—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897

No road is long with good company.

—Turkish Proverb

Good company upon the road is the shortest cut.

—Author Unknown

Once you find someone to share your ups and downs, downs are almost as good as ups.

—Robert Brault

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty.

—Sicilian Proverb

A partner is someone who makes you more than you are, simply by being by your side.

—Albert Kim

To truly know someone is to know the silence that stands for the thing they never speak of.

—Robert Brault

Are we not like two volumes of one book?

—Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend.

—Aristotle

A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they’re not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they’re not so bad.

—Arnold H. Glasgow

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.

—Henry Winkler

People change and forget to tell each other.

—Lillian Hellman

True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.

—Dave Tyson Gentry

Sometimes it is the person closest to us who must travel the furthest distance to be our friend.

—Robert Brault

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.

—Oprah Winfrey

When something is missing in your life, it usually turns out to be someone.

—Robert Brault

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.

—Elisabeth Foley

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.

—Audre Lorde

We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.

—Jean Guitton

The world is not outside you.

—Ramana Maharshi

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.

—H.F. Hedge

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

—Dr. Alexis Carrel

I am sure that nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man’s course as his personal appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in its attractiveness or unattractiveness.

—Leo Tolstoy

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounding yourself with assholes.

—William Gibson

There is nothing noble about being superior to some other person. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.

—Hindustani Proverb

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.

—Wayne W. Dyer

The mirror will only lie, when you look at it through a mask.

—Anthony Liccione

I am a raging sea trapped in a raindrop.

—Author unknown

Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

—William Butler Yeats

If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.

—Gelett Burgess

Be careful of selfish motives. You can mistake them for principles and end up dying for them.

—Robert Braul

We are the products of editing, rather than authorship.

—George Wald

There is a public me and a private me, who, if they were separate people, probably wouldn’t exchange Christmas cards.

—Robert Brault

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself,
I am large—I contain multitudes.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

A criminal becomes a popular figure because he unburdens in no small degree the consciences of his fellow man, for now they know once more where evil is to be found.

—Carl G. Jung

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.

—Michelangelo

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

People aren’t ignoring you. They are busy with their lives. And the way to stop feeling ignored is to get busy with yours.

—Robert Brault

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

—Oscar Wilde

Grace is within you. If it were external, it would be useless.

—Ramana Maharshi

We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is civil war.

—Charles Caleb Colton

We all have to escape from this thing called life sometimes. Maybe we use substances to do it. Maybe we use religion. Maybe we use exercise. Maybe we use anger. But we all have to do it. How we do it is what defines us.

—Dan Pearce

Dig within. There lies the well-spring of good: ever dig, and it will ever flow.

—Marcus Aurelius

Every human has four endowments – self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.

—Stephen Covey

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in the darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.

—Hāfez

What we do flows from who we are.

—Paul Vitale

There is luxury in self-reproach.... When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

—Oscar Wilde

The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.

—Reginald H. Blyth

How easy it is to be “deep”: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

—E.M. Cioran

Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.

—Chinese Proverb

Take your work seriously, but never yourself.

—Margot Fonteyn

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

—Marcel Proust

One must have chaos within one to give birth to a dancing star.

—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

A wise man never loses anything if he have himself.

—Michel de Montaigne

I know not what phantom we take for self....

—Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)

A man who finds no satisfaction in himself, seeks for it in vain elsewhere.

—François de la Rochefoucault

Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.

—Robert Brault

All men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of a masterpiece.

—Eddie Murphy, 1979

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

—Walter Benjamin

The words “I am” are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to. The thing you’re claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.

—A.L. Kitselman

Almost always it is the fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror.

—Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943

It’s like, at the end, there’s this surprise quiz: am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now! Was it worth what I paid?

—Richard Bach

From birth to death every man is weaving destiny around himself, as a spider does his web.

—Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–1891)

At this very moment, you may be saying to yourself that you have any number of admirable qualities. You are a loyal friend, a caring person, someone who is smart, dependable, fun to be around. That’s wonderful, and I’m happy for you, but let me ask you this: are you being any of those things to yourself?

—Phillip C. McGraw

What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.

—Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

—Agnes Repplier

There is great security in the prisons we create for ourselves.

—Stephen G. Scalese, The Whisper in Your Heart

A philosopher lives in your mind, a lover in your heart, an alchemist in your soul.

