Quotes

In chronological order, here’s what I have from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. They are noteworthy for various reasons, mostly because I thought they were somehow clever.

“Son of Atreus, what manner of speech has escaped your teeth?”
-Homer

“Badness you can get easily, in quantity: the road is smooth and it lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it, and rough at first. But when you come to the top, then it is easy, even though it is hard.”
-Hesiod

“Old women should not be perfumed.”
-Archilochus

“We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.”
-Aesop

“The superior man is distressed by want of ability.”
-Confucius

“The road up and down is one in the same”
-Heraclitus

“A man’s character is his fate.”
-Heraclitus

“Mankind is a dream of a shadow.”
-Pindar

“If one but tell a thing well, it moves on with undying voice, and over the fruitful earth and across the sea goes the bright gleam of noble deeds ever unquenchable.”
-Pindar

“The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.”
-Sophocles

“Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.”
-Sophocles

“Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead.”
-Euripides

“Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.”
-Euripides

“This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power.”
-Herodotus

“In soft regions are born soft men.”
-Herodotus

“Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand.”
-Hippocrates

“Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.”
-Plato

“My family history begins with me, but yours ends you.”
-Iphicrates (who was low-born, speaking to distinguished rival)

“Nature does nothing uselessly.”
-Aristotle

“Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.”
-Aristotle

“Never has a man who has bent himself been able to make others straight.”
-Mencius

“A military operation involves deception. Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective.”
-Sun-tzu

“Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.”
-Bion

“Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired.”
-Titus Maccius Plautus

“I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.”
-Marcus Porcius Cato

“It is a hard matter, fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.”
-Marcus Porcius Cato

“Grasp the subject, the words will follow.”
-Marcus Porcius Cato

“Let them hate, so long as they fear.”
-Lucius Accius

“The longest part of the journey is said to be the passing of the gate.”
-Marcus Terentius Varro

“Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.”
-Marcus Licinius Crassus

“There were poets before Homer.”
-Cicero

“I like myself, but I won’t say I’m as handsome as the bull that kidnapped Europa.”
-Cicero

“A dead man cannot bite.”
-Pompey

“The die is cast.” (alea jacta est)
-Julius Caesar

“It is not these well-fed long haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking.”
-Julius Caesar

“The first beginnings of things cannot be distinguished by the eye.”
-Lucretius

“What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.”
-Catullus

“Each one of us bears his own hell.”
-Virgil

“If I cannot bend Heaven, I shall move Hell.”
-Virgil

“Death twitches my ear. ‘Live,’ he says; ‘I am coming.'”
-Virgil

“Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.”
-Horace

“It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.”
-Horace

“The loss which is unknown is no loss at all.”
-Publilius Syrus

“A fair exterior is a silent recommendation.”
-Publilius Syrus

“It is a bad plan that admits no modification.”
-Publilius Syrus

“Necessity knows no law except to prevail.”
-Publilius Syrus

“We desire nothing so much as what we ought not to have.”
-Publilius Syrus

“It is vain to look for a defense against lightning.”
-Publilius Syrus

“Better to be ignorant of a matter than to half know it.”
-Publilius Syrus

“The seaman’s story is of tempest, the plowman’s of his team of bulls; the soldier tells his wounds, the shepherd his tale of sheep.”
-Sextus Propertius

“It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.”
-Ovid

“I was shipwrecked before I got aboard.”
-Seneca

“It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.”
-Seneca

“There is no great genius without some touch of madness.”
-Seneca

“Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time? How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?”
-Pliny the Elder

“I don’t like you, Sabidius, I can’t say why; But I can say this: I don’t like you, Sabidius.”
-Martial

“Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.”
-Martial

“He is a fool who leaves things close at hand to follow what is out of reach.”
-Plutarch

“When the candles are out, all women are fair.”
-Plutarch

“No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”
-Epictetus

“First say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do.”
-Epictetus

“Honesty is praised and starves.”
-Juvenal

“We are now suffering the evil of a long peace. Luxury, more deadly than war, broods over the city and avenges a conquered world.”
-Juvenal

“An object seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.”
-Pliny the Younger

“Truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persauding.”
-Tertullian

