JM's favorite, mostly short, quotes in alphabetical order.

JM's favorite, mostly short, quotes in alphabetical order. Posted blog 02/2019  last edit 04/15/22

List is getting too long but have fun just read the ones that start with a word. ie If or ?

"A belief is an uneducated guess." Mokokoma Mokhonoana

"A book is a mirror: When a monkey looks in, no apostle can look out." 

"A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking." Jerry Seinfeld

"A brilliant liar; he has total recall." Witold Gombrowicz

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." Douglas Adams

"A compromise is an agreement between two men to do what both agree is wrong." Lord Edward Cecil

"A conservative believes nothing should be done for the first time." Thomas Fuller

"A day without laughter is a day wasted." Charlie Chaplin

"A daydreamer is prepared for most things." Joyce Carol Oates

"A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances." B. F. Skinner

"A fanatic can't change his mind and won't change the subject." Winston Churchill 

"A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything." Friedrich Nietzsche

"A good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it.: Mike Rose

"A good life is one in which there is no need for miracles." Nadezhda Mandelstam

"A good question to ask yourself: 'What might I be wrong about?'" Kevin Kelly

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." William James

"A grouch escapes so many little annoyances that it almost pays to be one." Kin Hubbard

"A hungry man is not a free man." Adlai Stevenson

"A man is what he thinks about all day long." Ralph Waldo Emerson 

"A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else." George Savile

"A man with new ideas is a madman, until his ideas triumph." Marcelo Bielsa

"A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes." Aldous Huxley

"A myth is a fanciful picture of the past designed to justify certain activities in the present." Bernard Williams

"A nation is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry." Karl Deutsch

"A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see." Roland Barthes

"A rational person cannot seek to confirm their beliefs, only to test them." Chris Hallquist

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." Marcus Tullius Cicero

"A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting." Amartya Sen

"A stick or a stone only stings for a minute. A name seems to hurt forever." Barbara Park

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." Oscar Wilde

"A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends." Baltasar Gracian

"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." David Hume

"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

"A writer's promise is like a tiger's smile." Lytton Strachey

"Abandon the search for truth; settle for a good fantasy." Fran Lebowitz

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." William James

"Actions speak louder than words." Mom

"Adventure is just bad planning." Roald Amundsen

"Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters." Victor Hugo 

"After every victory you have more enemies." Jeanette Winterson

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." Aldous Huxley

"Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it don't matter." Satchel Paige

"Alcohol! Because no great story started with someone eating a salad." 

"All colors arouse specific associative ideas" Yves Klein

"All cruelty springs from weakness." Seneca

"All generalisations - perhaps except this one - are false." Kurt Godel

"All good art is abstract in its structure." Paul Strand

"All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret." Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

"All knowledge degenerates into probability." David Hume

"All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself." Gaston Bachelard

"All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone." Blaise Pascal

"All power corrupts, but some must govern." John le Carre

"All the big words - virtue, justice, truth, are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness." Stephen Fry

"All the world loves a good loser." Kin Hubbard

"Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use." Wendell Johnson

"Always strive to excel, but only on weekends." Richard Rorty

"Always tell the truth, and people will never believe you." Ronald Knox

"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy." Milan Kundera

"America is a country where half the money is spent buying food, and the other half is spent trying to lose weight."

"American conservatives have became unconscious postmodernists. Trump only made it visible." JM

"An art book is a museum without walls." Andre Malraux

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself." Albert Camus

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." Benjamin Franklin

"An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart." Robert M. Sapolsky

"An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will be postponed." Kin Hubbard

"An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory." E F Schumacher 

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep." Kurt Vonnegut

"Any fool can know. The point is to understand." Albert Einstein

"Anyone who isn't confused, really doesn't understand the situation." Edward R. Murrow

"Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn." Kurt Vonnegut

"Appearance rules the world." Friedrich Schiller

"Art is either revolution or plagiarism." Paul Gauguin

"Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." W. H. Auden

"Art is the daughter of freedom." Friedrich Schiller

"As we are, so we see." William Blake

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

"Be concerned about the future. You"ll spend the rest of your life there." 

"Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting." Virginia Woolf

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." Bernard M. Baruch

"Be yourself. No one can say you're doing it wrong." Charles M. Schulz

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." Oscar Wilde

"Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, beautiful old people are works of art." Eleanor Roosevelt

"Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them." David Hume

"Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life." Seneca

"Behind every argument is someone's ignorance." Louis D. Brandeis

"Being an optimist after you've got everything you want doesn't count." Kin Hubbard

"Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not." Stanley Fish

"Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made." Franz Kafka

"Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law." 

"Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance." George Bernard Shaw

"Beware of too much explaining, lest we end by too much excusing." John Dalberg-Acton

"Biology enables, culture forbids." Yuval Noah Harari 

"Birds of a feather flock together."

"Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos." Douglas Coupland

"Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves for we shall never cease to be amused."

"Books had instant replay long before televised sports." Bernard Williams 

"Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is." Thomas Szasz

"By words we learn thoughts, and by thoughts we learn life." Jean Baptiste Girard

"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all." John Maynard Keynes

"Capitalism, in the long run, will win in the United States, if only for the reason that every American hopes to be a capitalist before he dies."  H. L. Mencken

"Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers something to be a genius about." B. F. Skinner 

"Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principals." David Hume 

"Childhood lasts all through life." Gaston Bachelard

"Chocolate is happiness that you can eat." Ursula Kohaupt

"Classical art stands for form; romantic art for content." R. G. Collingwood

"Cockroaches are repelled by light." 

