In college I collected a huge amount of quotations that I like or thought was interesting.

We are all born originals – why is it so many of us die copies?
-Edward Young, poet (1683-1765)

Everyone is an explorer. How could you possibly live your life looking at a door and not open it?
- Robert D. Ballard

Your friend is that man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
- Elbert Hubbard

A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. ‘I reckon,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘It’s because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried.”
- Dorothea Kent

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
- Eden Phillpotts

Little girls and butterflies need no excuse.
- Robert A. Heinlein

The world is a spiritual kindergarten, where thousands of bewildered infants are trying to spell GOD with the wrong blocks.
- Edward Arlington Robinson

The truth will ouch.
- Arnold H. Glasow

Many things are lost for want of asking.
- English Proverb

Temptation usually comes in through a door that has deliberately been left open.
- Unknown

Tellin’ me lies when the truth was clear, I think she knew what I wanted to hear.
-Maxi Priest

Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry..
-Henry Ward Beecher

Speak when you’re angry and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret..
-Henry Ward Beecher

Liberty is the soul’s right to breath.
- Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit – Henry Ward Beecher

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance
-Henry Ward Beecher

Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.
-Henry Ward Beecher

In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
-Henry Ward Beecher

God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Keep a fair-sized cemetery in your back yard, in which to bury the faults of your friends.
-Henry Ward Beecher

A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
-Henry Ward Beecher

To array a man’s will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.
-Henry Ward Beecher

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.
-Henry Ward Beecher

It is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth
-Pablo Picasso

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
-Pablo Picasso

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun
-Pablo Picasso

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up
-Pablo Picasso

The little reed, bending to the force of the wind, soon stood upright again when the storm had passed over.
-Aesop

Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.
-Aesop

Obscurity often brings safety.
-Aesop

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
-Aesop

Any man who can see through women is sure missing a lot.
-Anonymous

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
- Mark Twain

Destiny dressed you today, and now fear is trying to take off your pants.  If you stop now, soon you’ll be naked while fear is just standing there laughing at you.
-The Tick

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
- Robert Frost

People are always making rules for themselves and always finding loop- holes.
- William Rotsler

A true friend is someone who is there for you when he’d rather be anywhere else.
- Len Wein

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
- Peter F. Drucker

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The happiest couples are those who spell “us” with a capital “you.”
- Klare Provine

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.
- Arnold H. Glasow

One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.
- Judith Viorst

Fools live to regret their words, wise men to regret their silence.
- Will Henry

The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid.
- Anonymous

A ship in harbor is safe– but that is not what ships are for.
- John A. Shedd

A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.
- Edgar J. Mohn

Just remember- when you think all is lost, the future remains.
- Bob Goddard

A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. ‘I reckon,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘It’s because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried.”
- Dorothea Kent

To most of us it would be very convenient if God were a rascal.
- Anonymous

Insomuch as any one pushes you nearer to God, he or she is your friend.
- Anonymous

God Himself is the best Poet, And the Real is His song.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

He loseth nothing that loseth not God.
- George Herbert
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
- Indian Proverb
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right then, have it your way.”
- C.S. Lewis

I fear God, and next to God I chiefly fear him who fears Him not.
- Saadi

Suspicion often creates what it suspects.
- C.S. Lewis

Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to manoeuvre you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.
- C.S. Lewis

We must not suppose that if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world.
- C.S. Lewis

Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to ‘cure’ it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.
- C.S. Lewis

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
- C.S. Lewis

The filth that our muddled, sincere, resentful enemies fling at the Holy One, either does not stick, or, sticking, turns into glory.
- C.S. Lewis

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because, by it, I see everything else.
- C.S. Lewis

Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.
- C.S. Lewis

We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
- C.S. Lewis, on confession

I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.
- C.S. Lewis

[As an atheist] I never noticed that the very strength of the pessimists’ case poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?
- C.S. Lewis

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
- Charles Lamb

There is no man so good who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the law, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Nor can a man with grace his soul inspire, More than the candles set themselves on fire.
- John Bunyan

Two men please God: who serves Him with all his heart because he knows Him; who seeks Him with all his heart because he knows Him not.
- Nikita Ivanovich Panin

God has two dwellings: one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart.
- Izaak Walton

Heaven is a cheap purchase, whatever it cost.
- Thomas Fuller

If ever I reach heaven, I expect to find three wonders there: first, to meet some I had not thought to see there; second, to miss some I had expected to see there; and third, the greatest wonder of all, to find myself there.
- John Newton

Heaven may be defined as the place which men avoid.
- Henry David Thoreau

To get to heaven, turn right and keep straight.
- Wesleyan Methodist

Entrance into heaven is not at the hour of death, but at the moment of conversion.
- Benjamin Whichcote

The proud man counts his newspaper clippings- the humble man his blessings.
- Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

I saw about a peck of counterfeit dollars once. Did I go to the window and throw away all my good dollars? No! Yet you reject Christianity because there are hypocrites, or counterfeit Christians.
- William E. Biederwolf

It is no fault of Christianity if a hypocrite falls into sin.
- St. Jerome

Hypocrites in the Church? Yes, and in the lodge and at the home. Don’t hunt through the Church for a hypocrite. Go home and look in the mirror. Hypocrites? Yes. See that you make the number one less.
- Billy Sunday

All men are idolators, some of fame, others of self-interest, most of pleasure.
- Baltasor Gracian y Morales

Maintaining a complicated life is a great way to avoid changing it.
- Elaine St. James

Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.
- Leo Tolstoy

A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway.
- Fr. Jerome Cummings

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.
- Donna Roberts

After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
- Marcus Porcius Cato

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
- G. K. Chesterton

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
- Blaise Pascal

A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you’re in deep water.
- Sidney Goff

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
- Albert Einstein

The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.
- Helen Keller

A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.
- General George S. Patton

Forgive, but not forget, Means not forgiven yet.
- J. Randal Matheny

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
- Anais Nin

Do not walk in front of me, I may not follow. Do not walk behind me, you may not keep up. But walk beside me, as a friend.
- Albert Camus 1913-1960

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.  1929-1968

A memory lasts forever, never does it die. True friends stay together and never say goodbye.
-Unknown.

Friends are like bras, close to your heart and all about support
-Unknown.

Everybody needs a friend.
- Bob Ross.  1943-1996

A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they’re not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they’re not so bad.
- Arnold Glasow.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
1803-1882

We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help when in need.
- Epicurus.
341-270 B.C

A good friend is someone who tells you something about themselves that no one else knows. A best friend is someone who tells you something about themselves that they didn’t even know.
-Unknown.

The road to a friend’s house is never long.
- Danish Proverb.

Should I smile because he’s my best friend, or should I cry because thats all he’ll ever be.
- Dave Matthews Band.

A friend is someone who knows the worst thing about you and it doesn’t matter.
- “Meet Joe Black”

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
- Sir Peter Ustinov.
1921-

A wise man washes his hands after he pees. A wiser man doesn’t pee on his hands.
-Unknown.

If you water it and it dies, it’s a plant. If you pull it out and it grows back, it’s a weed.
- Gallagher.

I felt like Dolly Parton’s baby: “Is all this for me?”
- Mickey Mantle (1931-1995), on the ovation he received on Mickey Mantle Day at Yankee Stadium in 1969.

We’ve hit rock bottom, and now we’re starting to dig!
- FM 104.7, Canberra, Australia.

If I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
- Sir Isaac Newton.  1642-1727

May Heaven bestow the best of blessings on this house, and may none but honest and wise men ever rule beneath this roof.
- President John Adams (1735-1826), as he wrote in his diary during the first night the White House was open, November 1, 1800.

There but for the grace of God go I.
- George Whitefield (1714-1770), 18th century clergyman, watching a condemned criminal being led to the execution chamber.

It was a dark and stormy night…
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton.
1803-1873

This is the beginning of the end.
Voilà le commencement de la fin.
- Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand.
1754-1838

Close doesn’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
- Frank Robinson.
1935-

There is no such thing as a free lunch.
- Milton Friedman.
1912-

Don’t fire till you can see the whites of their eyes.
- General Israel Putnam.
1718-1790

I have not yet begun to fight.
- Captain John Paul Jones.
1747-1792

I don’t know. I’ve never smoked AstroTurf.
- Tug McGraw, former New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies pitcher, upon being asked whether he preferred grass to an artificial surface.

We have a lot in common. I also used to be a Cardinal.
- Joe “Ducky” Medwick, former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder, when introduced to Pope Pius XII.

Bessie, you’re ugly. And tomorrow morning I’ll be sober, but you’ll still be ugly.
- Sir Winston Churchill, to Liverpool socialist MP Bessie Braddock, who told him, “Winston, you’re drunk.”

Ma’am, I don’t even suspect anything.
- Yogi Berra (1925-), age 8, when asked by his second grade teacher if he knew anything.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.~ Mark Twain

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. ~Anatole France

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. ~Juan Ramon Jimenez

What luck for rulers, that men do not think. ~Adolph Hitler

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die. ~Jean-Paul Sartre

You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time. ~Albert Einstein

To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. ~Michael Servetus

When I look at the world I’m pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic. ~Rogers, Carl

You change your works, but you never change your plan.
-St. Thomas Aquinas on God Confessions Book I

For on this subject you have granted man to guess from others about himself.
-St. Thomas Aquinas Confessions Book I

But what we liked to do was to play, and for this we were punished by those who were themselves behaving in just the same way.  But the amusements of older people are called “business,” and when children indulge in their own amusements, these older people punish them for it.  And no one is sorry for the children; no one is sorry for the older people; no one is sorry for both of them.  I doubt whether any good judge of things would say that it was a good thing for me, as a boy, to be beaten for playing some ball game simply on the grounds that by playing this game I was impeded in my studies, the point of which was that I should be able to perform, when I grew older, in some game more unbecoming still.  For this was the behavior of the teacher who beat me.  If he was defeated on some trifling point of argument by another schoolmaster, he was far more bitter and more tortured by envy than I was if I was defeated in a game of ball by one of my playfellows.
-St. Thomas Aquinas Confessions Book I

Now this is the Law of the Jungle, As old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, But the Wolf that shall break it must die.  As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk The Law runneth forward and back — For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, And the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.  And this is the Law of Athletics, As true as the flight of the ball, And the player that keeps it shall prosper, But the player that breaks it must fall.  As the ball is held together by the laces,  Keep in mind the law of the game, The strength of the Team is the Player, And the strength of the Player is THE TEAM!!!                                                                          -Spartan Sophomore Football Creed: Class of 2004

One thing, I don’t know why
It doesn’t even matter how hard you try
keep that in mind
I designed this rhyme, to remind myself how
I tried so hard
In spite of the way you were mocking me
Acting like I was part of your property
Remembering all the times you fought with me
I’m surprised it got so (far)
Things aren’t the way they were before
You wouldn’t even recognize me anymore
Not that you knew me back then
But it all comes back to me (in the end)
You kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart
What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when I…..