—Terri Guillemets

I said I could have done the thing, had the obstacles been removed, but after all else had been cleared away, there would still have been myself.

—Muriel Strode (1875–1964), My Little Book of Life, 1912

Man is never alone. Acknowledged or unacknowledged, that which dreams through him is always there to support him from within.

—Laurence van der Post

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

—Mark Twain

If you only live for yourself you are always in immediate danger of being bored to death with the repetition of your own views and interests.

—W. Beran Wolfe

Think positively about yourself.... ask God who made you to keep on remaking you.

—Norman Vincent Peale

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man.

—Dwigh L. Moody

Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

—Alan Watts

I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

—Katherine Anne Porter

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.

—Michel De Montaigne

There are at least two kinds of cowards. One kind always lives with himself, afraid to face the world. The other kind lives with the world, afraid to face himself.

—Roscoe Snowden

The most excellent Jihad is that for the conquest of self.

—Cyril Connolly

And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

—Confucius

The perfect man has no self.

—Zhuangzi

Self-destruction is the effect of cowardice in the highest extreme.

—Daniel Defoe

My life has been one great big joke,
A dance that’s walked,
A song that’s spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke,
When I think about myself.

—Maya Angelou

In a speech, the columnist Charles Krauthammer.... offered a new version of Socrates’ famous saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In our age of bottomless self-love and obsession with our own feelings, Krauthammer suggested, “The too-examined life is not worth living either.”

—John Leo

Sex is God’s joke on human beings.

—Bette Davis

The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.

—William Osler

Sex and sleep make me conscious that I am mortal.

—Alexander the Great

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

—George Bernard Shaw

The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love is a matter of chemistry, but sex is a matter of physics.

—Author Unknown

My wife is a sex object. Every time I ask for sex, she objects.

—Les Dawson

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

—W. Somerset Maugham, The Bread-Winner

The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it.

—Woody Allen

The common thread that binds nearly all animal species seems to be that males are willing to abandon all sense and decorum, even to risk their lives, in the frantic quest for sex.

—Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer

If you use the electric vibrator near water, you will come and go at the same time.

—Louise Sammons

Sex between a man and a woman can be a beautiful thing, provided you’re between the right man and the right woman.

—Woody Allen

The tragedy is when you’ve got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.

—D.H. Lawrence

It is not economical to go to bed early to save candles if the result is twins.

—Chinese Proverb

It was also Jacque who told me that children didn’t come out of their mother’s tummies. As she put it, “Where the ingredients go in is where the finished product comes out!”

—Anne M. Frank, letter, 1944

I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.

—John Waters

Sex hasn’t been the same since women started enjoying it.

—Lewis Grizzard

My message to businessmen of this country when they go abroad on business is that there is one thing above all they can take with them to stop them catching AIDS, and that is the wife.

—Edwina Currie

Obscenity is whatever gives the Judge an erection.

—Author Unknown

Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.

—Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Sex Education – A controversial course that parents argue about while their kids are out doing the lab work.

—Richard E. Turner

The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the “Four F’s”: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating.

—Marvin Dunnette

For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.

—Isabel Allende

The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.

—Gloria Leonard

Having sex is like playing bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.

—Woody Allen

Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.

—Marlene Dietrich

I am always looking for meaningful one night stands.

—Dudley Moore

It isn’t premarital sex if you have no intention of getting married.

—Drew Carey

While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.

—Boccaccio

Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?

—Murray Banks

I think I could fall madly in bed with you.

—Author Unknown

The sexual organs show more character than the actors’ faces.... There are phalluses in porno whose distended veins speak of the integrity of the hardworking heart, but there is so little specific content in the faces! Hard core lulls after it excites, and finally it puts the brain to sleep.

—Norman Mailer

Playboy exploits sex the way Sports Illustrated exploits sports.

—Hugh Hefner

Desire is in men a hunger, in women only an appetite.

—Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.

—Matt Groening

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around.

—David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965

Older women are best because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.

—Ian Fleming

Erotica is using the feather, pornography is using the whole chicken.

—Isabel Allende

An intellectual is someone who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

—Aldous Huxley

To know the difference between erotica and pornography you must first know the difference between naked and nude.

—Bernard Poulin

When a man talks dirty to a woman, it’s sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it’s $3.95 a minute.

—Author Unknown

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

—Henry Miller

Sex is something children never discuss in the presence of their elders.