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Chomsky

"Computers are like humans. They do everything except think." John von Neumann

"Conceit is an insuperable obstacle to all progress." Ellen Terry

"Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story." Antonio Damasio 

"Consistency is the playground of dull minds." Yuval Noah Harari

"Controversy is a last resort for the talentless." Criss Jami

"Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies." Nietzsche

"Correction does much, but encouragement does more." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Create rules for strict living not to restrict the living." P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

"Creativity is intelligence having fun." Albert Einstein

"Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order." Samuel Beckett"

"Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays." Friedrich Schiller

"Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living." William T. Vollmann

"Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability." Sam Keen

"Democracies can"t handle austerity measures very well." Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Democracy requires a certain relish for confusion." Molly Ivins

"Dieting is the only game where you win when you lose!" Karl Lagerfeld

"Difficult art is democratic. Tyranny requires simplification." Geoffrey Hill

"Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions." Winston Churchill

"Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth." Ursula Le Guin

"Diversity: the art of thinking independently together." Malcolm Forbes

"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric." Bertrand Russell

"Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on." Marshall McLuhan

"Don't attribute to stupidity what can be explained by incentives." Mike Elias

"Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose." Douglas Adams

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up." Robert Frost

"Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences." Samuel Beckett

"Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night." Philip K. Dick

"Don't you hate it when someone answers their own questions?  I do."

"Doubt is an awful snake of an emotion. Once it has you in it's grip, it won't let go. It spoils everything." Peter Watson

"Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one." Voltaire

"Dream in a pragmatic way." Aldous Huxley

"Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little." John Galsworthy

"Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment." Penelope Fitzgerald

"Either grant me the bliss of the ignorant or give me the strength to bear the knowledge." Elif Shafak

"Either you run the day, or the day runs you." Jim Rohn

"Embrace the glorious mess that you are." Elizabeth Gilbert

"Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded." Friedrich August von Hayek

"Endurance is frequently a form of indecision." Elizabeth Bibesco

"Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal." Friedrich Nietzsche

"Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds." Herbert Simon

"Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." William of Ockham

"Error is our enemy, but points to the truth and therefore deserves our respect." Allan Bloom

"Even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there." Stephen Chbosky

"Even in the presence of others he was completely alone." Robert M. Pirsig

"Even though there are no ways of knowing for sure, there are ways of knowing for pretty sure." Lemony Snicket

"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." Matsuo Basho

"Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence." George Steiner

"Every man's memory is his private literature." Aldous Huxley

"Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality." William Hazlitt

"Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment." Charles Sanders Peirce

"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence." Samuel Beckett

"Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something." Gertrude Stein

"Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful -but also when it comes to happiness." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

"Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia." James Wolcott

"Everyone smiles in the same language." 

"Everything has been thought of before. The problem is to think of it again." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it." L. Frank Baum

"Everything in moderation, including moderation." Oscar Wilde

"Everything in the world is purchased by labor." David Hume

"Everything matters. Nothing's important." Friedrich Nietzsche

"Everything that can be thought about the human condition is expressible in terms of behaviour." Simone Weil

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as necessity." Simone Weil

"Evolution is chaos with feedback." Joseph Ford

"Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power." Rene Descartes

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." Oscar Wilde

"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you." Aldous Huxley

"Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself." Elizabeth Bowen

"Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma." John Berger

"Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt." Robertson Davies

"Fear is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday." Renata Adler

"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." George Lucas 

"Fear less, hope more; Eat less, chew more; Whine less, breathe more; Talk less, say more; Love more, and all good things will be yours." Swedish Proverb 

"Few people become assholes reluctantly." Geoffrey Nunberg

"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth." Albert Camus

"Find joy in the ordinary." Max Lucado 

"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness." Allen Ginsberg

"For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred." John W. Gardner

"For me, a holiday is about taking a book and going to a mountain and reading." Sonam Kapoor

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." John F. Kennedy

"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age." Victor Hugo

"Freedom can occur only through education." Friedrich Schiller

"Freedom is the oxygen of the soul." Moshe Dayan

"Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey." Ocean Vuong

"Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying up." Marguerite Duras

"Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison." Wislawa Szymborska

"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please." Mark Twain

"Getting lost is just another way of saying 'going exploring'." Justina Chen Headley

"Give yourself a gift: the present moment." Marcus Aurelius

"Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts." Rebecca Solnit

"Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good." H. L. Mencken

"God did not die; he was transformed into money." Giorgio Agamben

"God made food; the devil the cooks." James Joyce

"Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." Mark Twain 

"Good history upsets everyone." David Silverman

"Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world." John Milton

"Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance." Samuel Johnson

"Guessing before proving! Need I remind you that it is so that all important discoveries have been made?" Henri Poincare

"Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any." Edith Wharton

"Happiness held is the seed; Happiness shared is the flower." John Harrigan

"Happiness is a condition attributed by adults to children and by children to adults." Thomas Szasz

"Happiness is a decision." Michael J. Fox 

"Happiness is a direction, not a place." Sydney J. Harris

"Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised." Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Happiness is a virtue, not its reward." Baruch Spinoza

"Happiness is not by chance, but by choice." Jim Rohn 

"Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present." Jim Rohn

"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory." Albert Schweitzer

"Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary." Milan Kundera

"He craved silences and solitude. He simply could not get lost in another person's life." Sreesha Divakaran

"He that travels much knows much." Thomas Fuller

"Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't." Richard Bach

"History doesn't repeat itself. But it does rhyme." Mark Twain

"History would be an excellent thing if only it were true." Leo Tolstoy

"Home is where one starts from." T.S. Eliot

"How can I tell what I think till I see what I say." E. M. Forster / David Markson

"How can the Devil be evil if he punishes people who do evil things?" 

"How do you make holy water? You boil the hell out of it."

"Human nature is various and not infrequently weird." AC Grayling

"Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life." A. C. Grayling

"I absolutely do not divide people into any religions, creeds, political views." Oleksandr Usyk

"I always advise people never to give advice." P.G. Wodehouse

"I am a nobody, nobody is perfect, therefore I am perfect."

"I am free, and that is why I am lost." Franz Kafka

"I am human, I think nothing human alien to me." Publius Terentius Afer

"I am never less alone than when alone." Cicero

"I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." Will Rogers

"I am not lazy, I am on energy saving mode."

