Quotes

June 12th, 2010
  • Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
    — Napoleon Bonaparte
  • I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.
    — John Keats
  • Tolerance comes of age. I see no fault committed that I myself could not have committed at some time or other.
    — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
    —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Habit rules the unreflecting herd.
    —William Wordsworth
  • Always when judging
    Who people are,
    Remember to footnote
    The words “So far.”
    —Robert Brault
  • It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
    —Upton Sinclair
  • I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
    —Walt Whitman
  • Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
    —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
    —Abraham Lincoln
  • Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
    —Erich Fromm
  • All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
    —Karl Marx
  • Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
    —Napoleon Bonaparte
  • To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
    —Gustave Flaubert
  • Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
    —Martin Luther King
  • Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
    —Albert Einstein
  • Knowledge is not a series of self consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth.
    —Paul Feyerabend
  • There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
    —Elie Wiesel
  • You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.
    —Sam Keen
  • Think globally, act locally.
    —Unknown
  • When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
    —Jonathan Swift
  • A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they does is just to open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world.
    —Ferdinando Scianna
  • In historical events great men—so-called—are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.
    —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
  • Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
    —Plato
  • One sentence will suffice to describe modern man: he fornicated and he read newspapers.
    —Albert Camus
  • America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
    —Sigmund Freud
  • Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
    —Sigmund Freud
  • Never believe straight off in a man’s unhappiness. Ask him if he can still sleep. If the answer’s ‘yes’, all’s well. That is enough.
    —Louis Ferdinand Celine
  • It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
    —Richard Feynman
  • Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
    —Albert Camus
  • When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
    —Mark Twain
  • The depth of your mythology is the extent of your effectiveness.
    —John C. Maxwell
  • It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
    —William G. McAdoo
  • What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
    —Abraham Maslow
  • Conceit is God’s gift to little men.
    —Harry S. Truman
  • A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.
    —Edgar Watson Howe
  • The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
    —Bertrand Russell
  • The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.
    —Leo Tolstoy
  • There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
    —Ansel Adams
  • The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.
    —Unknown
  • Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
    —George Bernard Shaw
  • Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
    —Susan Ertz
  • He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
    —Herman Melville
  • Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth.
    —Benjamin Disraeli
  • It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
    —Herman Melville
  • A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
    —William James
  • A man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science . . . thinks that by mouthing hard words he proves that he understands hard things.
    —Herman Melville
  • Luck has a peculiar habit of favouring those who don’t depend on it.
    —Unknown
  • Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
    —Anais Nin
  • History is Philosophy teaching by examples.
    —Thucydides
  • Humour is the instinct for taking pain playfully.
    —Max Eastman
  • Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humour to console him for what he is.
    —Francis Bacon
  • Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool.
    —George Bernard Shaw
  • It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
    —Epictetus
  • Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
    —Albert Einstein
  • He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
    —George Bernard Shaw
Comments are closed.