—Arthur Roche

For the first time in history, sex is more dangerous than the cigarette afterward.

—Jay Leno

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

—Leonardo Da Vinci

Men of few words are the best men.

—William Shakespeare

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.

—John Ruskin

All the great things are simple.

—Winston Churchill

The greatest step towards a life of simplicity is to learn to let go.

—Steve Maraboli

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

—Lin Yutang

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

—Hans Hofmann, Introduction to the Bootstrap, 1993

I’ve adjectived up my life so much I forgot how to be simple and plain and quiet. Be. Just be.

—Terri Guillemets

Everything we possess that is not necessary for life or happiness becomes a burden, and scarcely a day passes that we do not add to it.

—Robert Brault

How many things are there which I do not want.

—Socrates

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.

—E.F. Schumacher

Simplicity and harmony are the ultimate conditions to be attained in all things.

—Horace Fletcher

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed—it is a process of elimination.

—Elbert Hubbard

Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.

—Elise Boulding

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

—Rémy de Gourmont

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

—Alan J. Perlis

You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.

—Vernon Howard

The goal of life: simple but not empty.

—Terri Guillemets

Everything that is exact is short.

—Joseph Joubert

Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than submit to the desolation of an empty abundance.

—Michael Harrington

Maybe a person’s time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.

—Frank A. Clark

If you haven’t had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature.

—Phyllis Battelle

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

—Edwin Way Teale

Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

—Isaac Newton

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

—Albert Einstein

The greatest truths are the simplest: so likewise are the greatest men.

—Augustus William Hare

Simplicity of life is not a misery but the foundation of refinement.

—William Morris

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

—Albert Einstein

Live simply that others might simply live.

—Elizabeth Ann Seton

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.

—Philip Wylie

The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.

—Voltaire

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

—Edward Gibbon

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

—Henry David Thoreau

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

—Paul Tillich

Solitude is a form of meditation.

—Terri Guillemets

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

—Stendhal

We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart... and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together.... I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.

—Helen Hayes

Man loves company even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799)

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

—Lorraine Hansberry

In a soulmate we find not company but a completed solitude.

—Robert Brault

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

—Eric Hoffer

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

—Harold Bloom

There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

—Colette

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that’s where I renew my springs that never dry up.

—Pearl Buck

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1854

I’m not anti-social. I’m pro-solitude.

—Author unknown

Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.

—Paul Tillich

It is only when we silence the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts.

—K.T. Jong

You will not find a soulmate in the quiet of your room. You must go to a noisy place and look in the quiet corners.

—Robert Brault

Society shows us what we are. Solitude shows us what should be.

—Robert Cecil

What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There is something in the nature of silence which affects me deeply. Why it is I know not; but I do know that I love to be alone at such an hour as this. I love to forget the outward world and hold communion with the beings of the mind.

—Charles Lanman, “Musings,” 1840

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

—Henry David Thoreau

I owe my solitude to other people.

—Alan Watts

You will not find a soulmate in the quiet of your room. You must go to a noisy place and look in the quiet corners.

—Robert Brault

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.

—Chinese Proverb

STRESS: Someone Trying to Repair Every Situation Solo.

—Dave Willis

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

—Richard Carlson

How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterward.

—Spanish Proverb

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.

—Milan Kundera

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

—William James

Don’t let your mind bully your body into believing it must carry the burden of its worries.

—Terri Guillemets

Take rest. A field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.

—Ovid

It’s not the load that breaks you down. It’s the way you carry it.

—Lou Holtz

The most anxious man in the prison is the governor.

—George Bernard Shaw

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

—Mahatma Gandhi

If your teeth are clenched and your fists are clenched, your lifespan is probably clenched.

—Terri Guillemets

To live in scarcity is to worry about the cost of food; to live in abundance is to worry about who else you can invite for dinner.

—Mike Dolan

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.

—Aesop, Fables

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?

—Paul Sweeney

We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares. They fatigued only the muscles, we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves.

—Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

—Will Rogers

Anxiety is fear of oneself.

—Wilhelm Stekel

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.

—Etty Hillesum

I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.

—Jennifer Yane

The major cause of stress is the inability of people to discover their real nature.

—Author Unknown

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you.

—John De Paola

God didn’t do it all in one day. What makes me think I can?

—Author Unknown

Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.

—Natalie Goldberg

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it.

—Author Unknown

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

—Margaret Fuller

For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.