"I am not young enough to know everything." Oscar Wilde

"I am still alive then. That may come in useful." Samuel Beckett

"I am sure that I do not understand the idea of a reason for acting, and I wonder whether anyone else does either." Philippa Foot

"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." Plato

"I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything." T.H. Huxley

"I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse." Florence Nightingale

"I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it." Maya Angelou

"I can only please one person per day. Today isn't your day, tomorrow doesn"t look good either." Hilary Putnam

"I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do." James A. Baldwin

"I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think." Socrates

"I don't argue with my enemies; I explain to their children. " Andre Malraux

"I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world." Herbert A. Simon

"I don't know why we are here, but I"m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves." Ludwig Wittgenstein

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." Marshall McLuhan

"I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them." Susan Sontag

"I find myself fascinating." Milan Kundera

"I gave up caring about anything, and all my problems disappeared." Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I have a small mind and I mean to use it." Antonin Artaud

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." Jorge Luis Borges

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." Mark Twain 

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

"I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor." Rabelais

"I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them." Baruch Spinoza

"I have the feeling that I've seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants." Anton Chekhov 

"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list." Susan Sontag

"I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so."

"I intend to live forever. So far, so good." Steven Wright

"I know who I am without anyone there to tell me." Leigh Bardugo

"I know who I am. And after all these years, there's a victory in that." Rustin Cohle

"I learned long ago to distrust my childhood." Barrack Obama 

"I like my shadow; it reminds me that I exist." Mehmet Murat Ildan

"I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere." Albert Camus

"I like talking to a brick wall - it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!" Oscar Wilde

"I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me."  Anais Nin

"I may be alone, but I am never lonely. I am always with my best friend, and that is me." Debasish Mridha

"I no longer listen to what people say, I just watch what they do." Winston Churchill

"I opened two gifts this morning. They were my eyes." Zig Ziglar 

"I owe my solitude to other people." Alan Watts

"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours." Kurt Vonnegut

"I speak only one language, and it is not my own." Jacques Derrida

"I think I am, therefore, I am. I think..." George Carlin

"I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring." Dave Eggers

"I think those who object to my characterizing man as simple want somehow to retain a deep mystery at his core." Herbert A. Simon

"I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not too sure."

"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." Aldous Huxley

"I was born to make mistakes, not to fake perfection." Drake

"I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am." Francis Bacon

"I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them." Andy Bernard

"I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen." John Steinbeck

"I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time." Marianne Moore

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." Richard P. Feynman

"I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget." Samuel Beckett

"I'm Me. If I'm not me, it's only because I want to impress you." 

"I'm not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance." Jon Stewart

"I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb." Richard P. Feynman

"I'm sorry, if you were right, I'd agree with you."

"I've come to believe that our need, a very legitimate need for social belonging is the single greatest impediment to thinking." Alan Jacobs 

"I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness." Taiye Selasi

"Ideas are one thing and what happens is another." John Cage

"Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos."  Auguste Comte

"Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility." James Gleick

"If a man devotes himself to art,  much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle." Dürer

"If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world." Blaise Pascal

"If capital and labor ever do get together it's good night for the rest of us." Kin Hubbard

"If enough people walk there, it becomes the path." Jehan Azad

"If everything is perfect, language is useless." Jean Baudrillard

"If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen." Fyodor Dostoevsky

"If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, all that is necessary is the illusion of freedom." B. F. Skinner

"If hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world." Nikola Tesla

"If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth." E. O. Wilson

"If I look confused it is because I am thinking." Samuel Goldwyn

"If I waited for perfection...I would never write a word." Margaret Atwood

"If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human." Maggie Stiefvater

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?" Abraham Lincoln

"If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." Tweedledee

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." George Orwell

"If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance." Mark Twain

"If one could only catch that true color of nature, the very thought of it drives me mad." Andrew Wyeth

"If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other." Emmanuel Levinas

"If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy." Kurt Vonnegut

"If practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, why practice?"

"If the going is easy, maybe you are going downhill." Max Frisch

"If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words." E. M. Forster

"If there were nothing you'd still be complaining!" Sidney Morgenbesser

"If things were simple, word would have got around." Jacques Derrida

"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal." anon

"If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged." Margaret Atwood

"If you are immune to boredom there is nothing you cannot accomplish." David Foster Wallace

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." Desmond Tutu

"If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am." Peter Sellers

"If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't." Richard Feynman 

"If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." Albert Einstein

"If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person." Seneca

"If you succeed, you have solved the wrong problem." Alan Perlis

"If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty." Ludwig Wittgenstein

"If you truly want to know a person, talk to their enemies." Jamie Leanne Gaines

"If you want home truths, you should stay at home." Clifford Geertz

"If you want to make God laugh, the saying goes, tell her your plans." Ken Burns

"If your contribution has been vital, there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off." Walter Gropius

"If your upper and lower ranks want the same things, you will win." Sun Tzu

"Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard." Adlai Stevenson 

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." Charles Darwin

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life." Simone Weil

"In a philosophical dispute, he gains most who is defeated, since he learns most." Epicurus

"In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell 

"In a time of destruction, create something." Maxine Hong Kingston

"In a world full of audio visual marvels, may words matter to you and be full of magic." Peter Godfrey-Smith

"In an age of indifference to learning, the educated man is at a disadvantage." John Jay Chapman

"In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies." Stephen Leacock

"In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it." John Archibald Wheeler

"In between goals is a thing called life that has to be lived and enjoyed." Sid Caesar

"In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart." Blaise Pascal

"In general, every country has the language it deserves." Jorge Luis Borges

"In life, it's not where you go, it's who you travel with." Charles M. Schulz

"In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see." Charles Bukowski

"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion." Albert Camus

"In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State." Solzhenitsyn 

"In politics, stupidity is not a handicap." Napoleon Bonaparte

"In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people." David Weinberger

"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you." Leo Tolstoy

"Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know." Richard Francis Burton

"Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions." Buddha

"Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic." Evelyn Waugh

"Intelligence is more like a skill than a talent." Eli Horowitz 

"Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant." Victor Hugo

"Interesting answers are those which destroy the questions." Susan Sontag

"Interestingly enough, not all feelings result from the body's reaction to external stimuli. Sometimes changes are purely simulated in the brain maps." Antonio Damasio

"Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality." Theodor Adorno

"Is is is - the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything 'is', I only know how it seems to me at this moment." Robert Anton Wilson

"Is it really possible to experience anything objectively?" 