I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter

-”In The End” Linkin Park

I wanted to stay I wanted to play, I wanted to love you.
- Dave Matthews

You think a things impossible, then the sun refused to shine.”
- Dave Matthews
Open up my head and let me out.
- Dmb

Hey my friend it seems your eyes are troubled..care to share, your time with me would you say you’re feeling low and so, a good idea would be to get it off your mind.
- Dmb

Eat, drink, and be merry; for tomorrow, we die.
- Dmb
…people in every direction… no words exchanged, no time to exchange them, and all the little ants are marching…
- Dmb
If it was attention I wanted, I’d take off my clothes and walk into the street.
- Dmb

I mean to tell you all the things I’ve been thinking deep inside..My friend..With each moment the more I love you…
- The Dave Mathews Band

“i’ll lean on you you leane on me, and we’ll be ok”
- The Dave Mathews Band

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
- Charles Bukowski

When this girl at the museum asked me who I liked better, “Monet” or “Manet”, I said, “I like mayonnaise.” She just stared at me, so I said it again, louder. then she left. I guess she went to try to find some mayonnaise for me.
- Jack Handey

Lord, let me always desire more then I think I can do.
- Michelangelo

The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad
- Salvador Dali

The difference between mediocrity and excellence is attention to detail.
- Sebastian J. Barbarito

You can never do too much drawing.
- Tintoretto

The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.
- Wassily Kaninsky

I’ve decided, I’m going to feed every little addiction and silently go mad ’cause right now my writing sucks
- Zaffel

Art is why i get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know i don’t think its fair that I’m living for something i can’t even define.
- Ani_difranco(Out_of_habit)

Writing is a struggle against silence.
- Carlos Fuentes

never mistake legibility for communication
- David Carson

You are not expected to understand this.
- A Comment From The Source Of Unix 6th Ed, Unix/Slp.C, Line 438

I’ll try being nicer if you’ll try being smarter.
- Bank Of America Tech Support

don’t waste all your time just designing. it’ll horribly stunt you. take up a job at a grocery store or video rental place or anything, something that puts you in touch with normal people. design people are not normal. they have serious, serious problems and are too arrogant for their own good. try restocking a chip rack or getting yelled at to mop a floor. get some hair on your pubic region. sitting around with a mouse in one hand and an issue of emigre in the other is just making you fatter and uglier. you fat, ugly pig.
- Bradford Cox Rewlz

death is not the most tragic lost in life. the most tragic lost is what dies inside of you while your still alive
- …

To the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.
- Albus Dumbledore

“You get what anyone gets – you get a lifetime”
- Death (From The Neil Gaiman Comic Sandman)

I hit him to get his attention. I shot him to calm him down I killed him to reason with him.
- Henry Rollins

And the wild regrets and the bloody sweats None knew so well as I: That he who lives more lives than one, More deaths than one shall die.
- Oscar Wilde

Decisions usually aren’t been good and bad, they are between bad and worse, and it’s often not clear which choice is worse.
- Mark>Mark

A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later.
- General George S. Patton, Jr.

When choosing between two evils, always chose the one you haven’t done yet.
- Unknown

You’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
- Dean Martin

I Was one drink away from a tatoo.
- Forbal

The problem with the world is that everyone is one drink behind.
- Humphrey Bogart

The problem with the designated driver program, it’s not a desirable job. But if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At the end of the night, drop them off at the wrong house.
- Jeff Bridges

I don’t drink anymore, but I don’t drink any less.
- Nad

alcohol may be man’s worst enemy. but the bible says love your enemy
- On The Wall At The Local Pub

i have made an important discovery… that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication.
- Oscar Wilde

A guy walks into a bar. Ouch!
- Ryan/Jenni

Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker
- Willy Wonka – Ogden Nash

I drink to prepare for a fight. Tonight I am very prepared.
- Soda Popinski

I don’t drink to get drunk, I just get really thirsty and someone gives me something for that. Then I usually get really confused
- Yo

Love college. Hate class.
- 8th Floor East, Duquesne University

“it’s only tuesday night..” “yeah so we can make up a name…you know so we can drink…” “Oh I got it..we will call it whiskey Tuesday..” “Works for me..lets booze..”
- Keill And Puck

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free
- Michelangelo

The best of artists hath no thought to show, which the rough stone in its superfluous shell, doth not include; to break the marble spell, is all the hand that serves the brain can do.
- Michelangelo

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
- Dostoyevsky

The only thing we have to fear is fear it’self – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance
- Fdr – First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933

For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don’t enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are that you’re not going to be very happy. If someone bases his happiness or unhappiness on major events like a great new job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn’t going to be happy much of the time. If, on the other hand, happiness depends on a good breakfast, flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap, then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness.
- Andy Rooney

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.
- Anne Frank

Happiness is a warm puppy.
- Charles Schulz

We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.
- Frederick Koenig

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
- J.D. Salinger

Happiness is not a circus clown rolling around in a big tractor tire so that his arms and legs form ‘spokes.’ Happiness is when he stops.”
- Jack Handey, In Humor/Jack Handey

Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; & neither feeling is quite within our control.
- Arthur Schoperhauer

Don’t hate, it’s too big a burden to bear.
- Martin Luther King, Sr.

He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemys’ life.
- Neitzsche

Beshrew the heart that makes my heart to groan.
- William Shakespeare

Last night you were, unhinged. You were like some desperate, howling demon. You frightened me.
…Do it again.
- Morticia Addams

In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.
- Dereke Bruce, In Humor

“Some people may think you’re cute, Babe. But to me you’re one very large baked potato!” — Sylvester Stallone in Death Race 2000
- Death Race 2000

rabbits clinkity, clinkity, clink. Hello Mr. Zebra can i have your sweater cause its cold cold cold in my hole hole hole.
- Guess Who

I wish everybody would have to have an electric thing implanted in our heads that gave us a shoc k whenever we did something to disobey the president. Then somehow I get myself elected president.
- Jack Handey

You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to lay down on his back and float in it, then you have something.
- Joe E. Brown

“You know I always thought unicorns were fabulous creatures too, although I never saw one alive before.” “Well, now that we have met,” said the unicorn, “If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.”
- Lewis Carrol, “Throught The Looking Glass”

I didn’t expect her to counter my plan with nakedness.
- Riff (Of Pete Abrams’ Sluggy Freelance)

” you know what happens to popular people…They get fat”
- Unknown

Last night, I dreamt somebody loved me. No hope, No harm, just another false alarm.
- The Smiths, In Music

A country cannot simultaneously prepare and prevent war.
- Albert Einstein

The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that refuse military service.
- Albert Einstein

I love the smell of Napalm in the morning
- Apocalypse Now

Never has there been a good war or a bad peace
- Benjamin Franklin

Lee Harvey Oswald, shooting from the top floor of the Book Depository was able to take 3 shots from an old Italian bolt action rifle. From a distance of over 258 feet and shooting at a moving target he was able to score 2 hits including a headshot. Now does anybody know where he learned to shoot like this? In the Marine Corps ladies!
- Full Metal Jacket

Now your soul may belong to Jesus, but your ass belongs to the Marine Corps
- Full Metal Jacket

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
- Gandhi

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
- George Orwell

Join the army, meet interesting people, kill them
- Graffiti At Bromley

Older men declare war. But its the youth who must fight and die!
- Herbert Hoover

Zeus most glorious and most great, Thundercloud, throned in the heavens! Let not the sun go down and the darkness come, until I cast down headlong the citadel of Priam in flames, and burn his gates with blazing fire, and tear to rags the shirt upon Hectors breast! May many of his men fall about him prone in the dust and bite the earth!
- Homer – The Iliad

Only the dead have seen the end of war
- Plato

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.
- Ronald Reagan

Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.
- Ronald Reagan

I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve.
- Yamamoto, after the attack at Pearl Harbor

The wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe. But the stupid man will just lie down on some seaweed and roll around until he’s completely draped in it. Then he’ll stand up and go, “Hey, I’m Vine Man.”
- Jack Handey

Only promise me one thing, don’t take me home until I am drunk…very drunk indeed!!
- Audrey Hepburn (Breakfast At Tiffany’S)

once again you expect us to believe your lies but i’ve removed the blindfold you put across my eyes i can no longer sit back and watch your system destroy what’s left of me everything that makes me is a lie no more of this not freedom we don’t even question it these are your standards these are your ideas these are your morale but this is my life i’m taking back my life i won’t let you make a living off my misery
- Chokehold

to be nobody but yourself, in a world which is doing it’s best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting
- E.E. Cummings

We would never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.
- Hellen Keller

no matter who we are, where we’re going, or where we’ve been, we all struggle. everyone has battles. everyone, at one time or another, faces the every moment, to day, to year, trials of existence. such is life.sometimes simple. sometimes complicated. when we wake up with challenges, we wake up with choices. to either overcome all that holds us down by going against what opposes us – or to continue sitting quietly in the foul stench of our own shit, while at the same time surendering ourselves to dear and failure. life shifts, spins, and relocates. as we do. we all have the ability to switch our fear of failure into an energy to overcome any trial. just a sure as we all have a spine.
- Hot Water Music

Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind the stronger the trees.
- J. Willard Marriott

It is not the critic who counts; Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; Who strives valiantly; Who errs, and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; But who does actually strive to do the deeds; Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; Who spends himself in a worthy cause; Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worse, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt

in the aftermath of betrayal, we often have to struggle to maintain our grip on reality. survival requires a source of self-respect, self-awareness, and self-honesty. we have to find a balance point before reaching out again.
- Trial

There are two kinds of people _ those who run and those who should!
- Unknown

Pound for pound,… the amoeba is the most vicious animal on Earth
- Anonymous

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
- Bertolt Brecht,

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English — up to fifty words used in correct context — no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
- Carl Sagan

Anyone who says that they can contemplate quantum mechanics without becoming dizzy has not understood the concept in the least.
- Niels Bohr

lord, give me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, courage to change the things i can, and wisdom to know the difference

If God dwells inside us like some people say….I sure hope he likes enchiladas, cuz thats what he’s getting.
- Jack Handey

Believe it or not, Evolution Creation, Communism, Anarchism All isms are all religions

The death of a friend is equivalent to the loss of a limb.
- German Proverb

Dance as if no one’s watching, sing as if no one’s listening, and live everyday as if it were your last.
- Irish proverb

Enough is a feast
- Buddhist Proverb

They talk of my drinking but never my thirst
- Scottish Proverb

Don’t speak unless you can improve upon the silence
- Spanish Proverb

Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours.
- Swedish Proverb

Faith is to believe in things that we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see in what we believe.
- Unknown

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- Benjamin Franklin

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through
- From Anglo-Irish Poet And Satirist Jonathan Swift’S “Thoughts On Various Subjects.”

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use.
- Kierkegaard

You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.
- Nobel Prize-Winning Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
- Orson Welles (1915-1985)

Objection is when I say: this doesn’t suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that what doesn’t suit me never happens again
- Ulrike Meinhof

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
- Winston Churchill

the Earth is not dying, it is being murdered and the people murdering it have names and addresses’
- British Ef!, Seen In Diy Culture: Party And Protest In Nineties Britain (Verso)

“You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake… This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Anarchy is the basis for the anti-establishmentarian movement. Now it is a fad and a corporate logo. The fundamental basis for the anarchist movement is against everything it is now associated with. Corporations and mass profiterring on a political ideal. Would some body try this with Republicans or Democrats? Hell no! Anarchy appeals to the milk-fed, sheltered Hot-Topic shopping misguided children that shoot up our schools representing something they don’t understand.
- Disestablish This. Non-Commercial, Non-Profit, Just Free Speech.