“Truth does not blush.”
-Tertullian

“It is to believed because it is absurd.”
-Tertullian

“Love knows nothing of order.”
-Saint Jerome

“Avoid, as you would the plague, a clergyman who is also a man of business.”
-Saint Jerome

“Every day we are changing, everyday we are dying, and yet we fancy ourselves eternal.”
-Saint Jerome

“The cowl does not make the monk.”
-Anonymous Latin

“Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.”
-Petrarch

“Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.”
-Thomas a Kempis

“I am dying of thirst by the side of the fountain.”
-Charles d’Orleans

“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

“The world wants to be deceived.”
-Sebestian Brant

“Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me. Amen.”
-Martin Luther

“She looketh as butter would not melt in her mouth.”
-John Heywood

“I want death to find me planting my cabbages.”
-Montaigne

“I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.”
-Montaigne

“Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.”
-Montaigne

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
-Montaigne

“How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!”
-Montaigne

“Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.”
-Montaigne

“There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thought under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.”
-Montaigne

“A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid.”
-Montaigne

“Those who play with cats must expect to be scratched.”
-Cervantes

“There’s no sauce in the world like hunger.”
-Cervantes

“Time takes all and gives all.”
-Giordano Bruno

“Your eyes are so sharp that you cannot only look through a millstone, but clean through the mind.”
-John Lyly

“If a man begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end with certainties.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“All moral philosophy is but the handmaid to religion.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“If a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she is blind, she is not invisible.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
-Sir Francis Bacon

“Affliction may one day smile again; and till then, sit thee down, sorrow!”
-Shakespeare

“She speaks, yet she says nothing.”
-Shakespeare

“There is no vice so simple but assumes some mark of virtue on his outward parts.”
-Shakespeare

“Thou call’dst me dog before though had cause, but, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.”
-Shakespeare

“Upon what meal doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?”
-Shakespeare

“The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.”
-Shakespeare

“But when I tell him he hates flatterers, he says he does, being then most flattered.”
-Shakespeare

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
it seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
will come when it will come.”
-Shakespeare

“Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”
-Shakespeare

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
-Shakespeare

“Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.”
-Shakespeare

“I drink to the general joy of the whole table.”
-Shakespeare

“Few love to hear the sins they love to act.”
-Shakespeare

“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
-Shakespeare

“Sweets grown common lose their dear delight.”
-Shakespeare

“It is the heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in ‘t.”
-Shakespeare

“He receives comfort like cold porridge.”
-Shakespeare

“I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry.”
-John Donne

“I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.”
-John Donne

“Oblivioni sacrum [Sacred to oblivion].”
-John Marston

“All our geese are swans.”
-Robert Burton

“One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.”
-Robert Burton

“Of all the paths lead to a woman’s love Pity’s the straightest.”
-John Fletcher

“Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain.”
-John Selden

“Shall I wasting in despair
Die because a woman’s fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
‘Cause another’s rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flow’ry meads in May,
If she be not so for me,
What care I how fair she be?”
-George Whither

“Love, and a cough, cannot be hid.”
-George Herbert

“He that lies with dogs, riseth with fleas.”
-George Herbert

“He that is not handsome at twenty, nor strong at thirty, nor rich at forty, nor wise at fifty, will never be handsome, strong, rich or wise.”
-George Herbert

“One sword keeps another in the sheath.”
-George Herbert

“God’s mill grinds slow, but sure.”
-George Herbert

“Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“Old people like to give good advice, as solace for no longer being able to provide bad example.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fire.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“We frequently forgive those who bore us, but cannot forgive those whom we bore.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“We rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is to go beyond the mark.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“Nothing prevents us from being natural so much as the desire to appear so.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“In their first passion women love their lovers, in the others they love love.”
-Le Rochefoucauld

“God is usually on the side of the big squadrons and against the small ones.”
-Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

“We die only once, and for such a long time!”
-Moliere

“Although I am a pious man, I am not the less a man.”
-Moliere

“Doubts are more cruel than the worst of truths.”
-Moliere

“I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.”
-Pascal

“I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.”
-Pascal

“Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.”
-Pascal

“The greatest weakness of all weaknesses is to fear too much to appear weak.”
-Jacques Bossuet

“In a calm sea every man is a pilot.”
-John Ray

“Beware the fury of a patient man.”
-Dryden

“Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.”
-John Locke

“Nature abhors a vacuum.”
-Spinoza

“Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.”
-Spinoza

“Those who are believed to be the most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.”
-Spinoza