—Lily Tomlin

What luck for rulers that men do not think.

—Adolph Hitler

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

—William James

It has been said that we have approximately 187,000 thoughts a day, 98 percent of which we had the day before, and the day before that.

—Ariel and Shya Kane

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fear or wishes rather than with their minds.

—Will Durant

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

—Victor Hugo

Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.

—Josiah Royce

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Challenge your assumptions so that you can find your truths.

—Author Unknown

No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.

—Terry Josephson

Our most important thoughts are those which contradict our emotions.

—Paul Valéry

Some people get lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory.

—G. Behn

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always present.

—Helen Keller

Thinking up the Theory of Relativity was easy. Proving it was next to impossible.

—Albert Einstein

If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.

—Peace Pilgrim

At a certain age some people’s minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.

—William Lyon Phelps

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born, to people you could not possibly have met.

—Fran Lebowitz

Isn’t it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?

—Charles A. Lindbergh

He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.

—William Drummond

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won’t keep. SSSooomething must be done about them.

—A.N. Whitehead

Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.

—Howard Mumford Jones

It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean.

—Luther Burbank

When one thinks clearly about thinking, one is present at the first instant of time.

—Edgar Allan Poe

You and I are not what we eat; we are what we think.

—Walter Anderson

There are thoughts which appear not to have come from the senses, but rather to have been forced through the skull.

—James Lendall Basford

As long as you are going to be thinking anyway, think big.

—Donald Trump

Great thinkers move slowly.

—James Lendall Basford

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy: You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

—Ray Bradbury

Our minds are lazier than our bodies.

—François de la Rochefoucault

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

—H.L. Mencken

Thoughts are like an open ocean, they can either move you forward within its waves, or sink you under deep into its abyss.

—Anthony Liccione

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It’s a death trap.

—Anthony Hopkins

We are no more responsible for the evil thoughts which pass through our minds than a scarecrow for the birds which fly over the seed-plot he has to guard. The sole responsibility in each case is to prevent them from settling.

—John Churton Collins

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

—Paul Valéry

Practical gentlemen hate uncertainty, balancing of probabilities, skepticism or approximation. They have a number of bitterly satirical comments on persons whose minds are so open that their brains fall out. They are bent on getting to a conclusion.

—Max Radin

Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information.

—John Erskine

Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.

—Voltaire

Men can live without air a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months—and without a new thought for years on end.

—Kent Ruth

Children are happy because they don’t have a file in their minds called ‘‘All the things that could go wrong.’’

—Author Unknown

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their “agreement,” as falsity means their disagreement, with “reality.”

—William James

The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.

—Aristotle

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

—Francis Beacon

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Truth is a woman. One must not use force with her.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

There is nothing so powerful as truth – and often nothing so strange.

—Daniel Webster

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know.

—George Spencer Brown

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

—Mahatma Gandhi

The truth shall make you free.

—John 8:32

In war, Truth is the first casualty.

—Aeschylus

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.

—Michel De Montaigne

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

—Rémy De Gourmont

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

—Margaret Thatcher

Arguing with a woman is like reading the software license agreement. In the end, you ignore everything and click ‘‘I agree’’.

—Author Unknown

A man chases a woman until she catches him.

—American Proverb

Women speak two languages—one of which is verbal.

—William Shakespeare

Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman’s weapon is her tongue.

—Hermione Gingold

I like being a woman even in a man’s world. After all, men can’t wear dresses but we can wear the pants.

—Whitney Houston

Women always worry about the things that men forget; men always worry about the things women remember.

—Author Unknown

If men knew all that women think they would be twenty times more audacious.

—Alphonse Karr

A woman is like a tea bag. It’s only when she’s in hot water that you realize how strong she is.

—Nancy Reagan

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

—H.L. Mencken

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.

—Sigmund Freud

Sometimes it takes balls to be a woman.

—Anonymous

Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them.

—Bill Maher

She wasn’t looking for a knight. She was looking for a sword.

—Atticus

A man is as good as he has to be and a woman is as bad as she dares.

—Elbert Hubbard

The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A woman should be an illusion.

—Ian Fleming

Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen.

—Compton Mackenzie

I would rather trust a woman’s instinct than a man’s reason.

—Stanley Baldwin

One is not born a woman, one becomes one.

—Simone de Beauvoir

Who loves not women, wine, and song, remains a fool his whole life long.

—German Proverb

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

—Karl Kraus

Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.