If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution.
- Emma Goldman

If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange the apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea, and I have an idea, and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
- George Bernard Shaw

Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.
- Henry David Thoreau

There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts, to enforce a law not supported by the people.
- Hubert H. Humphrey

Why would David Fincher [the guy that made fight club] decide to declare the world meaningless with a two and half hour, sixty million dollar, star-studded, blockbuster production? Why would he bother? Simply put, that is the very point of this film. Fincher acknowledges his hypocrisy with the clever placement of a single frame depicting a giant penis at the end of the film. How could anyone have the audacity to create any sort of nihilistic doctrine? It simply would not make sense.
- Jared Levine

Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do
- Linus Torvalds

Living Gods have a way of being less divine when their armies have left
- Minda Zheng

If all fools, wise men, rich men, poor men, greedy men, humble men, selfish men, altruistic men, and neutral men in the world were killed, anarchy might actually be able to exist.
- Philip Musial

Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.
- Pierre Joseph Proudhon Quoted In The Match!

In a boat at sea one of the men began to bore a hole in the bottom of the boat. On being remonstrating with, he answered, “I am only boring under my own seat.” “Yes,” said his companions, “but when the sea rushes in we shall all be drowned with you.
- Talmud

Cyberspace is an illusion, virtual reality is not reality, instantaneous communication with bodies huddled over computer screens is not communication. It’s funny how many people have swallowed the WWW bait. People itch to go home and log on to the WWW.
- The Raven, Anarchist Quarterly, Vol. 8, No 4.

…a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing…
- Thomas Jefferson

We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government… Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind…”
- William Lloyd Garrison

sometimes all you have is nonsense to deal with and your anger with which to do so.
- Zaffel

When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side, ‘ I calmly say ‘Your child belongs to us already…What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.
- Adolf Hitler, in a speech given on November 6, 1933

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
- Albert Camus

Few are those who can see with their own eyes and hear with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein

Aye, but isn’t the man who chooses the bad in some way better than the man who has the good forced upon him?
- Alex (A Clockwork Orange)

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
- Amos Bronson Alcolt

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts–for support rather than for illumination.
- Andre Lang

Another way in is the other way out; Never doubt where to exit; it is another entrance out.
- Andrew S. Pudliner

We are what we repeatedly do.
- Aristotle

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
- Barry Lopez

It is the path of least resistance that makes rivers and men crooked.
- Bj Palmer

It’s like a finger, pointing at the moon. if you stare at the finger, you miss all the heavenly glory
- Bruce Lee Enter The Dragon

you have two ears and only one mouth for a reason
- Buddhist Belief

The only thing required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
- Castlevania – Symphony Of The Night

I think therefore I am.
- Descartes

To be is to do.
- Descartes

Learning how to stand up is easy. Learning how to stand up after you’ve fallen down, that is tough.
- Dican

You can never lose what you never had.
- Dican

Everything is but a dream within a dream.”
- Edgar Allen Poe

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Do be do be do.
- Frank Sinatra

I no longer want to walk on worn soles
- Friedich Nietzsche

Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs: He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Live simply that other may simply live.
- Gandhi

We must be the change we wish to see.
- Gandhi

Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.
- Gandhi

Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what is right.
- Isaac Asimov

to sit back and do nothing is to cooperate with the oppresser
- Jane Elliot

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet
- Kafka

Man will often act and live as though he were apart from his body, as if improving it from the outside.
- Karl Marx

Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
- Lao Tzu

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you
- Lao-Tzu

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
- Mahatma Ghandi

Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker is sorry.
- Mark Twain

If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
- Martin Luther King Jr.

We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we are all going to perish together as fools.
- Martin Luther King Junior

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and Earth will have to pause and say,”Here lived a great sweeper, who swept his job well
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Facing The Challenge Of A New Age

The greatest spiritual truths, with the greatest ability to transform our lives, are often the ones that look superficially like the twisted and sick rantings of a permanently-adolescent mental inadequate.¡±
- Pastor N. Pizzor

when living life becomes a chore, you should think about those who are grounded to their graves.
- Santiago

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
- Sartre

Leaves of inquisitevness floating on winds of doubt fall on an ignorant ground.
- Scott Steen

The unexamined life is not worth living.
- Socrates

My advice to you is to get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy: if not, you’ll become a philosopher
- Socrates

I don’t want to die without scars
- Tyler Durden

The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle
- Richard Wilbur In Time, In An Essay On Male Silence

I may not agree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it.
- Voltair

You can have anything you want in this life, as long as you help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziggler

love your life poor as it is. You may Perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours even in a poorhouse.
- Henry David Thoreau, In Life As We Live It

A clear breeze has no price, the bright moon no owner.
- Song Hun

Who can own a tree?
- The Indian Guy In “Ernest Goes To Camp”

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.”
- – Winnie The Pooh

There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way
- 20th Century American Writer Christopher Morley

When something is true many words are not necessary.
- A Paralyzed Japanese Painter

Where you came from never exsisted, where you are going never will, and where you are now doesn’t matter, unless you can get away from it.
- A. Jorgensen

There’s no such thing in anyone’s life as an unimportant day
- Alexander Woolcott

There are few things as precious as our emotions, and those so ignorant to play with them are at a complete loss of any good you might have to offer.
- Anonymous

It is very simple to play as fool! You don’t have to prove nothing.
- Catalin Sorescu

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children
- Clarence Darrow

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
- Confucious

Fantasy is a necessary ingrediant in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
- Dr. Suess

Life is like playing the violin solo inpublic and learning the instument as you go.
- Edward Geroge Bulwer-Lytton

I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.  You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
- Frederick E. Perl

When you forget to eat you know you’re alive.
- Henry Miller

Only the fool hopes to repeat an experience; the wise man knows that every experience is to be viewed as a blessing. Whatever we try to deny or reject is precisely what we have need of; it is our very need which often paralyzes us, prevents us from welcoming a (good or bad) experience.
- Henry Miller

When life hands you a lemon, say “Oh yeah, I like lemons. What else you got?”
- Henry Rollins

the boys didn’t care, because on cold corners they stood three backs to one another, facing all the winds, bent, lips don’t care, miserable, cold and broke, waiting like witch doctors, saying:
“everything belongs to me because i am poor”
- Jack Kerouac

If I had my life to live over, I’d try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax, I would limber up, I would be crazier than I’ve been on this trip. I know very few things I’d take seriously anymore. I’d certainly be less hygenic . . . I would take more chances, I would take more trips, I would scale more mountains, I would swim more rivers, and I would watch more sunsets. I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans. I would have more actual trouble and fewer imaginary ones. Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had to do it all over again, I’d have many more of them, in fact I’d try not to have anything else, just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of my day. If I had it to do all over again, I’d travel lighter, much lighter that I have. I would start barefoot earlier in the spring, and I’d stay that way later in the fall. And I would ride more merry-go-rounds, and catch more gold rings, and greet more people and pick more flowers and dance more often. If I had it to do all over again- but you see, I don’t.
- Jorge Luis Broges

“Movies are open doors, and at every door, I change character and life…I live for the present always. I accept this risk. I don’t deny the past, but it’s a page to turn.”
- Juliette Binoche (French Actress)

By the year 2050, I do not know what language we will be speaking in the United States, but it will be called English and will sound alot like Spanish.
- Mark A. Trevino

Wink at a homely girl, it costs you so little & does her so much good.
- Menken

Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.
- Neal Stephenson In

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
- Oscar Wilde

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; Some blunders and absurdities crept in; Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; You shall begin it serenely and With too high a spirit to be encumbered With your old nonsense
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life – It goes on.
- Robert Frost

Be glad you had the moment
- Steve Shagen

To know you have enough is to be rich.
- Tao

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
- The Velveteen Rabbit

“I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. …Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? – Every, every minute? …I’m ready to go back…I should have listened to you. That’s all human beings are! Just blind people.” -Emily Webb
- Thornton Wilder

“…That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know – that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”-Simon Stimson
- Thornton Wilder

“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers….. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life….. But why would I want to do a thing like that?”
- Trainspotting

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
- Unknown

“Against my will, I am sent to bid you….come into dinner…….Theres a double meaing in that!” Benadict
- William Shakespeare

The world is conspiring in your favor.
- Written on the street in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“I”M not as dumb as you think i am, i’ve learned a thing or two. I don’t care about nothing at all, but i think the world of you”
- Afi

Peggy- “Tell me you love me, Al” Al-”I love football, I love beer, let’s not cheapen the meaning of the word.”
- Al Bundy

Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own (will), is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
- Apostle Paul

“I met a young man who was wounded in love, I met another man who was wounded in hatred.”
- Bob Dylan

Born to lose, I”ve lived all my life in vain. All my dreams have only caused me pain. All my life i’ve always been so blue. Born to lose and now i’m losing you
- Bouncing Souls

i wish i could say i lived near an ocean. i could go there when i wanted and listen and waste more time than i should. watch people and listen. eat shrimp and listen.
- Dustin Vannatter

“if two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it”
- Ernest Hemingway

“Open Eyes, open heart, open up and fall apart”
- Finger Eleven

Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The joy of life and its affairs of happiness digress into a pain of lost height. So, in all happiness there is sadness. That of a depressed state of losing, a time which no enjoyment can fervor the full amount because of the hidden realization of drowning in the opposites.
- Hilliary Heard

My night has become a sunny dawn because of you.
- Inb Abbad

Whenever someone asks me to define love, I usually think for a minute, then I spin around and pin the guy’s arm behind his back. NOW who’s asking the questions?
- Jack Handey

I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words. and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
- James Joyce

I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like a genuis, she is ignorant of what she does.
- Jeanette Winterson, “The Passion”

I’m a dork and she’s so cool, I’m ugly she’s beautiful, she’s so smart I’m just a fool, and I just can’t figure it out, I just can’t undrstand, why does she love me?
- Jeffrie Fan Club

my heart you lifted, my eyes you dried, im sorry but i must say good-bye. i cried because my heart was broken, and its still stolen, im sorry because now i did the same to you, i hope you found someone whos true to you.
- L0l0

Love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses
- Lord Dewar

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden where the flowers are dead.
- Oscar Wilde

She is the heart that strikes a whole octave. After her all songs are possible.
- Rainer Maria Rilke -Think I’M Going For A Walk Now I Feel A Little Unsteady Dont Want Nobody To Fo

Love knows not its own depth except in the hour of separation.
- Tony Zappone

“…if you love enough, you’ll lie a lot”
- Tori Amos

It takes only a minute to get a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone, but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.
- Unknown

Somewhere there’s someone who dreams of your smile, and finds in your presence that life is worth while. So when you’re lonely remember it’s true: somebody somewhere is thinking of you.
- Unknown

A good love is delicious, you can’t get enough too soon. It makes you so crazy you want to swallow the moon.
- Venus De Milo

Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.
- William Shakespeare

“…Love is a smoke rais’d with the fume of sighs Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes. What is it else? A madness most discreet, a choking gall And a preserving sweet.”
- William Shakespeare

Love changes, a thug changes, and best friends become strangers…..
- Nas, In Music/Rap

Here I sit with no one near, I’m cryyyying in my beer. Love love love just ain’t a game I play. Oh no, love love love just ain’t a game I play.
- The Queers, In Music/Punk

