The great qualities, the imperious will, the rapid energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis are not required - are impediments - in common times.

——Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit, and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.

——Charles Read

When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.

——Sir Winston Churchill

The man who commands efficiently must have obeyed others in the past, and the man who obeys dutifully is worthy of being some day a commander.

——Cicero, De legibus

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

——Bertrand Russel

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

——Mark Twain

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

——Mark Twain

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

——Mark Twain

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

——Charles Dickens

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

——F. Scott Fitzgerald

Often undecided whether to desert a sinking ship for one that might not float, he would make up his mind to sit on the wharf for a day.

——Lord Beaverbrook , Men and Power

Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind.

——Louis Psteur

The "sane" person is not so much a person who has eliminated all contradictions, but one who uses them and applies them in his work.

——Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot.

——St Augustine

One should look long and carefully at oneself before one considers judging others.

——Moliere, Le Misanthrope

Time is that wherein there is opportunity, and opportunity is that wherein there is no great time.

——Hippocrates, Precepts

A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.

——Christina Stead, House of All Nations

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

——Lord Acton

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

——Ernest Hemingway

In necessary things, unity;in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.

——Richard Baxter

As I grew older I realized that hurting people through criticism was a form of failure… One hurt them for things one hadn't done oneself.

——Cyril Connolly

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

——James Baldwin

We do not succeed in changing according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

——Proust, La Fugitive Albertine disparue

There are no extraordinary men. . . just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.

——William Halsey

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

——Margaret Thatcher

All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

——Bruce Lee

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth contained in it.

——Henry Frederic Amiel

Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.

——William Lowndes

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.

——Dwight Morrow, letter to his son

No guilty man is acquitted if judged by himself.

——Juvenal, Satires

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

——Mary Renault

Never trust anyone who wants what you've got. Friend or no, envy is an overwhelming emotion.

——Eubie Blake

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.

——Kin Hubbard

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

——M. F. K. Fisher

Forgiveness is a funny thing. It warms the heart and cools the sting.

——William Arthur Ward

Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.

——Alice Duer Miller

An alliance with a powerful person is never safe.

——Phaedrus

Always be smarter than the people who hire you.

——Lena Horne

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

——George Bernard Shaw

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

——Mark Twain

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

——Jack London

If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.

——John D. Rockefeller

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

——Ludwig van Beethoven

There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent that he cannot be excelled.

——Baltasar Gracian

We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.

——Abraham Flexner, Universities

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

——Agatha Christie

Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.

——Bryant H. McGill

Do not let your ambitions become a sanctuary for your failures.

——Bryant H. McGill

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

——Robert A. Heinlein

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.

——Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

——Lily Tomlin

The dignity of individual requires that he not be reduced to vassalage by the largesse of others.

——Saint-Exupery, Flight to Arras

The common man, who doesn't know what to do with this life, wants another which shall be endless.

——Anatole France, La Revolte des anges

I am not fond of aphorisms, they are one-sizefits-all; each has its opposite, and whatever line of conduct you follow, there is always one to backyou up.

——Alfred de Musset, Emmeline

No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.

——Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fireside Chat

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

——Thomas Jefferson

I call bourgeois anyone who, in a fight or love affair, surrenders for safety's sake. I call bourgeois whoever puts anything ahead of feeling and sentiment.

——Leon Paul Fargue, Sous la Lampe

When written in Chinese the word"crisis" is composed of two characters- one represents danger and the other one represents opportunity.

——John F. Kennedy

Man never do evil so thoroughly and cheerfully as when they do it for conscience sake.

——Blaise Pascal, Pensees

Saying is one thing, doing another. We must consider the sermon and the preacher distinctly and apart.

——Montaigne, Essays

Most men commit great crimes only because of their scruples about little ones.

——Cardinal de Retz, Memoires

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.

——Abraham Lincoln

Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.

——Helen Keller

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

——Helen Keller

If we practiced medicine like we practice education, we'd look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years.

——Alfred Kazin

In order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it.

——Maurice Merleau-Ponty

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

——Nietzsche

There is no greater pain than to remember a happy time when one is in misery.

——Dante Alighieri

Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.

——James Dewar

Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

——Thomas Paine

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

There is no decision that we can make that doesn't come with some sort of balance or sacrifice.

