But then if I do not strive, who will?
-- Chuang Tzu
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we
need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
-- Charles Kingsley
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in
it. Begin it now.
-- Goethe
If we must fall, we should boldly meet the danger.
-- Tacitus (55-117 A.D.)
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
-- Eden Phillpots
When you're a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you're older, it's a straight
part.
-- Sir Laurence Olivier
One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.
-- Nietzsche
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but
suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
-- Somerset Maugham
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
-- Edward R. Murrow
I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom
undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard
strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I
found that it held me in its grip.
-- Rabindranath Tagore
They talk most who have the least to say.
-- Matthew Prior
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
"My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but
queerer than we can suppose."
-- John Haldane
"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of
tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."
-- Neils Bohr
Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the
time."
-- George Orwell
"Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it
afterwards."
-- Soren F. Petersen
"Most people want security in this world, not liberty."
-- H.L. Mencken
"Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand."
-- Homer Simpson
"It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your
help."
-- Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
"Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just
before you realize what's wrong with it."
-- Anonymous
"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is
the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
-- Goya
"For NASA, space is still a high priority." --Dan Quayle
"Every time I try to define a perfectly stable person, I am appalled by the dullness
of that person."
-- J. D. Griffin
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you have only one idea.
-- Emile-Auguste Chartier
"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of
authority."
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
"Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for
dandruff--it is a palliative rather than a remedy."
-- Peter De Vries
"Civilization is just a temporary failure of entropy."
-- Christine Nelson
Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
"Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity."
-- Charles G. Dawes
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day
of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful
which God has implanted in the human soul.
-- Goethe
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed
but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland,
they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did
that produce? The cuckoo clock.
-- Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949
That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what
you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.
-- William J.H. Boetcker
We tell lies when we are afraid, . . . afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others
will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the
thing that we fear grows stronger.
-- Tad Williams,
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
-- Austin Phelps
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 gone ourselves.
-- E. M. Forster
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so
they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
-- Albert Camus
Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.
-- Seneca
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, Walden
It is not a sign of arrogance for the king to rule. That is what he is there for.
WF Buckley
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
-- H L Mencken
If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the "Ode On a Grecian
Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.
-- William Faulkner
Alexander III of Macedonia is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people
of more different kinds than any other man of his time,
-- Will Cuppy
People who change the world are not usually the self-styled leaders of men, nor yet the
willing martyrs who go singing to the stake. They are the very ordinary people who, in
diffidence and apprehension, pursue the course they have set for themselves and who have
no other reason for doing so than that they would despise themselves if they gave up.
-- Peter Quince
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have
ceased to live.
-- Mark Twain
Fiat justitia et ruant coeli. (Let justice be done though the heavens fall.)
-- 'A Decacordon of Ten Quodlibeticall Questions Concerning Religion and State'
(1602) (first citation in an English work of a famous maxim).
Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
-- Felix Frankfurter
A ship is safe in harbor but that's not what ships are for.
"Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're
part of the road."
-- Stewart Brand
"On applause: They named it Ovation from the Latin _ovis_, a sheep."
-- Plutarch
"No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness."
-- Aristotle
"Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even
superficial."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded."
-- Terry Pratchett
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us
with a certain alienated majesty."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup."
-- Turkish proverb
"For what a man would like to to be true, that he more readily believes."
-- Francis Bacon
"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were
used to beat plowshares into swords."
-- Alan Wilson Watts