How to please a woman? Love her, die for her, take her to dinner, miss the superbowl for her, buy her jewelery, pretend you’re interested in what she has to say…How to please a Man? Show up naked, bring beer.
- Unknown

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and there for is wing’d cupid painted blind.
- Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I, Scene I, [Helena]

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.
- Aristotle

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.
- Charles Caleb Colton

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
- Dag Hammarskjold

There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.
- Dante

The most I ever did for you was to outlive you. But that is much.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
- Eric Hoffer

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
- Eric Hoffer

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness. The remarkable thing is that the cessation of the inner dialogue marks also the end of our concern with the world around us. It is as if we noted the world and think about it only when we have to report it to ourselves.
- Eric Hoffer

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Oh, sweet sorrow, the time you borrow, will you be here when i wake up tomorrow?
- Katherine Wolf

Loneliness the clearest of crystal insight into your own soul, its the fear of one’s own self that haunts the lonely.
- Keith Haynie

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
- Kurt Vonnegut

The loneliest it gets is when the wind begins to chill and when I sit atop of your old street, the church top brings a still ness to me, there’s nothing I would rather do, than have my heart broken by you.
- Lifetime

In solitude, where we are least alone
- Lord Byron

Life dies inside a person when there are no others willing to be-friend him. He thus gets filled with emptiness and a non-existent sense of self-worth.
- Mark R. J. Lavoie

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
- Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

When Christ said: “I was hungry and you fed me,” he didn’t mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that’s real hunger.
- Mother Teresa

Our language has widely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.
- Paul Tillich

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
- Pearl S. Buck

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

And I look again towards the sky as the raindrops mix with the tears I cry.
- Unknown

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
- Vincent Van Gogh

Skillful listening is the best remedy for loneliness, loquaciousness, and laryngitis.
- William Arthur Ward

It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.
- Alex Delarge, “A Clockwork Orange”

Good. Bad. I’m the one with the gun.
- Army Of Darkness

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA.
- Brodie, Mallrats

The question isn’t what are we going to do today, it’s what aren’t we going to do today
- Ferris Bueler’S Day Off

What the hell is this?” “Its a Peace symbol sir.” “What does your helmet say?” “Born to kill sir.” “What the hell is going on?” “I guess I was just trying to point out the duality of mankind.”
- Full Metal Jacket

“Tell me about it stud”
- Grease

There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers. Here, you are all equally worthless.
- Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), “Full Metal Jacket”

“You have to ask me nicely. You see, Danny, I can deal with the bullets and the bombs and the blood. I can deal with the heat and the stress and the fear. I don’t want money and I don’t want medals. What I want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform, and with your Harvard mouth, extend me some fuckin’ courtesy. You gotta ask me nicely.”
- Jack Nicholson In “A Few Good Men”

we’re gonna need a bigger boat
- Jaws

but i’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.
- Julia Roberts, Notting Hill

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world believe that he didn’t exist.
- Kevin Spacey “The Usual Suspects”

I don’t know what to say, so I’ll just say what’s in my heart… Baboom, Baboom, Baboom.
- Mel Brooks

I may be stepping out on a limb here, but I’m already on the edge. And that’s where it happens.
- Pi

im dying and it’s pissing me off”
- The Evening Star

Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is … delay it for a while.
- The Princess Bride

One day you make a wrong turn, or take a detour, and you end up in some crazy place you can’t even find on the map, doing something you never thought you would do. Maybe you feel a little lost while it’s happening, but later you realise that was the best bit of the trip.
- Threesome

This here is the man behind the man behind the man!
- Trent, Swingers

This book is not to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
- Dorothy Parker

Not all who wander are lost.
- JRR Tolkien

You know, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don’t help.
- Calvin

I’m yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you’re old and weak.
- Calvin

What’s the point of wearing your lucky rocketship underpants if no one asks to see ‘em?
- Calvin

I have a hammer! I can put things together. I can tear things apart. I can alter my enviroment while making an incredible din the whole time. God, its great to be a male.
- Calvin

I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
- Calvin

I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart so long. If we’re in each others dreams, we can play together all night!
- Hobbes, To Calvin

The problem with designing something completley foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of a complete fool.
- Douglas Adams

I love deadlines. I specially love the swooshing sounds they make as they fly by.
- Douglas Adams

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.
- Douglas Adams

Charitably… I think… sometimes, perhaps , one must change or die. And, in the end,there were,perhaps limits to how much he could let himself change.
- Neil Gaiman, Lucien/The Sandman

But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize.Their heart’s desire,their dream… But the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted.
- Neil Gaiman, Dream/The Sandman

“Friendship is present in all things but love”
- Much Ado About Nothing

Speak low, if you speak love
- Much Ado About Nothing, Ii, I, 104.

“He jests at scars that never felt a wound”
- Romeo

By me sad hours seem long…
- Romeo

“Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt.”
- Shakespear

Tis not so deep as a well, nor wide as a church door, but mind you tis enough. Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.
- Shakespear

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- Shakespear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (III, ii, 115)

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
- Shakespeare

It is a heretic which builds a fire, not she who burns in’t.
- Shakespeare

“My only love sprung from my only hate Too early seen unknown, and known too late.” Juliet, Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare

The course of true love never did run smooth
- William Shakespeare

The miserable have no other medicine But only hope.
- William Shakespeare

“For no matter how much [temporal authorities] fret and fume, they cannot do more than make the people obey them by word and deed; the heart they cannot constrain, though they wear themselves out trying.”
-Ibid., 383-85

“Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, devil and the world.”
-Martin Luther

“Such was the life I led.  Was this, my God, a life at all?”
-St. Augustine Confessions Book III Chapter 2

“I longed to make a name for myself, though my reason for this was [***]  and mere wind, being simply joy in human vanity.”
-St. Augustine Confessions Book III Chapter 4

“Yet these Scriptures would grow up together with a little child; I, however, thought too highly of myself to become a little child; swollen with pride, I was, in my own eyes, grown-up.”
-St. Augustine Confessions Book III Chapter 5

“The only just society of men is the society which does [Y]our will.”
-St. Augustine Confessions Book III Chapter 9

“Now go away and leave me.  As you live, it is impossible that the son of these tears should perish.”
-Bishop to St. Augustine’s Mother Confessions Book III Chapter 12

“Marriage is a wonderful institution…but who wants to live in an institution?”
Groucho Marx

“I let my music take me where my heart wants to go.”
-Cat Stevens “The Wind”

“Women have always lightened my burdens, picked up my spirits and exhilarated me with the old anything-goes feeling, though anything doesn’t go, of course, and never did.”
- Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
“when radio stars finally did make the transition to television, the medium had already created a host of its own stars who understood how to better utilize the medium. The radio stars were thinking radio with pictures; the new TV stars were thinking television.”
-www.ZUG.com

“We don’t need no destination, just a tank of gas and a good clear station.”
–Darryl Worley

“But it does not seem that I can trust anyone,’ said Frodo.
Sam looked at him unhappily,  ‘It all depends on what you want; put in Merry. ‘You can trust us to stuck to you through thick and thin-to the bitter end.  And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours-closer than you keep it yourself.  But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble along, and go off without a word.  We are your friends Frodo…”
“…I don’t deny it, but I’ll never believe you are sleeping again, whether you snore or not.  I shall kick you hard to make sure.”
-The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

“I wanted to have a great stock, so that I could feel rich, a great store laid up for many years, so that I would not be dependent upon Him the next day, but He never gave me such a store.  I never had more holiness or healing at one time than I needed for that hour.  He said, “My child, you must come to Me for the next breath…now you have to come to Me every second, and lie on My breast every moment.”  He gave me a great fortune, placed thousands and millions at credit, but He gave me a checkbook with this one condition, “You never can draw more than you need at the time.”
-A. B. Simpson

“There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open.”
-Tom Bombadil about Farmer Maggot, The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

“Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; the thief doth fear each bush an officer.”
–William Shakespeare
“There is a history in all men’s lives.”
–William Shakespeare
“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”
–William Shakespeare
“Each present joy or sorrow seems the chief.”
–William Shakespeare

“Summer, Winter, Misery, and Spring”
-Four seasons

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter to the other. Now you will feel no cold , for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there is no more loneliness for you, for each of you will be a companion to the other. Now you are two bodies, but there is only one life before you. Go now to your dwelling place,& to enter into the days of togetherness, and may your days be good and long upon the earth.
~Apache Blessing

Yet regardless if you love them, hate them, wish they would die or know that you would die without them…it matters not.; Because once they come into your life, whatever they are to the world, they become everything to you. When you look them in the eyes, traveling to the depths of their souls, and you say a million things without a trace of sound, you know that your own life is inevitable consumed within the rhythmic beating of their very hearts. We love them for a million reasons. It is a thing not of the mind but of the heart. A feeling. Only felt.
~Kimberly Kirberger

And I don’t regret the rain, or the nights I felt the pain, or the tears I had to cry, some of those times along the way. Every road I had to take, every time my heart would break; it was just something I had to get threw to get me to you.
~Song from Hope Floats soundtrack

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. Let your best be for your friend.
~Kahlil Gibran<

A true friend is one who is there for you when he’s rather be anywhere else.
~Len Wein

No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each others worth.
~Robert Southey

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
~Theodore Hesburgh

To often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve<
<~Roger Lewin

For children to take morality seriously they must see adults take morality seriously.
~William J. Bennett

Making the decision to have a child – its momentous. It is to decide to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
~Elizabeth Stone

She never once gave up. My mom is my hero.
<~Kimberly Anne Brand

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but i think she enjoyed it.
~Mark Twain

Know what it is to be a child….To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palf of your hand and eternity in an hour.
~William Blake “Auguries of Innoncence”

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.
~Carl Rowan

I am always ready to learn; but I do not always like being taught.
~Winston Churchill

Knowledge is power.
~Francis Bacon

When you get to heaven, God doesn’t check you for medals, awards or trophies; he looks for scars.
~Vin Scully

Often the best way to win is to forget to keep score.
~Marianne Bala

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.
~Mother Teresa

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.
~Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf

Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.
~Mark Helprin

It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
~Barbara Kingsolver

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
~James A. Michener

To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.
~unknown

Courage is getting away from death by continually coming within an inch of it.
~Gilbert K. Chesterton

He who doesn’t fear death dies only once.
~Giovanni Falcone

“I’ve gone to look for myself…If I should return before I get back, please tell me to wait for me….that way I can be reunited with my sanity…

I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
“Ah, God take me from this place!”
A voive said, “It is no desert.”
I cried, “Well, But–
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.”
A voice said, “It is no desert”
-Stephan Crane

“Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”
-John Donne Holy Sonnet XIV”
-David Chamber’s IM info
“Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.”

life is long and its work is hard; but life sometimes slips – lets up its guard; its then that we can find our way; to finish our work with time to play  –Anonymous

“It is not the dissenters or the papists that we should fear, but the set of canting, low-bred hypocrites who are wriggling their way in among us; men who have no fixed principle, no standard ideas of religion or doctrine, but who take up some popular cry, as this fellow has done about “Sabbath traveling”.”
-Dr. Grantly, Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

