quotes

Quotes
I am a man. Nothing human is strange to me.
Unknown

Advice
A place for everything, and everything in its place.
Samuel Smiles

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Speak softly and carry a big stick.
Theodore Roosevelt (1901)

Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.
Lord Chesterfield, letters to his son

Have no friends not equal to yourself.
Confucius, Analects

Age
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell (last words written)

Age is strictly a matter of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Jack Benny

Film
Television is a medium of entertainment which allows millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time and yet remain lonesome.
T.S. Elliot

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives in him to keep looking.
Brooks Atkinson

It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
Muhammad Ali

In America it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
Russell Baker

Friends
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tell me what company you keep and I’ll tell you what you are.
Miguel de Cervantes

Humor
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Lily Tomlin (attributed)

“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
“The dog did nothing in the nighttime.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle

When is a door not a door?
When it’s a jar.
Unknown

Language
To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.
Friedrich Nietzsche


Nature
Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.
Juvenal

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life’s become extinct, the climates ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier everyday.
Anton Chekhov


Philosophy
Man is condemned to be free.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism

One should eat to live, and not live to eat.
Moliere

Life is a romantic business. It is like a painting, not doing a sum – but you have to make the romance, and it will come to the question of how much fire you have in your belly.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley

There is but one truly serious question and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental problem of philosophy.
Albert Camus

Poetry
Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B. Yeats

Your children are not your children.
They are the son’s and daughters of Life’s
Longing for itself….
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
Kahlil Gibran
Two roads diverged in the woods, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost

Retired is being tired twice, I’ve thought
First tired of working.
Then tired of not.
Richard Armour

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S. Eliot

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads to madness.
Christopher Morley


Politics
Eternal Vigilance is the price of liberty – power is ever stealing from the many to the few.
Wendell Philips (1852)

All conservatism is based on the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
G.K. Chesterton

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men…. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Lord Acton (1887)

What we call real estate – the solid foundation to build a house on – is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of the world rests.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

It was as though Eichmann was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word and thought defying banality of evil.
Hannah Arndt


The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke

I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections
William Congreve.

Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society; it’s most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.
William James, The Principles of Psychology

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw


Prose
Take most people, they’re crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they are always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand new car already they start talking about trading it in for one that’s even newer. I don’t even like old cars…. I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye


Psychology
I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake – which I also keep handy.
W.C. Fields

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

I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for artistic expression.
Evelyn Waugh

Every act of will is an act of self limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self sacrifice.
When you choose anything you reject everything else.
G.K. Chesterton

Character is that which one can do without success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are the children of our landscape.
Lawrence Durrell

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God was dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. In the nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the twentieth century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men become robots.
Eric Fromm, The Sane Society

Work and love – those are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.
Theodore Reik

Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.
Comte de Buffon

I have so often seen how people come by the name of genius – in the same way, that is, as certain insects come by the name of millipede, not because they have that number of feet, but because most people won’t count up to fourteen.
Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms

Every case is unique, and very much the same.
Freud


Life is a romantic business. It is like a painting, not doing a sum – but you have to make the romance, and it will come to the question of how much fire you have in your belly.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley

Religion
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him out to dinner, hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
Thomas Carlyle


Style
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we see a natural style, we are quite surprised and delighted, for we expected an author and we find a man.
Blaise Pascal



Teaching Learning
Great teachers have no common characteristics beyond the belief that people can learn and that teaching can help them to do so.
Unknown

Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me, and I may remember.
But involve me, and I will understand
Confucius

I do not open up the truth to one is not eager to get knowledge, nor help out anyone who is not anxious to express himself. When I have presented one corner of a subject, and he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lesson.
Confucius, The Analects VII

Men must be taught as if you taught them not.
And things proposed as things forgot.
Alexander Pope

In examinations those who do not wish to know ask questions of those who cannot tell.
Sir Walter Raleigh, Laughter from a Cloud



Women
When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn’t she behave like a nice man?
Edith Evans

The lady doth protest too much methinks.
Shakespeare, Macbeth

Oh the innocent girl
in her maiden teens
knows perfectly well
what everything means.
D. H. Lawrence

Women would rather be right than reasonable.
Ogden Nash