——Simon Sinek

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

——Havelock Ellis

The crowd sill follow a leader who marches twenty paces ahead of them, but if he is a thousand paces ahead of them, they will neither see nor follow him.

——Georg Brandes, Ferdinand Lasalle

Every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies.

——Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than fundamental ones.

——Sigmund Freud

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.

——G. B. Shaw

Nature made man happy and good, but…society corrupts him and makes him miserable.

——Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We have no longer in any country a literature as great as the literature of the old world, and that is because the newspapers, all kinds of second rate books, the preoccupation of men with all kinds of practical changes, have driven the living imagination out of this world.

——W. B. Yeats, First Principles

What experience and history teach us, however, is this, that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history.

——Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Lectures

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

——Emerson, Self-Reliance

The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.

——William Hazlitt

We read that we ought to forgive our enemies, but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.

——Cosimo de' Medici

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

——Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.

——John Burroughs

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; if you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or, being lied about, don't deal in lies, or, being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise.

——Rudyard Kipling, If

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

——Christopher Dawson

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

——Mark Twain

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

——Mark Twain

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

——George Bernard Shaw

The weak are strong because they are reckless. The strong are weak because they have scruples.

——Otto von Bismarck

A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by and idea.

——Victor Hugo, Histoire d'un Crime

The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.

——G. B. Shaw, Man and Superman

Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.

——J. M. Barrie

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

——G. B. Shaw, Man and Superman

Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.

——Antisthenes

Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.

——W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

The spontaneity of a slap is sincerity, whereas the ceremony of a caress is largely conventional.

——Ugo Betti, The Gambler

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal class I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

——Eugene Victor Debs

As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.

——Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

Mutual aid is as much the law of animal life as mutual struggle.

——Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

——Charles Dickens

In our society, those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.

——Marya Mannes, More in Anger

When you are in trouble, people who call to sympathize are really looking for the particulars.

——Edgar Watson Howe, Country Town Sayings

Madness is rare in individuals- but in groups, political parties, nations, and eras it's the rule.

——Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

When I was young I hoped that one day I should be able to go into a post office to buy a stamp without feeling nervous and shy: now I realize that I never shall.

——Edmund Blunden

Anyone who isn't confused doesn't really understand the situation.

——Ed Murrow

In this world I would rather live two days like a tiger, than two hundred years like a sheep.

——Tipu Sultan

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.

——Gene Fowler, Skyline

It is always the task of the intellectual to "think otherwise." This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.

————Harvey Cox, The Secular City

Couldn't we even argue that it is because men are unequal that they have that much more need to be brothers?

——Charles Du Bos, Journal

We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.

——Adam Clayton Powell

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters.

——Walter Lippmann. Atlantic Monthly

For the sake of a family an individual may be sacrificed; for the sake of a village a family may be sacrificed; for the sake of a nation a village may be sacrificed; for the sake of one's self the world may be sacrificed.

——Panchatantra, Fifth Century A. D.

No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were.

——John Donne

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.

——Dietrich Bonhoeffer

When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.

——Thomas Jefferson

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone;but if someone puts a hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

——Malcolm X

When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

——George Washington Carver

If you look at the human condition today, not everyone is well fed, has access to good medical care, or the physical basics that provide for a healthy and a happy life.

——Ralph Merkle

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

——Arthur Schopenhauer

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

——Herodotus

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

——Hiram Johnson

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.

——Sun Tzu

Happiness is brief. It will not stay. God batters at its sails.

——Euripides

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

——Julius Caesar

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

——William Ralph Inge, Idea of Progress

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries- for heavy ones they cannot.

——Machiavelli, The Prince

Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.

——Lord Halifax

Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin.

——Denise McCluggage

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.

——Harold Wilson

Happiness is a by-product. You cannot pursue it by itself.

——Sam Levenson

Happiness is a continuation of happenings which are not resisted.

——Deepak Chopra

Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.

——Victor Hugo

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

——Oscar Wilde

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

——Mark Twain

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

——Joseph Conrad

We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

——Benjamin Franklin

Government and co-operation are in all things the laws of life;anarchy and competition the laws of death.

——John Ruskin

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

——Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.

——Jack London

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

——Paul Theroux

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

——Charlie Chaplin

This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it.

——Charlie Chaplin

A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.

——Montaigne

Make all men equal today, and God has so created them that they shall all be unequal tomorrow.