“There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons.  No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent, and be tormented.  No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips.  Let a professor of law or physic find his place in a lectureroom, and there pour forth to empty benched.  Let a barrister attempt to talk without talking well, and he will talk but seldom.  A jusge’s charge need be listened to perforce by none but the jury, prisoner, and gaoler.  A member of Parliament can be coughed down or counted out.  Town-councillors can be tabooed.  But no one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman.  He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sindbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sunday’s rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and makes God’s service distasteful.  We are not forced into church!  No; but we desire more than that.  We desire no to be forced to stay away.  We desire, nay, we are resolute, to enjoy the comfort of public worship; but we desire also that we may do so without an amount of tedium which ordinary human nature cannot endure with patience that we may be able to leave the house of God without that anxious longing for escape, which is the common consequence of common sermons.
With what complacency will a young parson deduce false conclusions from misunderstood texts, and then threaten us with all the penalties of Hades if we neglect to comply with the injunctions he has given us!  Yes, my too self-confident juvenile friend, I do believe in those mysteries, which are so common in your mouth; I do believe in the unadulterated word which you hold there in your hand; but you must pardon me if, in some things, I doubt your interpretation.  The bible is good, the prayer-book is good, nay, you yourself would be acceptable, if you would read to me some portion of those time-honoured discourses which our great divines have elaborated in the full maturity of their powers.  But you must excuse me, my insufficient young lecturer, if I yawn over your imperfect sentences, you repeated phrases, your false, your drawlings and denouncings, your humming and hawing, your oh-ing and ah-ing, your black gloves and your white handkerchief.  To me, it all means nothing; and hours are too precious to be so wasted – if one could only avoid it.”
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (47)

Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.
– C. S. Lewis (Studies in Words)

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.-C.S. Lewis

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
C. S. Lewis

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
C. S. Lewis

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C. S. Lewis

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
C. S. Lewis

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
C. S. Lewis

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
C. S. Lewis
If we could know which of us, darling, would be the first to go, who would be first to breast the swelling tide and step alone upon the other side – if we could know!
C. S. Lewis

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
C. S. Lewis

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
C. S. Lewis

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
C. S. Lewis

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
C. S. Lewis

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C. S. Lewis
We are what we believe we are
C. S. Lewis

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
C. S. Lewis

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
C. S. Lewis

The safest road to hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
C. S. Lewis

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.
C. S. Lewis

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
C. S. Lewis

The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
C. S. Lewis

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest…
C. S. Lewis

You play the hand you’re dealt. I think the game’s worthwhile.
C. S. Lewis

You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
C. S. Lewis

You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
C. S. Lewis

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
C. S. Lewis

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
C. S. Lewis

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.
C. S. Lewis

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
C. S. Lewis

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought I was the only one!”
C. S. Lewis
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
C. S. Lewis

Then Aslan turned to them and said:
“You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.”
Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.”
“No fear of that, ” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?”
Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
•        in The Last Battle, by C. S. Lewis

Lucy leant her head on the edge of the fighting-top and whispered, “Aslan, Aslan, if ever you loved us at all, send us help now.” The darkness did not grow any less, but she began to feel a little – a very little – better…
An albatross…circled three times round the mast and then perched for an instant on the crest of the gilded dragon at the prow… But no one except Lucy knew that as it circled the mast it had whispered to her, “Courage, dear heart,” and the voice, she felt sure, was Aslan’s.
•        in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis

“Kiss me, Jewel,” he said. “For certainly this is our last night on earth. And if ever I offended against you in any matter great or small, forgive me now.”
“Dear King,” said the Unicorn, “I almost wish you had, so that I might forgive it. Farewell. We have known great joys together. If Aslan gave me my choice I would choose no other life than the life I have had and no other death than the one we go to.”
•        in The Last Battle, by C. S. Lewis
“It is ordained that all novels should have a male and a female angel, and a male and a female devil.”
-Anthony Trollope Barchester Towers

“The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did.”
-Chinua Achebe,  Things Fall Apart

“Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.”
-Chinua Achebe,  Things Fall Apart

“A proud hear can survive a general failure because such failure does not prick its pride.  It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.”
-Chinua Achebe,  Things Fall Apart

“Looking at a king’s mouth, said an old man, “one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast.”
-Chinua Achebe,  Things Fall Apart

“When a man says yes his chi [personal god] says yes also.”
Ibo proverb, Chinua Achebe,  Things Fall Apart

“It is well known that the family of the Slopes never starve: they always fall on their feet like cats, and let them fall where they will, they live on the fat of the land.  Our Mr Slope did so.  On his return to town he found that the sugar-refiner had died, and that his widow was inconsolable; or, in other words, in want of consolation.  Mr Slope consoled her, and soon found himself settled with much comfort in the house in Baer Street.”
-Anthony Trollope Barchester Towers

“If he ever thought of freedom, he did so as men think of the millennium, a of a good time which may be coming, but which nobody expects to come in their day.”
-Anthony Trollope Barchester Towers, About Bishop Proudie concerning his wife

“To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavor.  As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that thee sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economies, politics, law, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit.  Collective activities are, of course, necessary, but this is the end to which they are necessary.  Great sacrifices of this private happiness by those who have it may be necessary in order that it may be more widely distributed.  All may have to be a little hungry in order that none may starve.  But do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.  The mistake is easily made.  Fruit has to be tinned if it is to be transported and has to lose thereby some of its good qualities.  But one meets people who have learned actually to prefer the tinned fruit to the fresh.”
-C.S. Lewis, “Membership”

“There is, in fact, a fatal tendency in all human activities for the means to encroach upon the very ends which they were intended to serve.  Thus money comes to hinder the exchange of commodities, and rules of art to hamper genius, and examinations to prevent young men from becoming learned.”
-C.S. Lewis, “Membership”

“Equality is for me in the same position as clothes.  It is a result of the Fall and the remedy for it.  Any attempt to retrace the steps by which we have arrived at egalitarianism and to reintroduce the old authorities on the political level is for me as foolish as it would be to take off our clothes.  The Nazi and the nudist make the same mistake.  But it is the naked body, still there beneath the clothes of each one of us, which really lives.  It is the hierarchical world, still alive and (very properly) hidden behind a façade of equal citizenship, which is our real concern.”
-C.S. Lewis, “Membership”

“It delights me that there should be moments in the services of my own Church when the priest stands and I kneel.”
-C.S. Lewis, “Membership”

“There will come a time when every culture, every institution, every nation, the human race, all biological life is extinct and every one of us is still alive.  Immortality is promised to us, not to these generalities.  It was not for societies or states that Christ died, but for men.  In that sense Christianity must seem to secular collectivists to involve an almost frantic assertion of individuality.  But then it is not the individual as such who will share Christ’s victory over death.  We shall share the victory by being in the Victor.  A rejection, or in Scripture’s strong language, a crucifixion of the natural self is the passport to everlasting life.  Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.”
-C.S. Lewis, “Membership”

“as organs in the Body of Christ, as stones and pillars in the temple, we are assured of our eternal self-identity and shall live to remember the galaxies as an old tale.”
-C.S. Lewis, “Membership”

“As a colour first reveals its true quality when placed by an excellent artist in its pre-elected spot between certain others, as a spice reveals its true falvour when inserted just where and when a good cook wished among the other ingredients, as the dog becomes really doggy only when he has taken his place in the household of man, so we shall then fist be true persons when we have suffered ourselves to be fitted into our places.  We are marble waiting to be shaped, metal waiting to be run into a mould.  No doubt there are already, even in the unregenerate self, faint hints of what mould each is designed for, or what sort of pillar he will be.  But it is, I think, a gross exaggeration to picture the saving of a soul as being, normally, at all like the development from seed to flower.  The very words repentance, regeneration, the New Man, suggest something very different.  Some tendencies in each natural man may have to be simply rejected.  Our Lord speaks of eyes being plucked out and hands lopped off-a frankly Procrustean method of adaptation.”
-C.S. Lewis, “Membership”

“I have wanted to try to expel that quite un-Christian worship of the human individual simply as such which is so rampant in modern thought side by side with out collectivism, for one error begets the opposite error and, far from neutralizing, they aggravate each other.  I mean the pestilent notion (one sees it in literary criticism) that each of us starts with a treasure called “personality” locked up inside him, and that to expand and express this, to guard it from interference, to be “original,” is the main end of life.  This is Pelagian, or worse, and it defeats even itself.  No man who values originality will ever be original..  But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit or work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.”
-C.S. Lewis, “Membership”

“A mother’s tears weigh heavily  on the soul of a child.”
-Tamas’s mother, Women of Deh Koh by Erick Friedl

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
-G. K. Chesterton

I am the judge of dreams….   I find you guilty of  dreaming good dreams, and sentence you to a lifetime of working and suffering for the sake of your dreams.
-Speaker for the Dead,
by Orson Scott Card

No one digs a gold mine under a paved street.  You need a rocky hill to find gold.
-St. John “Don” Bosco

You people don’t celebrate your faith, you mourn it!
-Serendipity, in Dogma

Evidently, [God] has not thought the past sufficient, for He has given us the present.
-Donald Spoto,
The Hidden Jesus

One day, a philosopher asked, “What is the purpose of creation?”
“Lovemaking,” said the Master.
Later, to his disciples, he said, “Before creation, love was.  After creation, love was made.  When love is consummated, creation will cease to be, and love will be forever.”
-Anthony de Mello, Awakenings

We’ve all heard that the unexamined life is not worth living, but consider too that the unlived life is not worth examining.
-Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it.  Action has magic, power, and grace in it.
-Goethe

If you think you understand, it isn’t God.
-Søren Kierkegaard

…perfection cannot be perfect without the potential for perfecting!…our purpose is not to achieve some transcendental level but to deal with the imperfect world as a partner in creation….
-Rabbi David Cooper, in God is a Verb

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe.
-Albert Einstein

When a man takes a step towards God, God takes more steps toward that man than there are sands in the worlds of time.
-The Work of the Chariot

Every blade of grass has an angel bending over it, saying, “Grow! Grow!”
-The Talmud

Let us applaud and give thanks that we have become not only Christians but Christ himself. Do you understand, my brothers, the grace that God our head has given us? Be filled with wonder and joy-we have become veritable Christs!
-St. Augustine of Hippo

Work is love made visible.
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Most men would rather die than think, and most men do.
-Bertrand Russell

Realists are people who deserve reality.
-Christian Camlin

If you were now restored by grace to the integrity man posessed before sin, you would be complete master of these impulses. None would ever go astray, but flee to the one sole good, the goal of all desire, God himself.
-The Cloud of Unknowing (author unknown)

I am a pizza
I can be a delicious lunch, dinner,
or breakfast, if you’re weird
I have a great deal of toppings on me
I am a round and flat piece of dough
with lots of toppings
I make your mouth water
I’m very good to eat, but I’m
Fattening!
I am a mouth’s best friend
I make you say, Yum, Yum
I am a pizza
-Monica Lewinsky, age 10 (?)