“All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”
-Spinoza

“In appearance, at least, he being on all occasions glad to be at friendship with me, though we hate one another, and know it on both sides.”
-Samuel Pepys

“The greatest fools are oft the most satisfied.”
-Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother shell or a prettier pebble than ordinary, whist the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
-Isaac Newton

“Every man loves what he is good at.”
-Thomas Shadwell

“Truth often suffer more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.”
-William Penn

“She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.”
-Jonathan Swift

“The woman that deliberates is lost.”
-Joseph Addison

“When you fall into a man’s conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.”
-Richard Steele

“All men think all men mortal but themselves.”
-Edward Young

“By night an atheist half believes a God.”
-Edward Young

“If triangles has a god, he would have three sides.”
-Charles de Secondat

“You know that these two nations [England and France] have been at war over a few acres of snow near Canada, and that they are spending on this fine struggle more than Canada itself is worth.”
-Voltaire

“The best is the enemy of good.”
-Voltaire

“Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.”
-Voltaire

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.”
-Henry Fielding

“When widows exclaim loudly against second marriages, I would always lay a wager that the man, if not the wedding day, is absolutely fixed on.”
-Henry Fielding

“Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.”
-Samuel Johnson

“Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”
-Samuel Johnson

“Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
-Samuel Johnson

“That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.”
-Samuel Johnson

“Sir, you have two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.”
-Samuel Johnson

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
-Samuel Johnson

“Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.”
-Samuel Johnson

“Whatever you have, spend less.”
-Samuel Johnson

“Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.”
-Rosseau

“Lazy people are always looking for something to do.”
-Luc de Clapiers

“He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.”
-Samuel Foote

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
-Kant

“Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
-Kant

“There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.”
-Edmund Burke

“Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war let it begin here.”
-John Parker (at Lexington)

“Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell; and George the Third [“Treason!” cried the speaker] – may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.”
-Patrick Henry

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and this is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.”
-Patrick Henry

“He who praises everybody, praises nobody.”
-James Boswell

“A knife without a blade, for which the handle is missing.”
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Nothing contributes more to peace of soul than having no opinion at all.”
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.”
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“If individuals have no virtues, their vices may be of use to us.”
-Letters of Junius

“No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.”
-Goethe

“One must be something to be able to do something.”
-Goethe

“The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus.”
-Laplace

“The quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands; we should only spoil it by trying to explain it.”
-Richard Sheridan

“Women sometimes forgive a man who forces the opportunity, but never a man who misses ones.”
-Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord

“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”
-Alexander Hamilton

“An atheist-laugh’s a poor exchange for Deity offended.”
-Robert Burns

“Show my head to the people, it is worth seeing.”
-Georges Jacques Danton (last words to executioner)

“Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn’t roar?”
-Schiller

“When win goes in, strange things come out.”
-Schiller

“We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”
-Hegel

“What you don’t know would make a great book.”
-Sydney Smith

“The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.”
-Coleridge

“There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.”
-William Hazlitt

“We are not hypocrites in our sleep.”
-William Hazlitt

“I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.”
-William Lamb

“I am always at a loss to know how much to believe my own stories.”
-Washington Irving

“Tell him to go to hell.”
-Zachary Taylor (reply to Santa Anna’s demand for surrender)

“With just enough of learning to misquote.”
-Lord Bryon

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer

“Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.”
-Alphonse de Lamartine

“What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.”
-Thomas Carlyle

“Ordinarily he is insane, but he has lucid moments when he is only stupid.”
-Heinrich Heine

“That…man…says women can’t have as much rights as man, cause Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.”
-Sojourner Truth

“The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.”
-Sojourner Truth

“It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.”
-Balzac

“A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.”
-Lord Macaulay

“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.”
-Lord Macaulay

“He never would believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.”
-Lord Macaulay

“Not a hundredth part of the thoughts in my head have ever been or ever will be spoken or written – as long as I keep my senses, at least.”
-Jane Welsh Carlyle

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”
-Victor Hugo

“Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it there duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.”
-Emerson

“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”
-Emerson

“We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.”
-Emerson

“Genius has no taste for weaving sand.”
-Emerson

“Some people are so fond of ill luck that they run halfway to meet it.”
-Douglas Jerrold