——Anthony Trollope, Autobiography

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.

——Peter Medawar

I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.

——George Burns

I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.

——Michael Jordan

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.

——W. C. Fields

Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.

——Nido Qubein

You must be master and win, or serve and lose, grieve or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.

——Goethe, Der Gross-Cophta

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

——John Lahr

Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.

——Polybius, History

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand;that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

——John D. Rockefeller

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

——Emily Dickinson

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

——Theodor Adorno

If a man examine carefully his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead.

——Emerson, Journals

The people have little intelligence, the great no heart…if I had to choose I should have no hesitation: I would be of the people.

——Jean de la Bruyere

Technology - the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.

——Max Frisch

The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.

——F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

——John F. Kennedy

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

——Karl Marx

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

——John Lennon

Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.

——Socrates

I think the future also will not belong to those who are cynical or those who stand on the sidelines.

——Paul Wellstone

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

——Will Durant

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

——Paul Cezanne

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

——H. G. Wells

Any idiot can face a crisis -it's day to day living that wears you out.

——Anton Chekhov

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

——Henri Bergson, L'Evolution creatrice

Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets being second-rate.

——Horace, Ars Poetica

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

——C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Mankind is safer when men seek pleasure than when they seek the power and the glory.

——Geoffrey Gorer

A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

——Margaret Thatcher

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

——Alexis de Tocqueville

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

——Thomas Mann

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

——Mark Twain

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for: there is all the difference in the world.

——Tony Benn

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.

——Thomas Gray

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

——Charles Dickens

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

——Mark Twain

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

——Jack London

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

——Jack London

That all things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

——Francis Bacon

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

——Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

——Reinhold Niebuhr

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.

——Charles Kuralt

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

——Erich Fromm

There is no pain as great as being alive, no burden heavier than that of conscious life.

——Ruben Dario, The Swans and Other Poems

A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.

——Lin Yutang, The importance of Living

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

——Ludwig van Beethoven

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

——Muhammad Ali

You can never be too rich or too thin.

——Duchess of Windsor

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

——Helen Keller

I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

——Marie Curie

The old believe everything;the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

——Oscar Wilde

We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives.

——Dr. Lewis Thomas

It well becomes a man who is no longer young to forget that he ever was.

——Charles de Saint-Evremond

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God the herdsman goads them on behind, And I am broken by their passing feet.

——W. B. Yeats

The distinction between the past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.

——Albert Einstein

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

——Woody Allen, Without Feathers

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.

——Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

——John Donne

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

——F. Scott Fitzgerald

From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

——W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

Nothing begins, and nothing ends, that is not paid with moan;For we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.

——Francis Thompson, Daisy

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort - to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires - and expires, too soon, too soon - before life itself.

——Joseph Conrad, Youth

Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the most longest half of your life.

——Robert Southe, The Doctor

Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour- of youth! … A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and- goodbye! - Night - Goodbye!

——Joseph Conrad, Youth

What? Is man only a mistake made by God, or God only a mistake made by man?

——Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget.

——Christina Rossetti

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

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations;to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country;to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.

——Robert Louis Stevenson

Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward - your destiny - are here and now.

——Dag Hammarskjold, Markings

One is never as unhappy as one thinks, or as happy as one hopes to be.

——La Rochefoucauld

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

——Charlie Chaplin

Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

——Sir James Hopwood Jeans

There are only three events in a man's life: birth, life, and death;he is not aware of being born, he dies in suffering, and he forgets to live.

——Jean de La Bruyére

When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me preparation for something that never happens.

——W. B. Yeats

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable.

——Henry Brooks Adams

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will pause to say, here lived a great streets weeper who did his job well.

——Martin Luther King

The Farmer will never be happy again; He carries his heart in his boots; For either the rain is destroying his grain; Or the drought is destroying his roots.

——A. P. Herbert, The Farmer

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another;and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

——J. M. Barrie

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

——Samuel Butler

What is called the serenity of age is only perhaps a euphemism for the fading power to feel the sudden shock of joy or sorrow.

——Arthur Bliss

As you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh and embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions! Don't leave them on the road, for you will not pick them up afterwards!

——Nikolai Gogol

We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living"is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.

——Aldo Leopold

Seize the day! Put no trust in the morrow.