With a mighty roar,
The encompassing love of the Lord
Gives birth to the great Universe.
His holy works thus come into being.
-Morihei Ueshiba

Change is a constant.
-Anonymous Engineer

When we try to overcome evil with evil, we are not working for peace. If you say, “Saddam Hussein is evil. We have to prevent him from continuing to be evil,” and if you then use the same means he has been using, you are exactly like him. Trying to overcome evil with evil is not the way to make peace.
-Thich Nhat Hahn

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.
-John Lennon

If thou art absolutely obedient to God, there is no ambiguity in thee and . . .thou art mere simplicity before God. . . .
One thing there is which all Satan’s cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise, and that is simplicity.
-Søren Kierkegaard (Christian Discourses)

It is more necessary to love much than to think much.
Always do that which impels you most to love.
-St. Teresa of Ávila

An atheist is someone without any invisible means of support.
-Anonymous

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that lies at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not, who can no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. -Albert Einstein

We can do no great things.
We can only do small things with great love. -Mother Teresa

Resentment is letting someone live in your mind rent-free.  -Roger Ebert

The flame of love
grows as it is divided
it increases by being shared
from one, then two, then three
and darkness is transformed into glory
and the walls reflect its light
Share your flame!
Share your flame!
-St. John of the Cross

Those who dance are thought mad
by those who don’t hear the music.   -unknown

Time and Space are fragments of the Infinite
for the use of finite creatures.   -Henri Frederic Amíel

While God waits for His Temple to be built of love,
Men bring stones.
-Rabinadrath Tagore

I have been mistaken. It was necessary, I suppose, to liberate the multitude of oppressed people; but our method has provoked other oppressions, frightful massacres. You know that my most awful nightmare is to feel myself drowning in the blood of countless victims. To save our Russia, what we needed (but it is too late now) was ten Francises of Assisi. Ten Francises of Assisi, and we should have saved Russia.
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in his deathbed confession to a Hungarian priest, quoted in The Francis Book.

What is not eternal is eternally out-of-date.
-C. S. Lewis

Too many of us in this culture are enslaved by things. The only way for a Christian to live in an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that their very existence is an act of rebellion. There is nothing more maddening than a free person.
-Fr. Brennan Manning

Every sinner has a future;
Every saint had a past.
-Baba Ji

God is dead.
-Nietsche

Nietsche is dead!
-God

There is no denying that the artist is someone who is full of questions, who cries them out in great angst, who discovers rainbow answers in the darkness, and then rushes to canvas or paper. An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in this world. Along with Plato’s divine madness, there is also divine discontent, a longing to find the melody in the discords of chaos, the rhyme in the cacophony, the surprised smile in time of stress or strain.
-Madeleine L’Engle

The only lasting freedom from self-consciousness comes from a profound awareness that God loves me as I am and not as I should be, that He loves me beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity; that He loves me in the morning sun and the evening rain without caution, regret, boundary, limit or breaking point; that no matter what I do, He can’t stop loving me.
-Fr. Brennan Manning

“The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower,
share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another’s,
smile at someone and receive a smile in return,
are to me continual spiritual exercises.”
– Leo Buscaglia

“Men honor what lies within the sphere of their knowledge,
but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.”
– Chuang-tse

“In the presence of eternity,
the mountains are as transient as the clouds.”
– Robert Green Ingersoll
“Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead.
It is going on all the time. We are in it now.”
– Charlotte Perkins Gilman
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”
–  William Blake

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.”
– Crowfoot

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,
places to play in and pray in,
where nature may heal and give strength
to body and soul.”
– John Muir

“Once in a while you find a place on earth that becomes your very own.
A place undefined. Waiting for you to bring your color, your self.
A place untouched, unspoiled, undeveloped.
Raw, honest, and haunting.
No one, nothing is telling you how to feel or who to be.
Let the mountains have you for a day…”
– Sundance

“More grows in the garden than the gardener knows he has sown.”
– Spanish Proverb

“Physical strength is measured by what we can carry;
spiritual by what we can bear.”
– Unknown

“Be careful how you live;
you will be the only Bible
some people ever read.”
– William J. Toms

“[I]f I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God
who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives
and not the pattern of their words.
I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist
to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God,
and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.”
– Isaac Asimov

“India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all.
In religion, other countries are paupers;
India is the only millionaire.”
– Mark Twain

“Some claim that
‘God is one and the same, only people call him by different names.’
Such a statement aims to reconcile all the religions of the world.
It sounds safe and friendly; making nearly all religions acceptable…
It is tragic because the outward differences that demand investigation
are brushed aside.”
– M. Rafiqul-Haqq and P. Newton

frisbeetarianism: the belief that when you die,
your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck

“I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up –
they have no holidays.”
– Henny Youngman

“Everything has a natural explanation.
The moon is not a god but a great rock
and the sun a hot rock.”
– Anaxagorus, ca. 475 BC

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
– Anne Lamott
“On the sixth day God created man
On the seventh day, man returned the favor.”
– Unknown
“The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal,
of the crusaders a crusader,
and of the merchants a merchant.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black,
the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair.”
– Xenophanes
“Men create gods after their own image,
not only with regard to their form
but with regard to their mode of life.”
– Aristotle
“Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves.
Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
“I don’t care if it rains or freezes,
‘long as I’ got my plastic Jesus,
sittin’ on the dashboard of my car;
It makes no difference if we hit a bump,
he’s held on by a suction cup,
sittin’ on the dashboard of my car.
I can even go a hund’rd miles-an-hour,
as long as I’ve got that dee-vine power,
sittin’ on the dashboard of my car.”
– “Plastic Jesus”, circa 1969,
sign-on song of disk jockey Don Imis

“When I do good, I feel good.
When I do bad, I feel bad.
That’s my religion.”
– Abraham Lincoln

“Religion is no more the parent of morality
than an incubator is the mother of a chicken.”
– Lemuel K. Washburn

“People who want to share their religious views with you
almost never want you to share yours with them.”
– Dave Barry

“On Saturday night, I would see men lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival,
and on Sunday morning when I was playing organ
for tent-show evangelists at the other end of the carnival lot,
I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives and children,
asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires.
And the next Saturday they’d be back at the carnival or some other place of indulgence.
I knew then that the Christian church thrives on hypocrisy,
and that man’s carnal nature will out
no matter how much it is purged or scoured by any white-light religion.”
– Anton LaVey

“Fundamentalism means never having to say ‘I’m wrong’.”
– Unknown

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

“Any belief worth having must survive doubt.”
– Unknown

“For those without faith there are no answers,
for those with faith there are no questions.”
– Immanuel Jacobovits
“If you ask the wrong questions
you get answers like ’42′ or ‘God’.”
– Unknown
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true,
by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
– Seneca the Younger

“A cult is a religion with no political power.”
– Tom Wolfe

“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments;
there are consequences.”
– Robert Ingersoll

“It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil.
If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men,
the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.”
– Helen Keller

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully
as when they do it from religious conviction.”
– Blaise Pascal

“Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people.
Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling.
Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality.
At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires.
At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.”
– Phillip Adams

“Force may make hypocrites,
but it can never make converts.”
– William Penn

“Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day.
Give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish.”
– Timothy Jones

“Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.”
– Unknown

“Traveller: God has been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer.
Farmer: You should have seen how he treated them when I wasn’t around.”
– Unknown

“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy
by resorting to mathematics, though she is still forbidden
to resort to physics or chemistry.”
– H.L. Mencken

“Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats,
then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.”
– Fred Allen

“To hear many religious people talk,
one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms
but the devil slapped on the genitals.”
– Don Schrader

“If I do it, it is wonderfully sensual;
If you do it, it is kinky;
If THEY do it, it is perverted.”
– Unknown

“The Church says that the earth is flat,
but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon,
and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.”
– Ferdinand Magellan

“There exists no politician in India daring enough
to attempt to explain to the masses that
cows can be eaten.”
– Indira Gandhi

“I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest,
‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’
‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’
‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’ ”
– Annie Dillard

“There are three truths:
my truth, your truth and the truth.”
– Chinese Proverb

“There are very few human beings who receive the truth,
complete and staggering, by instant illumination.
Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment,
on a small scale, by successive developments,
cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”
– Anais Nin

“We occasionally stumble over the truth
but most of us pick ourselves up
and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
– Winston Churchill

“Truth has to fall on fertile soil.”
– Paula D’Arcy

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie –
deliberate, contrived, and dishonest –
but the myth — persistent, persuasive and realistic.”
– John F. Kennedy

“A belief is not true because it is useful.”
– Henri Amiel

“A thousand probabilities do not make one fact.”
– Italian Proverb

“Truth is not determined by majority vote.”
– Doug Gwyn

“The truth, of course, is that a billion falsehoods told a billion times by a billion people are still false.”
– Travis Walton

“An error does not become truth
by reason of multiplied propagation,
nor does truth become error
because nobody will see it.”
– Mohandas K. Gandhi

“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth –
anonymously and posthumously.”
– Thomas Sowell

“Reality is that which,
when you stop believing in it,
doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick

“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as
six impossible things before breakfast.”
– Lewis Carroll

“The surest way to corrupt a youth
is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem
those who think alike
than those who think differently.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

“A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.”
– Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

“Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.”
– Louis Nizer

“My idea of heaven is
a great big baked potato
and someone to share it with.”
– Oprah Winfrey

“We need not worry so much
about what man descends from –
it’s what he descends to
that shames the human race.”
– Hal Boyle

“Evolution is fascinating to watch.
To me it is the most interesting when one can observe
the evolution of a single man.”
– Shana Alexander

“Love anything and
your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact
you must give it to no one, not even an animal.
Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries;
avoid all entanglements.
Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless –
it will change. It will not be broken;
it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
To love is to be vulnerable.”
– C.S. Lewis

Instructions for installing Mac OS X:
1) Insert CD.
2) Double click install.
3) Enjoy beverage.
4) Restart and login.
– Mac site

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!
– Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance… I am comparing it with the merely dutiful ‘church going’ and laborious ‘saying our prayers’… Against that it stands out as something astonishingly robust, virile, and spontaneous;  something we may regard with an innocent envy… It has all the spontaneity of a natural, even a physical, desire… (In the Psalms) I find an experience fully God-centered, asking of God no gift more urgently than His presence, the gift of Himself, joyous to the highest degree, and unmistakably real.” -C. S. Lewis

Prison

The address of my house has changed,
And the time when I eat,
Changed too the amount of my tobacco,
The colour of my clothes, my face, the look of me,
Even the moon,
So dear to me here,
Has become larger, more beauitful,
And the smell of the earth: Perfume,
And the taste of nature: Suger.
It is as though I am on the roof of my old house
And a new star
Has riveted itself upon my eye.
-        Mahmoud Darwish

If Christ truly be God……then no sacrifice is too great.

“Indeed, Mrs Bold, I shall live alone, quite alone as far as the heart is concerned, if those with whom I yearn to ally myself turn away from me.  But enough of this; I have called you my friend, and I hope you will not contradict me.  I trust the time may come when I may also call your father so.  May God bless you, Mrs Bold, you and your darling boy.  And tell your father from me” -Mr Slope

You might begin to talk to her as though she were your sister, and it would not be till your head was on your pillow, that the sweetness of her voice would come upon your ear.

‘Is it true, sir, that you owe the man 700 pounds?’  ‘Well,’ said Bertie, ‘I think I should be inclined to dispute the amount, if I were in a condition to pay him such of it as I really do owe him.’

But how little our friends know us!

Savoir vivre = knowing how to live (grammatically ‘knowledge of how to live’)

As in the case with most bachelors, and some married men, regarded the prospect of his month’s visit to Plumstead in a pleasanter light, when he learnt that a very pretty woman was to share it with him.