“A sophistical rhetorician [Gladstone], inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.”
-Benjamin Disraeli

“In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.”
-Hawthorne

“We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.”
-George Sand

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you will cease to be so.”
-John Stuart Mill

“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

“[I feel] somewhat like the boy in Kentucky who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.”
-Abraham Lincoln

“The president last night had a dream. He was in a party of plain people and as it became known who he was they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said, ‘He is a common looking man.’ The president replied, ‘Common-looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.'”
-Abraham Lincoln

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
-Poe

“I have come too late into a world too old.”
-Alfred de Musset

“He [Benjamin Disraeli] is a self-made man who worships his creator.”
-John Bright

“I never said all Democrats were saloon keepers. What I said was that all saloon keepers were Democrats.”
-Horace Greeley

“A man in armor is his armor’s slave.”
-Robert Browning

“Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism, are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism.”
-Dickens

“Now comes the mystery.”
-Henry Ward Beecher (last words)

“For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.”
-Thoreau

“That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.”
-Thoreau

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
-Thoreau

“There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by that lies outside it.”
-George Eliot

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact.”
-George Eliot

“Science frees us in many ways…from the bodily terror which the savage feels. But she replaces that, in the minds of many, by a moral terror which is far more overwhelming.”
-Charles Kingsley

“There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.”
-James Russel Lowell

“Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.”
-James Russel Lowell

“Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.”
-James Russel Lowell

“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
-Melville

“A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.”
-Melville

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.”
-John Rushkin

“Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.”
-Victoria

“If the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
-Dostoevsky

“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”
-Dostoevsky

“You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.”
-George Macdonald

“The great tragedy of Science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis with an ugly fact.”
-Thomas Huxley

“Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”
-Thomas Huxley

“The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”
-Ibsen

“A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.”
-George Meredith

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
-Emily Dickinson

“It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single irradiating word.”
-Alexander Smith

“‘If everybody minded their own business,’ said the Duchess in a hoarse growl, ‘the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'”
-Lewis Carroll

“Begin at the beginning…and go on till you come to an end: then stop.”
-Lewis Carroll

“‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.”
-Lewis Carroll

“If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this it is: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
-William Morris

“I’m not arguing with you – I am telling you.”
-James Whistler

“It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.”
-Samuel Butler (I happen to disagree, as I have a crush on Jane Carlyle)

“Adam was human – this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.”
-Mark Twain

“Put all your eggs in one basket and – WATCH THAT BASKET.”
-Mark Twain

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

“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.”
-Mark Twain

“When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.”
-Mark Twain

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.”
-Mark Twain

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
-Mark Twain

“He who sleeps in continual noise is awakened by silence.”
-William Howells

“Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.”
-William Howells

“A man always has two reasons for what he does – a good one, and the real one.”
-John Morgan

“They [two fellow congressmen] never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.”
-Thomas Reed

“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
-Georges Clemenceau

“Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
-William James

“I’m glad you like adverbs – I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.”
-Henry James

“People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.”
-Anatole France

“One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.”
-Nietzsche

“Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”
-Nietzsche

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
-Nietzsche

“No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”
-Nietzsche

“Lazy fokes’ stummucks don’t git tired.”
-Joel Harris

“The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own.”
-Joris Huysmans

“I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.”
-August Strindberg

“He could whip his weight in wildcats.”
-Eugene Field

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”
-Jules Poincare

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
-Oscar Wilde

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
-Oscar Wilde

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
-Oscar Wilde

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
-Oscar Wilde

“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
-Oscar Wilde

“To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
-Oscar Wilde

“The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal consistency of the women who love me.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his…It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”
-Woodrow Wilson

“The belief in the supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
-Joseph Conrad

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”
-Chekhov

“The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.”
-Charlotte Gilman

“The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.”
-Alfred Whitehead

“The New Testament, and to a very large extent the Old, is the soul of man. You cannot criticize it. It criticizes you.”
-John Chapman

“Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.”
-James Robinson

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten you aim.”
-George Santayana

“There are moments when everything goes well; don’t be frightened, it won’t last.”
-Jules Renard