"It could be that the total scenario for human beings is an insoluble mystery until we die, followed by nothing at all." Bryan Magee

"It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase." David Foster Wallace

"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was." Anne Sexton

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not." Andre Gide

"It is by surprises that experience teaches all she deigns to teach us." Charles Peirce

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." James A. Baldwin

"It is easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory." Arthur Schnitzler

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." Epictetus

"It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you." Nigel Slater

"It is impossible to ostracize a lone wolf." Joseph Annaruma

"It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak." John Stuart Mill

"It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them." de Beaumarchais

"It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom." David Hume

"It is one of my rules in life never to notice what I don't understand." Wilkie Collins

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

"It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed." Kin Hubbard

"It is success that colours all in life, Success makes fools admir'd, makes villains honest." D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

"It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness." E. M. Forster

"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf." Walter Lippmann

"It seems to me a case of negligence if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe." Peter Watson

"It will be easy to read what I will write. What will be hard to understand is the point of what I say." Wittgenstein

"It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it." Kurt Vonnegut

"It's all very well in theory but it doesn't work in practice." Sidney Morgenbesser

"It's always, you know, a pleasant exercise to imagine my own death because then I'm so happy when I can stop." William Vollmann

"It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." George Carlin

"It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference." Tom Brokaw

"It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment." Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

"It’s hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well." Thomas Harris

"It's not what happens to you, but how you react." Epictetus 

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." Henry David Thoreau

"It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to." Luc Godard

"It's only arrogance if you are wrong." Simone de Beauvoir

"Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible." William T. Vollmann

"Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don't happen." Dick Cavett

"Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you." Walt Whitman

"Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it." Lord Chesterfield

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." Aristotle

"Knowledge is Life with wings." William Blake

"Lack of money is the root of all evil." George Bernard Shaw

"Lack of pep is often mistaken for patience." Kin Hubbard

"Laughter is an inadequate response to what is truly funny." Walter Kerr

"Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face." Victor Hugo

"Laws are never as effective as habits." Adlai Stevenson 

"Learn from yesterday, live for today, look to tomorrow, rest this afternoon." Charles M. Schulz

"Learning history is easy; learning its lessons is impossibly difficult." Nicolas Bentley

"Learning is the art of ignoring." Elias Canetti

"Legend remains victorious in spite of history." Sarah Bernhardt

"Let there be spaces in your togetherness." Khalil Gibran

"Liberals demand that the social order should in principle be capable of explaining itself at the tribunal of each person's understanding." Jeremy Waldron

"Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs." Isaiah Berlin

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Soren Kierkegaard 

"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously." Hunter S. Thompson

"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it." Charles R. Swindoll

"Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel." Jean Racine 

"Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor." Sholom Aleichem

"Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it." Christopher Morley

"Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it." Ernest Holmes

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act." Truman Capote 

"Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats." Voltaire

"Life is a sum of all your choices". So, what are you doing today?" Albert Camus

"Life is good when we think it's good. Life is bad when we don't think." Doug Horton

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving." Albert Einstein

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced." Soren Kierkegaard 

"Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that makes you smile." Mark Twain

"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser." John W. Gardner

"Life is to blame for everything." Robert Musil

"Life is too important to be taken seriously." Oscar Wilde 

"Life isn't a matter of milestones, but of moments." Rose Kennedy 

"Life looks simple when you leave out the details." Ursula K. Le Guin

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." Anais Nin

"Light is part of our diet." James Turrell

"Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment." Jean Baudrillard

"Like Humpty Dumpty, we can make words mean anything we want them to mean." Herbert A. Simon

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Live life to the fullest... think of all the people on the Titanic who passed up chocolate dessert." 

"Live so that you can at least get the benefit of the doubt." Kin Hubbard

"Logic doesn't apply to the real world." Marvin Minsky

"Love has reasons which reason cannot understand." Blaise Pascal

"Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables." Sappho

"Love unconditionally, laugh intentionally, live strategically, and learn daily." Hope D. Blackwell

"Love? I'm not sure I know what love really is. Don't tell my wife I said that." Ethics professor

"Luck is statistics taken personally." Penn Jillette

"Machines are for answers; humans are for questions." Kevin Kelly

"Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life." Nicolas Chamfort

"Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter." James A. Garfield

"Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual." Roland Barthes

"Man is a bridge, not an end." Friedrich Nietzsche

"Man is affected not by events but by the view he takes of them." Seneca

"Man is his own most vexing problem." Reinhold Niebuhr

"Marriage is a wonderful invention: then again, so is a bicycle repair kit." Billy Connolly

"Martyrdom proves the intensity, not the correctness, of a belief." Arthur Schnitzler

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything." Kurt Vonnegut

"Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories." William T. Vollmann

"Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories." William T. Vollmann

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell." Aldous Huxley

"Maybe we ought to have a world in which things are divided between people kind of fairly." Herbert Simon

"Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent." George Steiner

"Men are never so good or bad as their opinions." James Mackintosh

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

"Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them." Dion Boucicault

"Merely looking at the world around us is immensely different from seeing it." Frederick Franck

"Mid-life crises are a luxury compared with end-of-life crises." Margaret Drabble

"Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men." Jorge Luis Borges

"Modernism is, among other things, a crisis of narration, as the world ceases to be story-shaped." Terry Eagleton

"Most decisions should be made with around 70% of the information that you wish you had." Jeff Bezos

"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it." Soren Kierkegaard

"Most minds are like concrete ... all mixed up and permanently set!" Alfred E. Neuman

"Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done." Louis D. Brandeis

"Most of what we call civilisation depends on reciprocal vulnerability." Thomas Schelling

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

"Most people are so lazy, they don't even exercise good judgement!" Alfred E. Neuman

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility." Freud

"Most people don't act stupid: it's the real thing!" Alfred E. Neuman

"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." Bertrand Russell

"Most real relationships are involuntary." Iris Murdoch

"Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things." Arthur Schopenhauer

"Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse." Rebecca West

"Much learning does not teach understanding." Heraclitus

"Music was invented to confirm human loneliness." Lawrence Durrell

"My answers are typically '€˜guesses' cleverly disguised as answers." Craig D. Lounsbrough

"My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity." Amos Tversky

"My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind." William James

"My job is making windows where there were once walls." Michel Foucault

"My language is the sum total of myself." Charles Sanders Peirce

"My life is basically my work." Temple Grandin

"My life is better with every year of living it." Rachel Maddow

"My mistakes are my life." Samuel Beckett 

"My normal life is like being on holiday." Valentino Rossi

"My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right." Ashleigh Brilliant

"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity." Sigmund Freud

"Never allow carping critics to deter you from success. Instead, silence them with it." Christian Baloga

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." anon

"Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations." Joe Bageant

"Never laugh at your wife's choices, you are one of them."