——Horace, Odes

But be not afraid of greatness:some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

——William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

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

——G. K. Chesterton

Hold it the greatest wrong to prefer life to honor and for the sake of life to lose the reason for living.

——Juvenal, Satires

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving.

——Anais Nin

The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty.

——Brooks Atkinson

Life is the greatest bargain;we get it for nothing.

——Yiddish Proverbs

Death, my son, is a benefit for all of us, it is the night of this turbulent day that we call Life.

——Bernardin de St. Pierre

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, and after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality.

——Tennyson, Tithonus

From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.

——Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

——George Orwell, Shooting and Elephant

Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavour, enjoyment, and suffering.

——Dietrich Bonhoeffer

How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, the answer is blowin' in the wind.

——Bob Dylan

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

——Randall Jarrell

At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement.

——Benjamin Franklin

What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excite-ment and the revelation in those first fourteen years?

——Graham Green

Most people die at the last minute; others twenty years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth.

——Louis Celine

The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better.

——Emile Zola

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

——Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured

It is often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch, the Universe, however, is a free lunch.

——Alan Guth

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

——Will Rogers

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.

——Dion Boucicault

Our life is frittered away by detail…Simplify, simplify.

——Henry David Thoreau

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

——Alice Walker, Expect nothing

Life is a gamble at terrible odds - if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it.

——Tom Stoppard

Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!

——Friedrich Nietzsche

Science offers the best answers to the meaning of life. Science offers the privilege of understanding before you die why you were ever born in the first place.

——Richard Dawkins

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.

——Samuel Smiles

It seems that it is madder never to abandon one's self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor.

——Margaret Fuller

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

——Tennessee Williams

To find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task.

——William Congreve, Love for Love

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

——Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.

——Max Beerbohm

Life's perhaps the only riddle, That we shrink from giving up.

——W. S. Gilbert

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock pile when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.

——Saint-Exupery, Flight to Arras

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with time in one's life.

——Proust, The Past Recaptured

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same person.

——Pascal, Pensees

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience.

——George Gissing

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

——Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect

I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be you're your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.

——Henry Rollins

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

——Vernon Law

Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.

——Jean Paul Sartre

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

——Ludwig Wittgenstein

The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on.

——Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The important thing in life is not the victory but the contest;the essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well.

——Baron Pierre de Coubertin

We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in drydock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.

——Otto Neurath

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.

——Novalis

It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.

——Emil Zatopek

Time is the wisest counselor of all.

——Pericles

Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.

——Adam Hochschild

Always remember that the future comes one day at a time.

——Dean Acheson

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

——Charles Dickens

Time, the devourer of everything.

——Ovid

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

——Max Beerbohm

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence.

——Art Linkletter

I worked half my life to be an overnight success, and still it took me by surprise.

——Jessica Savitch

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

——Orson Welles

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

——Edith Wharton

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

——Jack London

My compositions spring from my sorrows. Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest grief.

——Franz Schubert

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

——Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Man may be considered as a superior species of animal who produces philosophies and poems in about the same way that silkworms produce their cocoons and bees their hives.

——Hippolyte Taine

In the youth of a state arms do flourish; in the middle age of a state, learning; and then both of them for a time; in the declining age of a state, mechanical arts and merchandise.

——Francis Bacon

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

——G. K. Chesterton

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, you are a god.

——Jean Rostand

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

——Abraham Lincoln

Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in.

——H. R. Haldeman

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

——George Orwell, Animal Farm

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

——E. and J. de Goncourt

God is becoming bitter, he envies man his mortality.

——Jacques Rigaut

Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.

——Norman Mailer

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

Man has become a superman. He not only disposes of innate, physical forces, but he commands latent forces in nature, which he can put to his service. We are becoming inhuman.

——Arthur Schopenhauer

Whether science - and indeed civilization in general - can long survive depends upon psychology, that is to say, it depends upon what human beings desire.

——Bertrand Russell

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

——Saint - Exupery

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

——Alfred Kazin

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

——Chateaubriand

Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mocking bird.

——Harper Lee

A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

——Al Capp

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them.

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

——J. R. R. Tolkien

Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice;physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.

——Rousseau

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

——Omar N. Bradley

I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going, and hook up with them later.

——Mitch Hedberg

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

——Terry Pratchett