“My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
-Mrs Patrick Campbell

“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 Smith

“A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.”
-Bert Taylor

“[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.”
-HG Wells

“A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks th’ Lord wud do if He knew th’ facts iv th’ case.”
-Mr Dooley

“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it’s the only one we have.”
-Emile Chartier

“The vice-presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
-John Garner

“Nobuddy ever fergits where he buried a hatchet.”
-Abe Martin

“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”
-Robert Scott

“He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”
-Stephen Leacock

“The parent who could see his boy as he really is, would shake his head and say: ‘Willie is no good; I’ll sell him.'”
-Stephen Leacock

“A man said to the universe:
‘Sir, I exist!’
‘However,’ replied the universe,
‘The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'”
-Stephen Crane

“Like everyone who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.”
-Proust

“Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
-Proust

“God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his solitude more acutely.”
-Paul Valery

“To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.”
-Max Beerbohm

“He said he was against it.”
-Calvin Coolidge (after being asked what a preacher who had spoken on sin had said)

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
-Willa Cather

“No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.”
-Alfred Smith

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”
-Gilbert Chesterton

“Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.”
-Gilbert Chesterton (titled ‘The Donkey’)

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
-Winston Churchill

“Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”
-Winston Churchill

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
-Winston Churchill

“We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.”
-Winston Churchill

“I do not at all resent criticism, even when, for the safe of emphasis, it for a time parts company with reality.”
-Winston Churchill

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
-Winston Churchill

“We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.”
-Thomas Mann

“Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire pistols.”
-Thomas Mann

“This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers. There are men who can’t be bought.”
-Carl Sandburg

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
-James Cabell

“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”
-Henry Mencken

“No one in this world, so far as I know…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
-Henry Mencken

“Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.”
-Georges Braque

“Anything that man says you’ve got to take with a dose of salts.”
-Samuel Goldwyn

“A biography is considered complete it if merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.”
-Virginia Woolf

“The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.”
-Will Cuppy

“‘Are you lost, daddy?’ I asked tenderly.
‘Shut up,’ he explained.”
-Ring Lardner

“You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered.”
-DH Lawrence

“Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it.”
-DH Lawrence

“A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”
-Raymond Chandler

“Most editors are failed writers – but so are most writers.”
-TS Eliot

“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
-Gene Fowler

“If you wish,
I shall grow irreproachably tender:
Not a man, but a cloud in trousers!”
-Vladimir Mayakovski

“Scratch a lover, and find a foe.”
-Dorothy Parker

“The worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless.”
-Dorothy Sayers

“A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.”
-Isaac Babel

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
-F Scott Fitzgerald

“Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.”
-Thornton Wilder

“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
-CS Lewis

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
-Ernest Hemingway

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
-Ernest Hemingway

“Since the measure device has been constructed by the observer…we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
-Heisenberg

“Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.”
-Graham Greene

“Lonely people talking to each other can make each other lonelier.”
-Lillian Hellman

“The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.”
-Arthur Koestler

“We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.”
-Lionel Trilling

“Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful. Avoid running at all times. Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”
-Satchel Paige

“Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.”
-Laurens Van der Post

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
-Stanislaw Lec

“Most of the sighs we hear have been edited.”
-Stanislaw Lec

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
-Cyril Parkinson

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.”
-Simone Weil

“There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall.”
-Bernard Malamud

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, 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 they produce? The cuckoo-clock.”
-Orson Welles

“Washington is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm.”
-John F Kennedy

“Profound thoughts arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ones.”
-Andrei Sakharov

“The young need old men. They need men who are not ashamed of age, not pathetic imitations of themselves…Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.”
-Peter Ustinov

“Every year without knowing it I have passed the day.”
-William Merwin (regarding the anniversary of his death)

“The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
-Milan Kundera

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”
-John Updike

“If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!”
-Tom Stoppard

“An essentially private man [James Joyce] who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.”
-Tom Stoppard

“As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”
-James Farley

“All the world is queer save me and thee; and sometimes I think thee is a little queer.”
-Anonymous Quaker

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
-Feminist slogan

“When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.”
-African proverb

“Don’t hang noodles on my ears.”
-Russian saying

“In the woodsman’s house the knives are of wood.”
-Spanish proverb

“Gold and love affairs are difficult to hide.”
-Spanish proverb

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