"Never lie in bed at night asking yourself questions you can't answer." Charles Schulz

"Never miss a good chance to shut up." Will Rogers

"Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today." Aldous Huxley

"Never regret something that made you smile." 

"Ninety percent of good writing is rewriting." Charles Johnson

"No man is an island, I am the exception." JM

"No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." John Locke

"No matter how bad things are, you can always make things worse." Randy Pausch

"No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides." Baruch Spinoza

"No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world." Robin Williams

"No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had." Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

"No one wants a lecture. Everyone wants a story." Morgan Housel

"No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing." Derek Parfit

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." Voltaire

"No statue has ever been erected to a critic." Jean Sibelius

"Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry." Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

"Nobody ever grew despondent looking for trouble." Kin Hubbard

"Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead. That is where your future lies." Ann Landers

"Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have." Elizabeth Bowen

"Nobody who says 'I told you so' will ever be a hero." Ursula Le Guin

"Not all of your followers are fans. Some are just internet trolls." Kelly L. Miller

"Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence." Sholem Asch

"Nothing exists except through human consciousness." George Orwell

"Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth." Blaise Pascal

"Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me." Audre Lorde

"Nothing important comes with instructions." James Richardson 

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Martin Luther King

"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness." Samuel Beckett

"Nothing is less instructive than a machine." Simone Weil

"Nothing is more real than nothing." Samuel Beckett

"Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory." Franklin Pierce Adams

"Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few." David Hume

"Nothing is worth more than this day." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think." Benjamin Disraeli

"Of all the home remedies, a good wife is best." Kin Hubbard

"Of course pragmatism is true; the trouble is it doesn't work." Sidney Morgenbesser

"Often people ask what I"m photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today." William Eggleston

"Old age is life's decision about us." Christina Stead

"Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man." Leon Trotsky

"Old words obscure new situations." Kim Stanley Robinson

"On the internet you're a troll until proven innocent." Narcissismus Decimus Maximus

"Once you get to know your neighbours, you are no longer free." Rose Macaulay

"Once you label me you negate me." Søren Kierkegaard 

"One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening."

"One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own." James A. Baldwin

"One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end." Jiddu Krishnamurti

"One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us." Cassandra Clare

"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being." May Sarton

"One never does solve what it is about watching fires, really." David Markson

"One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea." Walter Bagehot

"One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is." Ludwig Wittgenstein

"One reads so as not to believe everything one reads." Aaron Haspel

"One should always think of men in power as dangerous things." Simone Weil

"One sign of maturity is knowing when to ask for help." Dennis Wholey

"One will rarely err by ascribing extreme actions to vanity, ordinary actions to habit and mean actions to fear." Nietzsche

"Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows." Werner Heisenberg

"Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me." Hegel

"Only the dead are safe." George Santayana

"Only the insane take themselves seriously." Max Beerbohm

"Only the shallow know themselves." Oscar Wilde

"Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent." Christopher Isherwood

"Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments." Walter Benjamin

"Opportunities are seldom labelled." John G. Shedd

"Opportunity is the greatest charity." Don King

"Originality is a by-product of sincerity." Marianne Moore

"Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget." Aldous Huxley

"Our democracy should aspire to be more democratic." DaShanne Stokes

"Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live." André Gide

"Our life is what our thoughts make it." Marcus Aurelius

"Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance." Michel Foucault

"Our words should be purrs instead of hisses." Kathrine Palmer Peterson

"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without." Buddha

"People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive." Blaise Pascal 

"People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore." Kurt Vonnegut

"People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute." Rebecca West

"People change, and forget to tell each other." Lilian Hellman

"People generally quarrel because they cannot argue." Gilbert K. Chesterton

"People often only see one side to someone's personality, but there are levels." Ross Lynch

"People only ask if you are enjoying yourself when you aren't." E. Nesbit

"People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day." A. A. Milne

"People with opinions just go around bothering one another." Buddha

"Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea." George Orwell

"Personality has power to uplift, power to depress, power to curse, and power to bless." Paul P. Harris

"Personally, I don't think there's intelligent life on other planets. Why should other planets be any different from this one?" Bob Monkhouse 

"Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat." Simone Weil

"Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world." Bruno Barbey

"Political ideology can corrupt the mind and science." E. O. Wilson

"Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naivete." Emmanuel Levinas

"Possibility and limitation mean about the same thing." Flannery O"Connor

"Prejudice is the child of ignorance." William Hazlitt

"Problems are inherently wonderful; solutions are merely useful." David Deutsch

"Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer." Jean de La Fontaine

"Rationalisation may be defined as self-deception by reasoning." Karen Horney

"Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else." George Orwell

"Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting." Jorge Luis Borges 

"Reality simply consists of different points of view." Margaret Atwood

"Reason is found with great wickedness no less than with great kindness, and by its assistance gives great effectiveness to the one as to the other."  Arthur Schopenhauer

"Remember that nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all." Balfour

"Remember that, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy." George Carlin

"Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth." Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Reporter interviewing a 104 year-old woman: And what do you think is the best thing about being 104?" She simply replied, no peer pressure.

"Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous." Pierre Boulez

"Rudeness is the weak person's imitation of strength." Edmund Burke

"Rules are there so that you think before you break them." Terry Pratchett

"Sadness is a form of fatigue." Andre Gide

"Sane people do what their neighbors do, so that if lunatics are at large, one might know them." George Eliot

"Sanity is a cozy lie." Susan Sontag

"Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions-to define, classify, control, and regulate people." Michel Foucault

"Science is magic that works." Kurt Vonnegut

"Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle."  Mahatma Gandhi

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you." Carl Jung

"Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak." Elizabeth Bowen

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." Leonardo Da Vinci

"Skepticism relieved two terrible diseases that afflicted mankind: anxiety and dogmatism." Sextus Empiricus

"Small thoughts fit easily into a closed mind, but big thoughts require an open one." Roy H. Williams

"Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates." Erving Goffman

"Solitude sometimes is best society." John Milton

"Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost." Erol Ozan

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." Oscar Wilde

"Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go." Herman Hesse

"Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns."  Antonio Damasio

"Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live." Charles Bukowski

"Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't you think?" Frank Baum 

"Sometimes I didn't know what I sought until I've found it." Toba Beta

"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple." Dr. Seuss

"Sometimes we need to speak oddly to see clearly." Galen Strawson

"Sometimes words are harder than blows." Zinedine Zidane

"Stop giving someone else the job of making you happy." Joyce Meyer 

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it." Hannah Arendt

"Straight roads do not make skillful drivers." Paula Coelho

"Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter."  Max Beerbohm

"Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results." Margaret Atwood

"Subjectivity is just objectivity waiting for data." David Eggers 

"Take a look at the books other people have in their homes." Jerzy Kosinski

"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition." Jacques Barzun

"Tell me anyway. Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies." Leon Trotsky

"Tell people what they want to hear and you can be wrong indefinitely without penalty." Morgan Housel 

"That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers." Charles Chincholles

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet." Emily Dickinson

"The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence." Jiddu Krishnamurti

"The age of the book is almost gone." George Steiner

"The aim of argument should not be victory, but progress." Joseph Joubert

"The answer you're looking for is inside of you, but it's wrong."

"The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose." Margaret Atwood

"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." William James

"The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much." William Hazlitt

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." Philip K. Dick

"The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you." B. B. King

"The best adventures are embarked on alone." Lidia Longorio

"The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey

"The best mirror is an old friend." George Herbert

"The best of seers is he who guesses well." Euripides

"The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen." Sam Keen

"The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view." Jack Kerouac

"The best things are achieved in a state of surprise." Brian Eno

"The best things in life aren't things." John Ruskin

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay

"The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny."  Albert Ellis

"The blank page gives us the right to dream." Gaston Bachelard

"The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus." H. L. Mencken

"The covers of this book are too far apart." Ambrose Bierce

"The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat." William Kingdon Clifford

"The curious are always in some danger." Jeanette Winterson

"The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are." Karl Kraus

"The difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity." Amelia Earhart

"The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know." Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset." Geoffrey Madan

"The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government." Edward Abbey

"The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us." Eugène Ionesco

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection." George Orwell

"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." David Markson

"The facts exceed our curiosity." Walter Lippmann

"The first one who uses "but" has lost the argument." Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are." Marcus Aurelius

"The fool wonders, the wise man asks." Benjamin Disraeli

"The foundation of every state is the education of its youth." Diogenes

"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so." Gore Vidal

"The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn"t care too much." Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The freedom to love is no less sacred than the freedom of thought." Victor Hugo

"The full area of ignorance is not mapped. We are only exploring the fringes." John Desmond Bernal

"The future happens. No matter how much we scream." Derek Walcott

"The future is made of the same stuff as the present." Simone Weil

"The game is worthwhile so long as we don't know what the end will be." Michel Foucault

"The great human error is to reason in place of finding out." Simone Weil

"The greatest consolation in life is to say what one thinks." Voltaire

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." Daniel J. Boorstin

"The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do." Walter Bagehot

"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts." Marcus Aurelius

"The hardest thing to open is a closed mind." Ahmed Kathrada

"The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion." Richard P. Feynman

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul." Ludwig Wittgenstein 

"The human race has improved everything, but the human race." Adlai Stevenson 

"The human race is not divided into two opposing camps of good and evil. It is made up of those who are capable of learning and those who are incapable of doing so."  E. O. Wilson

"The important thing is somehow to begin." Henry Moore

"The important thing is the diversity available on the Web." Tim Berners-Lee

"The inaudible and noiseless foot of time." William Shakespeare

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for." Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The logic of words should yield to the logic of realities." Louis D. Brandeis

"The longer I live, the greater is my respect for manure in all its forms." Elizabeth von Arnim

"The lover of life knows his labour divine, And therein is at peace." George Meredith

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

"The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life." Confucius

"The meaning of life is to See." Hui Neng

"The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning." Joseph Campbell

"The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time." Marcus Aurelius

"The mind is everything. What you think you become." Buddha

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." John Milton

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." John Kenneth Galbraith

"The more perfect you try to become, the more vulnerable you generally are." Morgan Housel

"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude." Aldous Huxley

"The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist." Guy Debord

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." Steven Weinberg

"The more we know, the less certain we are." Simon Critchley

"The more you weigh the harder you are to kidnap. Stay safe, eat cake."

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." George Orwell 

"The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood." Voltaire

"The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know." Simone Weil

"The most important political office is that of the private citizen." Louis D. Brandeis

"The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he's trying not to say." Lyndon Johnson

"The most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one." Herbert Marcuse

"The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed." Nicolas Chamfort

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Howard Lovecraft

"The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other." Slavoj Zizek

"The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions." Max Beerbohm

"The only reason they say '€œwomen and children first" is to test the strength of the lifeboats." Jean Kerr

"The only serious enterprise is living, and we have to live after the reflection; moreover (though the distinction of theory and practice encourages us to forget it), we have to live during it as well."  Bernard Williams

"The only strong and deep passions are those which can stand the test of reason." Kafka 

"The only thing that makes life possible is not knowing what comes next." Ursula K. Le Guin

"The only way to deep happiness is to do something you love to the best of your ability." Richard P. Feynman

"The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them." Kin Hubbard

"The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob." H. L. Mencken

"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject." Marcus Aurelius

"The past is never where you think you left it." Katherine Anne Porter

"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." William Faulkner

"The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet." Edward Thomas

"The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar." Marshall McLuhan

"The pleasures of ignorance are as great as the pleasures of knowledge." Aldous Huxley