Jocose

‘You condemn what I do; but put yourself in my position and do the reverse, and then see if I cannot condemn you.’ -Mr. Arabin

But then Goodenough never had a glass of wine that any man could drink.

A man should remember that between two stools he may fall to the ground.  (241)

How could he stand up and preach the lessons of his Master, being there as he was, on the devil’s business?

‘Your love should be sufficient to satisfy the dream of a monarch,’ said Mr Slope, not quite clear as to the meaning of his words.

His feelings towards his friends were, that while they stuck to him he would stick to them; that he would work with them shoulder to shoulder; that he would be faithful to the faithful.  He knew nothing of that beautiful love which can be true to a false friend.

Few men do understand the nature of a woman’s heart, till years have robbed such understanding of its value.  And it is well that it should be so, or men would triumph too easily.

‘La distance n’y fait rien; il n’y a que le premier pas qui cou(^)te’ = The distance doesn’t matter; it is only the first step that is difficult.

‘currente calamo’ = with a running pen, casually

especial friend

Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves right by finding fault with the people against whom they have sinned.

But for real true love – love at first sight, love to devotion, love that robs a man of his sleep, love that ‘will gaze an eagle blind’, love that ‘will hear the lowest sound when the suspicious tread of theft is stopped’, love that is ‘like a Hercules, still climbing trees in the Hesperides’ – we believe the best age is from forty-five to seventy; up to that men are generally given to mere flirting.   (Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost)

He resolved that he would shake her off before he was fifteen minutes older.

‘Is not such the doom of all speculative men of talent?’ said she.  ‘Do they not all sit rapt as you now are, cutting imaginary silken cors with their fine edges, while those not so highly tempered sever the everyday Gordian knots of the world’s struggle, and win wealth and renown?  Steel too highly polished, edges too sharp, do not do for this world’s work, Mr Arabin.

“[Our] original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of it at all . . . rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”
-Frederick Buechner Telling Secrets

“…communion with God is replaced by activity with God.”
-The Sacred Romance

Who’s more foolish: the fool or the fool who follows him?
-Obi Won Konobi, Star Wars: Episode IV

Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool.
-The Music Man

If u can t respect Dee or my house  ya ll need to bounce

If we get separated meet me at the mood swings

Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.|Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Try to look unimportant, they may be low on ammo

All I want for Christmas is a box of smurfs and a mallet|

Calm down, give me the pun.|

The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.|

If you think there is good in everybody, you haven’t met everybody

People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.|Bob Hope.

How many Guns does it take to change a lightbulb?  Guns don’t change light bulbs. People change light bulbs.|

Women should not be allowed on juries where the accused is a stud. |Rush Limbaugh

The prostitute is the only honest woman left in America.|Ty-Grace Atkinson.

The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.|Maggie Kuhn.

The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.|Katharine Whitehorn.

I’ve never been married, but I tell people I’m divorced so they won’t think something’s wrong with me.|Elayne Boosler.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.|George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans).

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.|Elizabeth Bowen.

A good listener is not someone with nothing to say. A good listener is a good talker with a sore throat.|Katharine Whitehorn.

We are so vain that we even care for the opinions of those we don’t care for.|Marie Egner von Eschenbach.

The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels grateful and has no one to thank.|Wendy Ward.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.|Ambrose Redmoon.

No more tears now; I will think about revenge.|Mary Queen of Scots.

Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first base.|Fredrick Wilcox.

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.|Rebecca West.

My favorite animal is steak.|Fran Lebowitz.

Running away will never make you free.|Kenny Loggins.

The best way out is always through.|Robert Frost.

I know what you’re thinking – did he fire six shots, or only five?|Dirty Harry.

Life is like a game of poker… It’s not the cards that you are dealt that determine whether you win or loose, but how you play the game, and the higher you bet, the more interesting the game becomes.|Philip Rawson.

“Thus nature has no love for solitude, and always leans, as it were, on
some support; and the sweetest support is found in the most intimate
friendship.”
–Cicero

Gladly except the gifts of the present hour
-Horace

“Ther sound of a kiss is not so loud as a cannon, but it’s echo lasts a lot longer.”
-Holmes

Never judge a work of art by its defects.
Washington Allston

If you can’t win, make the fellow ahead of you break the record.
Anon.

When you are an anvil be patient; when a hammer, strike.
Arab Proverb

Try to go through life a little bit hungry. You never know when you’ll meet someone edible.
T.J. Bass, Half Past Human (1970)

Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.
Henry Ward Beecher

When you see a snake, never mind where he came from.
W.G. Benham

Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.
Arnold Bennett

Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.
Josh Billings

Never run into debt, not if you can find anything else to run into.
Josh Billings

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Erma Bombeck

Always behave like a duck — keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.
Jacob Braude

If you can’t return a favour, pass it on.
Louise Brown

Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.
Aaron Burr (bad advice??)

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.
Lewis Carrol, from Alice in Wonderland

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness; no laziness; no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
Lord Chesterfield

Whenever a man seeks your advice he generally seeks your praise.
Lord Chesterfield

Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.
Lord Chesterfield

When you walk through your neighbor’s melon patch, do not tie your shoe.
Chinese Proverb

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time–a tremendous whack.
Winston Churchill

Advice is like snow; the softr it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into, the mind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
James Bryant Conant

No man ever listened himself out of a job.
Calvin Coolidge

There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids to do it.
Monta Crane

Chase after the truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails.
Clarence Darrow

The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough; it is slippery. Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed. A man must stay sober: not always, but most of the time.
Clarence Day

Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
Phyllis Diller

Beware the fury of a patient man.
John Dryden, Oedipus, 1679

Trust everybody, but cut the cards.
Finley Peter Dunne

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
Albert Einstein

Big Ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. Don’t forget that, all of you who don’t have them.
John Elliot, Jr.

When lying, be emphatic and indignant, thus behaving like your children.
William Feather

Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake.
W. C. Fields

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them. The only books I have in my library are books that other folks have leant me.
Anatole France

When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
Anatole France

If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.
Benjamin Franklin

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.
Benjamin Franklin

Wait till it is night before saying it was a fine day.
French Proverb

Better break your word than do worse in keeping it.
Thomas Fuller

1.        Cheat me in the price but not in the goods.
Thomas Fuller

Don’t be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small steps.
David Lloyd George

Always go to the bathroom when you have a chance
King George V

Look over your shoulder now and then to be sure someone’s following you.
Henry Gilmer

A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you’re in deep water.
Sidney Goff

Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it..
Baltasar Gracian.

Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose.
Baltasar Gracian.

Don’t tell your friends about your indegestion. “How are you.” is a greeting, not a question.
Arthur Guiterman

Never take the advice of someone who has not had your kind of trouble.
Sidney J. Harris

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
Ernest Hemingway

You must lose a fly to catch a trout.
George Herbert

Don’t ever slam the door; you might want to go back.
Don Herold

Whoever would lie usefully should lie seldom.
Lord Hervey

Speak clearley, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr.

When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.
Edgar Watson Howe

A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.
Edgar Watson Howe

To escape criticism — do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard

When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
Victor Hugo

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook.
Thomas Jefferson

Have the courage to act instead of react.
Earlene Larson Jenks

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
Samuel Johnson [letter, 1782] (bad advice??)

When you are right, you cannot be too radical; When you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Never praise a sister to a sister in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears.
Rudyard Kipling

No problem is so big and complicated that it can’t be run away from.
Linus (Peanuts character by Charles Schultz)

Run to daylight.
Vince Lombardi

No man is so poor as to have nothing worth giving.
Henry Wadsworth Lonfellow

Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.
James Russel Lowell

Decide promptly, but never give your reasons. Your decisions may be right, but your reasons are sure to be wrong.
Lord Mansfield

Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.
H.L. Mencken

My advice to you concerning applause is this: enjoy it but never quite believe it.
Robert Montgomery

No one is the worse for knowing two languages.
Oliver Mowatt

If called by a panther
Don’t anther.
Ogden Nash

Never play cards with a man named Doc, and never eat at a place called Mom’s.
John O’Hara

Never argue; repeat your assertion
Robert Owen

Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. ANd don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.
Satchel Paige

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
George S. Patton

Throw your heart over the fence and the rest will follow.
Norman Vincent Peale

Never eat anything at one sitting that you can’t lift.
Miss Piggy (Muppet character, by Jim Henson/Frank Oz)

Boys should abstain from all use of wine until after their eighteenth year, for it is wrong to add fire to fire.
Plato

When you have a number of disagreeable duties to perform, always do the most disagreeable first.
Josiah Quincy

Hit the ball over the fence and you can take your time going around the bases..
John W. Raper

A tough lesson in life that one has to learn is that not everybody wishes you well.
Dan Rather

So live that you wouldn’t be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.
Will Rogers

If you treat people right they will treat you right — ninty percent of the time.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell ‘em, “Certainly, I can!” Then get busy and find out how to do it.
Theodore Roosevelt

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.
Theodore Roosevelt

Don’t hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft.
Theodore Roosevelt

When you play, play hard; when you work, don’t play at all.
Theodore Rooseveldt

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
Jean Jacques Rosseau

Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?.
Frank Scully

Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest.
William Shakespeare, King Lear

Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you will, but remember it didn’t work for the rabbit.
R.E. Shay

Never try to reason the predjudice out of a man. It wasn’t reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.
Sydney Smith

When you say Yes, say it quickly. But always take a half hour to say No, so you can understand the other fellow’s side.
Francis Cardinal Spellman

Fortune favours the bold.
Terence

It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.
James Thurber

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber

Never tell a man you can read him through and through; most people prefer to be thought enigmas.
Marchioness Townsend

Never run after your own hat. Others will be delighted to do it — why spoil their fun?
Mark Twain

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
Mark Twain

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

When you cannot get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.
Mark Twain

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
Mark Twain

When in doubt, tell the truth.
Mark Twain

I’ve always followed my father’s advice: He told me, first, to always keep my word and, second, to never insult anybody unintentionally. If I insult you, you can be sure I intend to. And, third, he told me not to go around looking for trouble.
John Wayne

Keep cool; anger is not an argument.
Daniel Webster

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy the ice cream while it’s on your plate..
Thornton Wilder

If you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.
Henny Youngman
I will have two fillings.
Advertisement, for US Women’s World Cup, 1999

I need to know the price of a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. I need to know right now.
Lamar Alexander, former governor and presidential candidate needing a quick reality check, New Hampshire, 1996

The more I know about men the more I like dogs.
Gloria Allred, feminist attorney, on Politically Incorrect, 1995

The Lord had the wonderful advantage of being able to work alone.
Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, answering why he had not implemented organizational reforms after five months when ‘God created the universe in seven days’,1997

We don’t charge for autographs here. We give them away free.
(Anonymous Baseball Player), with the Beloit, Wisconsin “Snappers”, 1995

Somehow a bunch of sanctimonious wackos have managed to legalize torture.
(Anonymous Airline Passenger), describing the US ban on smoking during airline flights, 1990

If you compare ours with the best of French wines, we are definitely not there. But if you compare it to the worst of French wines, we are definitely better.
(Anonymous Vintner), near Bangalore India, 1994

I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
Woody Allen

Remember, God always leaves the porch light on.
Anon.