—Oscar Wilde

A woman need know but one man well, in order to understand all men, whereas a man may know all women and understand not one of them.

—Helen Rowland

Beauty is the first present Nature gives to women, and the first it takes away.

—Méré

Men look at themselves in mirrors. Women look for themselves.

—Elissa Melamed

Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.

—Elsa Schiaparelli

A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is a man who hopes they are.

—Chauncey Mitchell Depew

No woman wants to see herself too clearly.

—Mignon McLaughlin

The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.

—Guy de Maupassant

A woman wears her tears like jewelry.

—Author Unknown

To get to a woman’s heart, a man must first use his own.

—Mike Dobbertin

There are women who do not like to cause suffering to many men at a time, and who prefer to concentrate on one man: These are the faithful women.

—Alfred Capus

A man never knows how to say goodbye; a woman never knows when to say it.

—Helen Rowland

Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weakness.

—Marie de Vichy-Chamrond

In politics, if you want something said ask a man. If you want something done ask a woman.

—Margaret Thatcher

If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.

—Aristotle Onassis

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Men really prefer reasonably attractive women; they go after the sensational ones to impress other men.

—Mignon McLaughlin

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

—Charlotte Whitton

You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.

—Brigham Young

They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.

—Oliver Goldsmith

Every woman is wrong until she cries, and then she is right—instantly.

—Sam Slick

Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.

—Laurence J. Peter

Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination.

—Marcel Proust

I hate women because they know where things are.

—James Thurber

Women like silent men. They think they’re listening.

—Marcel Achard

The rarest thing in the world is a woman who is pleased with photographs of herself.

—Elizabeth Metcalf

Be to her virtues very kind,
Be to her faults a little blind.

—Matthew Prior

Even when they meet in the street, women look at each other like Guelphs and Guibellines.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.

—Author Unknown

That’s the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty-eight and forty.

—James Thurber

Whether they give or refuse, it delights women just the same to have been asked.

—Ovid

Biologically speaking, if something bites, it’s more likely to be female.

—Desmond Morris

There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.

—Madeleine K. Albright

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

—George Eliot

Women are like elephants to me. I like to look at them, but I wouldn’t want to own one.

—W.C. Fields

Women rule the world. No man has ever done anything that a woman hasn’t either allowed him to do, or encouraged him to do.

—Bob Dylan

Can you imagine a world without men? No crime and lots of happy fat women.

—Nicole Hollander

Women get the last word in every argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

—Author Unknown

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

—Oscar Wilde

She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.

—Woody Allen

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the superiority of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things! Each has what the other has not; each completes the other; they are in nothing alike; and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

—John Ruskin

Words are free. It’s how you use them that may cost you.

—Author Unknown

Words are magic things. They hide secret life meanings. The very essence of the world…

—Danai Krokou

Words are loaded pistols.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.

—Lord Byron

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

—Stephen King

Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make clearer.

—Joseph Joubert

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

—Dennis Potter

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

—Jorge Luis Borges

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

—Joan Baez

Words—so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is not my sentence that I polish, but my thought. I pause until the drop of light that I need is formed and falls from my pen.

—Joseph Joubert

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

—Blaise Pascal

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

—E.L. Doctorow

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It’s enough to make you lose your mind day by day.

—Richard Price

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

—Enrique Jardiel Poncela

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

—James Michener

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality. !

—Edgar Allan Poe

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

—Anton Chekhov

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

—Anaïs Nin

Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong.

—Jeb Dickerson

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

—Mignon McLaughlin

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.

—Sharon O’Brien

In the course of life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

—Winston Churchill

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

—Elias Canetti

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

—Agatha Christie

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

—Orson Scott Card

Every word born of an inner necessity—writing must never be anything else.

—Etty Hillesum

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.

—Wendell Johnson

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.

—Mark Twain

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason. They made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

—Charles Caleb Colton

Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head.

—From the movie Finding Forrester

A writer’s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.

—Ethel Wilson

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.

—Burton Rascoe

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

—Francis Bacon

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

—Catherine Drinker Bowen

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

—Mark Twain

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

—Charles Peguy

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

—Toni Morrison

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.

—Truman Capote

The expression “to write something down” suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

—William Gass

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

—Logan Pearsall Smith

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

—Hannah Arendt

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

—W. Somerset Maugham

We write to remember our nows later.

—Terri Guillemets