"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth." Garry Kasparov 

"The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty." John Maynard Keynes

"The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round." AJP Taylor

"The principal mark of genius is not perfection, but originality." Robert Schumann

"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are." Joseph Campbell

"The problem with temptation is that you may not get another chance." Laurence Peter

"The proper study of mankind is books." Aldous Huxley

"The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire." Wilfred Bion

"The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story." Stanley Fish

"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." B. F. Skinner

"The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude." Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm." Aldous Huxley

"The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art." Henry Moore

"The strong man is strongest when alone." Friedrich Schiller

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." Samuel Beckett

"The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must 

"The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place." Lawrence Durrell

"The text is a machine for producing meaning." Octavio Paz

"The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it." Don DeLillo

"The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late." Jeanette Winterson

"The trouble with psychology is that it doesn't take human nature into account." Ruth Rendell

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." Samuel Johnson

"The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance."  Stanley Fish

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." Leo Tolstoy 

"The value of history is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." R. G. Collingwood

"The war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense." Roland Barthes

"The ways we miss our lives are life." Randall Jarrell

"The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows." Sydney J. Harris

"The wise man is always similar to himself." Sextus Empiricus

"The wise man reads both books and life itself." Lin Yutang 

"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." Saint Augustine

"The world is everything that is the case." Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." Bertrand Russell

"The worse the villain, the better the film." Alfred Hitchcock

"The worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades." Demetri Martin

"The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it." John Stuart Mill

"Them that don't know don't know they don't know." anon

"There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer." Gertrude Stein

"There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions." Charles Steinmetz

"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." Marshall McLuhan

"There are no right answers to wrong questions." Ursula K. Le Guin

"There are two kinds of people in the world- those who are foolish enough to believe there are only two kinds of people in the world, and the rest of us." Sam Haselby

"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true." Soren Kierkegaard

"There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable." Elias Canetti

"There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think." Charles Sanders Peirce

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong." H L Mencken

"There is hope. But not for us." Kafka 

"There is just one life for each of us: our own." Euripides

"There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope." Baruch Spinoza

"There is no success or failure in Nature." John Searle

"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all." Rebecca West

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Shakespeare

"There is nothing permanent except change." Heraclitus

"There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evil-doer." Robert Staughton Lynd

"There should be a thirteenth commandment: Thou shall not abandon those who love you." Sidney Sheldon

"There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope." Bernard Williams

"There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth." Maya Angelou

"There's always some truth behind '€œjust kidding'€, knowledge behind every '€œI don't know'€, emotions behind '€œI don't care'€ and pain behind '€œit's okay'€".

"There's always someone willing to disagree with me; but I'm the one who's called controversial." Solomon Short

"There's more to getting to where you're going then just knowing there's a road." Joan Lowery Nixon

"There's no such thing as a grown up person." Andre Malraux

"There's no time like the present."

"Think before you speak. Read before you think." Fran Lebowitz

"Thinking about the future means you want something." Douglas Coupland

"This above all, to refuse to be a victim." Margaret Atwood

"This is Sunday, and the question arises, what'll I start tomorrow?" Kurt Vonnegut

"Those who do not move do not notice their chains." Rosa Luxemburg

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." Salvador Dali

"Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity." Nietzsche

"Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity." Jean de La Bruyère

"Those who understand the true nature of humanity are always loners." Dean Cavanagh

"Thousands have lived without love, not one without water." W. H. Auden

"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do." Jean-Paul Sartre

"Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent." Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"Time heals what reason cannot." Seneca

"Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted." Christopher Hitchens

"To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe." Marilyn vos Savant

"To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life." Gelett Burgess

"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." Henry Kissinger

"To betray, you must first belong." Kim Philby

"To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job." Simone de Beauvoir

"To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth." Ludwig Wittgenstein

"To create and to confront, one has to be an outcast." Masha Gessen

"To explain something is to explain why things are not otherwise. But there can be no explaining why something is not otherwise, which could not be otherwise." David Stove 

"To explain why a man slipped on a banana peel, we do not need a general theory of slipping." Sidney Morgenbesser

"To give somebody your time is the biggest gift you can give." Franka Potente

"To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child." Henning Mankell

"To have ideals is not the same as to have impracticable ideals." Susan Stebbing

"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs." Aldous Huxley

"To know one thing, you must know the opposite." Henry Moore

"To know, to think, to dream. That is everything." Victor Hugo

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else." Emily Dickinson

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." Oscar Wilde

"To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing." Anne Carson

"To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting." Edmund Burke 

"To really know someone is to have love and hated him in turn." Marcel Jouhandeau

"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." George Orwell

"To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult." J. W. von Goethe

"To think is to say no." Emile Chartier

"To thrive in life you need three bones. A wishbone. A backbone. And a funny bone." Reba McEntire

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries." Aldous Huxley

"To understand is to perceive patterns." Isaiah Berlin

"Today, if you are not confused, you are not thinking clearly." Irene Peter

"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions." Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs." Susan Sontag

"Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions." Peter Hoeg

"Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless." Chief Seattle

"True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing." Socrates

"True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are." Isaiah Berlin

"True poetry is the opposite of fiction." Ludwig Hohl

"Truth exists; only lies are invented." Georges Braque

"Truth is a property of our beliefs."