I refuse to admit that I am more than fifty-two, even if that does make my sons illegitimate.
Lady Astor

Pandemonium did not reign; it poured.
John Kendrick Bangs

Applaud friends, the comedy is over.
Ludwig van Beethoven, last words

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
Shirley Temple Black, actress, singer, and US ambassador

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham Bell, american inventor

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. I don’t like them myself. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.
Humphrey Bogart to Lauren Bacall, in The Big Sleep

The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella:
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just’s umbrella.
Lord Bowen

One good thing about being young is that you are not experienced enough to know you cannot possibly do the things you are doing.
Gene Brown

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Samuel Butler

If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.
Johnny Carson

The more you study, the more you find out you don’t know, but the more you study, the closer you come.
Cozy Cole

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Nick Diamos

Once, during prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
– W. C. Fields

I like children. Properly cooked.
–W.C. Fields

A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.
–Martin H. Fischer

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
–Mark Russell

I belong to no organized political party — I am a Democrat.
–Will Rogers

A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.
–Will Rogers

What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.
–Will Rogers

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 more I see of man . . . the more I like dogs.
– Madam de Stael

A great many open minds should be closed for repairs.
–Toledo Blade Newspaper

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
–Lilly Tomlin, actress, author and comedian

I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.
–Lilly Tomlin, actress, author and comedian

I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.
– Mark Twain

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
–Mark Twain

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.
– 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 man and a dog.
– Mark Twain

Providence protects children and idiots. I know because I have tested it.
–Mark Twain

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
– Mark Twain

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. – Henri Bergson

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. – Ellen Parr

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. – Confucius

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child…eventually.

1.        The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created.
–The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams, 1980It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
–Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, 1813
All children, except one, grow up.
–Peter Pan, by J.M. Barie, 1911

There is a young legend developing on the west side of the mountains.
–Lilies of the Field, by William E. Barrett, 1962

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a Dream.
–The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, 1675
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.
–Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’
–Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, 1866

At a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, there lived a little while ago one of those gentlemen who are wont to keep a lance in the rack, an old buckler, a lean horse and a swift greyhound.
–Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, 1605

The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.
–2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke, 1968

It was sunny in San Francisco; a fabulous condition.
–The Manchurian Candidate, by Richard Condon, 1959

He did not expect to see blood.
–Kramer vs.Kramer, by Avery Corman, 1977
Marley was dead, to begin with, there is no doubt whatever about that.
–A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, 1843

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
–The Personal History of David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, 1850

Mr. Sherlock Holmes,who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
–The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902

Dusk–of a summer night.
–An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, 1925

Landscape tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed pearl and oyster reflections.
–Balthazar, by Lawrence Durrell, 1958

I am the invisible man.
–The Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, 1947

1.        There was death at its beginning, as there would be death again at its end.
–The Horse Whisperer, by Nicholas Evans, 1995

I warn you that what you’re about to read is full of lose ends and unanswered questions.
–Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney, 1955

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
–The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

It was the saddest story I have ever heard.
–The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford, 1927

On the fifteenth of may, in the Jungle of Nool,
In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool,
He was splashing…enjoying the jungle’s great joys…
When Horton the elephant heard a small noise.
–Horton Hears a Who!, by Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), 1954

The Year that Buttercup was born the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
–The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, 1973

There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.
–The Tenth Man, by Graham Greene, 1985

Nobody was really suprised when it happened, not really, not on the subconscious level where savage things grow.
–Carrie, by Stephen King, 1974

The truth is, if old Major Dover had not dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would have never come to Thurgoods at all.
–Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré, 1974

It was a dark and stormy night.
–A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle, 1962 (you were thinking Snoopy, perhaps?)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
–1984, by George Orwell, 1949

All beginnings are hard.
–In the Beginning, by Chaim Potok, 1975

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
–The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, 1951

The night that Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one sort or another, his mother called him wild thing.
–Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak

The President of the United States awoke that Monday morning with his usual hangover–fashioned not of liquor but of tensions and worries that sleep had failed to dissolve.
–The President’s Plane is Missing, Robert J. Serling, 1967

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
–The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937

All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.
–Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, 1878

When a journey begins badly it rarely ends well.
–The Floating Island, by Jules Verne, 1895

1.        All this happened, more or less..
–Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, 1968
You better not never tell nobody but God.
–The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, 1982

There are songs that come from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads.
–The Bridges of Madison County, by Robert James Waller, 1992

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
–Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White, 1952

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.
–The Man with Two Left Feet, by P.G. Wodehouse, 1917

1.        For many days we had been tempest-tossed..
–The Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann Wyss, 1814
Never worry about the bullet with your name on it. Instead, worry about shrapnel addressed to ‘occupant’. – Murphy’s Tenth Military Law

Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.
Allen’s Law

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

You don’t have to stay up nights to succeed; you have to stay awake days.

“It is like a fruit with a very think shell,” said Tinidril.  “The joy of our meeting when we meet again in the Great Dance is the sweet of it.  But the rind is thick-more years thick than I can count.” -C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, on saying goodbye

“Charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all.  Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all.  And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.” – G. K. Chesterton

“He is so gay, that one might almost believe he had found God.” -Franz Kafka

“There is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians.  They prove conclusively what the Bible teaches about the Fall.”  -Philip Yancey, quoting G. K. Chesterton

“What’s Wrong with the World?” -London Times
“Dear Sirs:
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton.” – G. K. Chesterton

“In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting.  It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.”  G. K. Chesterton

“He has been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere.” G. K. Chesterton

“I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it.  God and humanity made it; and it made me.”  G. K. Chesterton

“Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute.  Beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove.”  G. K. Chesterton

“Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else.”  G. K. Chesterton

“Of the madman who called himself Christ.  If we said what we felt, we should say, “So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be!  What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies!  How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God!  Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pit that all flesh must put its faith?  How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down.” G. K. Chesterton

“He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point.  He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity.”  G. K. Chesterton, on the insane

“I do not for the present attempt to prove to Haechel that materialism is untrue, any more than I attempted to prove to the man who thought he was Christ that he was laboring under an error.  I merely remark here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness and the same kind of incompleteness. You can explain a man’s detention at Hanwell by an indifferent public by saying that it is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy.  The explanation does explain.  Similarly you may explain the order in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls of men, are leaves inevitably unfolding on an utterly unconscious tree-the blunt destiny of matter.  The explanation does explain, though not, of course, so completely as a madman’s.  But the point here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both, but feels to both the same objection.  Its approximate statement is that if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he is not much of a god.  And, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos.  The think has shrink.  The deity is less divine than many men; and (according to Haechel) the whole of life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it.  The parts seem greater than the whole.” – G. K. Chesterton

“The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen.  Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.” – G. K. Chesterton

“The ordinary man…he has always cared more for truth than for consistency.  If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.  His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees twp different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.” – G. K. Chesterton

“To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits.  But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits.  Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.  If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck.  If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.” – G. K. Chesterton

“The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust.  But the new rebel is a Sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything.  He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist.” – G. K. Chesterton

“For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it.” – G. K. Chesterton, on modern philosophies that question even thought itself

“The man who kills a man, kills a man.  The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world…He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.” – G. K. Chesterton

“A women loses a child even in having a child.  All creation is separation.  Birth is as solemn a parting as death.” G. K. Chesterton

“The Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one.  It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow…Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.  Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with it any more.  But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song.  The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.  Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find hat there is something odd in the truth.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Oddly enough, there really is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one.  If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he has actually clearer reasons for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia.  For the more complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence.  If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian, it might be an accident.  But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one might call it a miracle.  It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since come to feel of the philosophy of Christianity.  The complication of our modern world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of the plain problems of the ages of faith.  It was in Notting Hill and Battersea that I began to see that Christianity was true.  This is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details which so much distressed those who admire Christianity without believing in it.  When once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science.  It shows how rich it is in discoveries.  If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it’s elaborately right.  A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident.  But a key and a lock are both complex.  And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key.” – G. K. Chesterton

“It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced.  It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced.  He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it.  But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it.  He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.  And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up.  Thus, if one asked an ordinary man intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, “Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?” he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, “Why, there is that bookcase…and the coals in the coal-scuttle…and pianos…and policemen.”  The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex.  It has done so many things.  But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.” – G. K. Chesterton

“As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind-the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing.  For not only (as I understood) has Christianity the most glaring vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combing vices which seemed inconsistent with each other.  It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.  No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west.  No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.” – G. K. Chesterton

“I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, that taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of the creed-
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, the world has grown gray with they breath.
But when I read the same poet’s accounts of paganism (as in “Atalanta”), I gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards.  The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself was pitch dark.  And yet, somehow, Christianity has darkened it.  The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself a pessimist.  I thought there must be something wrong.  And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god.” – G. K. Chesterton

“The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it.  Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it.  Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage.  Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.  When one came to think of one’s self, there was a vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth.  There the realistic gentleman could let himself go-as long as he let himself go at himself.  There was an open playground for the happy pessimist.  Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool”…”but he must not say that fools are not worth saving.  He must not say that a man, qua man, can be valueless.  Here, again in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, but keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.  The church was positive on both points.  One can hardly think too little of one’s self.  On can hardly think too much of one’s soul.” – G. K. Chesterton

“It is true that the historic church has at once emphasized celibacy and emphasized the family; has at once (if one may put it so) been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children.  It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the read and while upon the shield of St. George.  It has always had a healthy hatred of pink.  It hated that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers.  It hated that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray.  In fact, the whole theory of the church on virginity might be symbolized in the statement that white is a colour: not merely the absence of a colour.  All that I am urging here can be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in most of these cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure.  It is not a mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.” – G. K. Chesterton

“This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy.  People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking or orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe.  There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.  It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.  It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.  The church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism.  She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles.  She left on one hand the bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly.  The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.  The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable.  It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.  It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination.  It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic.  It is always east to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.  It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.  To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom-that would indeed have been simple.  It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.  To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame.  But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.” – G. K. Chesterton

“And sometimes this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture; the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, int eh soul of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the lamb.  But remember that this text is too lightly interpreted.  It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like.  But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the art of the lamb.  That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb.  The real problem is-Can the lion lie down with the lam and still retain his royal ferocity?  That is the problem the church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.  And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation.  The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall.  His pathos was natural, almost casual.  The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears.  He never concealed His tears; He showed the plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city.  Yet He concealed something.  Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger.  He never restrained His anger.  He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the [judgment] of Hell.  Yet He restrained something.  I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness.  There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.  There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation.  There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.” – G. K. Chesterton

What you cannot enforce, do not command.
Sophocles (496 BC – 406 BC)

Nobody likes the man who brings bad news.
Sophocles, Antigone

Truly, to tell lies is not honorable;
but when the truth entails tremendous ruin,
To speak dishonorably is pardonable.
Sophocles, Creusa

There is always something new out of Africa.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History

Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself.
Plutarch

Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.
Plutarch

When the candles are out all women are fair.
Plutarch, Morals

An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason.
Publilius Syrus

It is more tolerable to be refused than deceived.
Publilius Syrus

Don’t throw away the old bucket until you know whether the new one holds water.
Swedish Proverb

Break the leg of a bad habit.
Puerto Rican Proverb

A brave man dies but once, a coward many times.
Native American Proverb

The big thieves hang the little ones.
Czech Proverb

Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true. -Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962), to a young physicist