"Truth springs from argument amongst friends." David Hume 

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." John Kenneth Galbraith

"Universal peace sounds ridiculous to the head of an average family." Kin Hubbard

"Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life." Bernard Williams

"We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real." Jorge Luis Borges 

"We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do." B. F. Skinner

"We all get the exact same 365 days. The only difference is what we do with them." Hillary DePiano

"We all have imaginary friends, who are generally real people." Aaron Haspel

"We are all broken, that's how the light gets in." Ernest Hemingway

"We are ignorant of our acts until we accomplish them." Francis Picabia

"We are in a world that is quite extremist and extremism makes more noise. Normality does not sell." Vicente Del Bosque

"We are not satisfied to be right, unless we prove others wrong." William Hazlitt

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." Kurt Vonnegut

"We ask what makes people believe things, but not what makes them know things." Gilbert Ryle

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." Marshall McLuhan

"We can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy." T.H. Huxley

"We can understand things better. We can never understand things fully." David Deutsch

"We cannot begin with complete doubt." Charles Sanders Peirce

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." Randy Pausch

"We cannot predict the future, but the past is changing before our very eyes." Soviet radio

"We cannot solve today problems with the same thinking that gave us those problems." Albert Einstein

"We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap." Kurt Vonnegut

"We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world." Helen Keller

"We do not judge the people we love." Jean-Paul Sartre 

"We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong." Charles Sanders Peirce

"We do not remember days, we remember moments." Cesare Pavese

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Anaïs Nin

"We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing." George Bernard Shaw

"We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology." E. O. Wilson

"We grow a little every time we do not take advantage of somebody's weakness." Bernard Williams"

"We have, I fear, confused power with greatness." Stewart Udall

"We inhabit a language rather than a country." Emile Cioran

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives." Robert M. Pirsig

"We know not through our intellect but through our experience." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

"We learn by teaching." James Howell

"We live in the United States of Amnesia." Gore Vidal

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." Winston Churchill

"We must believe in free will. We have no choice." Isaac Bashevis Singer

"We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world." René Magritte

"We need not destroy the past. It is gone." John Cage

"We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public." Bryan White

"We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing." Seneca

"We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced." Malala Yousafzai

"We retain the facts which are easiest to think about." B. F. Skinner

"We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains." Li Bai

"We suffer more often in imagination than in reality." Seneca

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Joan Didion 

"We typically have a bias that tells us we are less susceptible to bias than everyone else." Will Storr

"What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable." Adlai Stevenson

"What are we doing here, that is the question." Samuel Beckett 

"What comes easy won't last long, and what lasts long won't come easy." anon

"What could an entirely rational being speak of with another entirely rational being?" Emmanuel Levinas

"What do any of us ever truly know?" David Markson 

"What do we do now, now that we are happy?" Samuel Beckett 

"What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning..." Fyodor Dostoevsky

"What happens when you get scared half to death twice?"

"What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence." Jean-Paul Sartre

"What is that unforgettable line?" Samuel Beckett

"What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it." Ludwig Wittgenstein

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it." Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?" Ursula K. LeGuin

"What you believe is what you see is what you know is what you do is what you are." Stanley Fish 

"What you believe to be true will control you, whether it's true or not." Jeremy LaBorde 

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Whatever you believe imprisons you. Convictions create convicts." J.M.R. Higgs

"Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself." David Foster Wallace

"Whatever you want to do, do it now. There are only so many tomorrows." Michael Landon

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." Dom Helder Camara

"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"" Sydney J Harris 

"When intelligent people are obviously wrong, I look to ideology." Chris Dillow

"When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken." David Hume

"When my boss asked me who is the stupid one, me or him? I told him everyone knows he doesn't hire stupid people."

"When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes." Dylan Thomas

"When people show you who they are, believe them." Maya Angelo

"When the facts change, I change my mind." John Maynard Keynes

"When the image is new, the world is new." Gaston Bachelard

"When you can believe in one stupid thing then all stupid things become available to you." Pradeep Satyaprakash

"When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on." Franklin D. Roosevelt

"When you possess light within, you see it externally." Anais Nin

"Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again." L. Frank Baum

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." Mark Twain

"Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up." Ogden Nash

"Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless." Edward Gibbon

"Where there is no imagination there is no horror." Arthur Conan Doyle

"Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine." Anthony J. D'Angelo

"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." Henry Ford

"Who among us, looking down the path of no return, can say that they followed it the right way?" Fernando Pessoa

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." George Orwell

"Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?" Epicurus

"Without context words and actions have no meaning at all." Gregory Bateson

"Without publicity, no good is permanent." Jeremy Bentham

"Wonder. Go on and wonder." William Faulkner

"Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment." Learned Hand

"Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do." Slavoj Žižek

"Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad." Manly Hall

"Words are the clothes thoughts wear." Samuel Beckett

"Words matter when you run for president. And they really matter when you are president." Hillary Clinton

"Worrying about what's right is always more important than worrying about who's right."

"Worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe." Mark Twain

"Write about what you don't know about what you know." Eudora Welty

"Writing is like paying myself a formal visit." Fernando Pessoa

"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." Isaac Asimov

"Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to remain silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of." Samuel Beckett

"You affect the world by what you browse." Tim Berners-Lee

"You are free to do whatever you want. You need only face the consequences." Sheldon Kopp

"You are made of the stuff that is as old as the planet, one third as old as the universe, though this is the first time those atoms have been gathered together such that they think that they are you."  Frank Close

"You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you." Robert Anton Wilson

"You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with." Jim Rohn

"You are who you are when nobody's watching." Stephen Fry

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." Plato

"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." James D. Miles

"You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think." Milton Berle

"You can never plan the future by the past." Edmund Burke

"You can't become what you can't accurately see." Sarah Lewis

"You can't make this stuff up." 

"You can't talk to the ignorant about lies, since they have no criteria." Ezra Pound

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life." Michael Cunningham

"You confuse what's important with what's impressive." E.M. Forster

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury

"You feel vulnerable when you hear things that are not being said." Alan Pardew

"You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget." Cormac McCarthy

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." Winston Churchill

"You have to know the past to understand the present." Carl Sagan

"You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world." William Hazlitt

"You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on." Samuel Beckett 

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."  Ray Bradbury

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough." Mae West

"You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd." Flannery O'Connor

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad." Aldous Huxley

"You should never doubt something that no one is sure of." Roald Dahl

"You should never try and out guess Mother Nature because when you do, you come off second best." Anthony T.Hincks

"You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand." E. O. Wilson

"You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do." David Foster Wallace

"You're on earth. There's no cure for that." Samuel Beckett

"You're tired and scared. Happens to everyone, okay? Just don't let your feet stop." Haruki Murakami 

"Your body hears everything your mind says." Naomi Judd

"Your eyeball is not a well-defined statistical procedure." Alex Reinhart

"Your liberty does not extend beyond the bounds of your authority." Bran Emrys

"Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change." Jim Rohn

"Your smile is proof that the best things in life are free."