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These quotes are in English. There are some French Quotes, too.
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The Vinegar Tasters
Happiness is the only sanction of
life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and
lamentable experiment.
George Santayana
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life
is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
We come into this world crying while all around us are smiling.
May we so live that we go out of this world smiling while
everybody around us is weeping.
Persian proverb
The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to
become a human being.
Immanuel Kant
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Benjamin Franklin
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and
the life he leads.
Albert Camus
Virtue and happiness are mother and daughter.
Benjamin Franklin
The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in
conformity with excellence or virtue.
Aristotle
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius
Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.
Victor Frankl
As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.
Bible
Man is made by his beliefs; as he believes, so he is.
The Bhagahvad Gita
You become what you think.
Buddha
When the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something.
Browning
Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is
determinism; the way you play it is free will.
Jawaharlal Nehru
Wisdom doesn't automatically come with old age. Nothing does -
except wrinkles. It's true, some wines improve with age. But only
if the grapes were good in the first place.
Abigail Van Buren
The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need
you do anything but be yourself.
Lao Tzu
To thine own self be true.
William Shakespeare
Live your own life, for you will die your own death.
Latin proverb
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Observe all men; thyself most.
Benjamin Franklin
When we cannot find contentment in ourselves, it is useless to
seek it elsewhere.
La Rochefoucauld
Know thyself.
Thales Miletus
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Attributed to Socrates (Plato - Apology)
It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally
faithful to himself.
Thomas Paine
He lives long who lives well.
J. Wilson
Ideals are like the stars - we never reach them, but like
mariners, we chart our course by them.
C. Schurz
Those who know when they have enough are rich.
Chinese Proverb
Thinking is the essence of wisdom.
Persian Proverb
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell
whether a man is wise by his questions.
Mahfouz Naguib
Be wiser than other people, if you can; but do not tell them so.
Lord Chesterfield
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after
a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Marcel Proust
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is,
but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.
Viktor Frankl
No one in the world can challenge the benignant man.
Mencius
He who knows others is learned, and he who knows himself is wise.
Laotze
You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to
learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.
Theodor Geisel
These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life.
Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help
create that fact.
William James
Our lives are frittered away by detail; simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
Basically, I no longer work for anything but the sensation I have
while working.
Albert Giacometti
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold,
it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I have a new philosophy, I'm only going to dread one day at a
time.
Charles Shulz (Peanuts)
A crown's no cure for a headache.
English saying
The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Charles de Gaulle
What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument
than why I have one.
Cato the Elder
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
Ian L. Fleming
A loving heart is the truest wisdom.
Charles Dickens
When you're sad, learn something.
Merlin
Without kindness there can be no true joy.
Thomas Carlyle
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a
fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares
may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has
implanted in the human soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature
and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider
horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it
has been a successful day.
Alex Noble
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than
luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not
respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and
birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think
quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never;
in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow
up through the common - this is my symphony.
William Henry Channing
Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness, and
just be happy.
Guillaume Apollinaire
It is a little embarrassing that,
after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give
to people is to be a little kinder to each other.
Aldous Huxley
For the purposes of life and conduct, and society, a little good
sense is surely better than all this genius, and a little good
humour than this extreme sensibility.
David Hume
Goodness does not consist in greatness but greatness in goodness.
Athenaeus
Virtue alone is true nobility.
William Gifford
What you would seem to be, be really.
Benjamin Franklin
Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.
Seneca
He who reigns within himself, and rules passions, desires, and
fears, is more than a king.
Milton
Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
George Eliot
Every man has to seek his own way to make himself more noble and
to realize his own true worth. - Albert
Schweitzer
When life's path is steep, keep your mind even.
Horace
Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain
If a man does his best, what else is there?
General George S. Patton
We are not retreating - we are advancing in another Direction.
General Douglas MacArthur
Never esteem anything of advantage to thee that shall make thee
break thy word or lose thy self-respect.
Marcus Aurelius
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Ghandi
The path of duty lies in what lies near at hand; and men seek for
it in what is remote.
Japanese Proverb
The immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins
of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different
scales.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two
chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are
transformed.
Carl Jung
The pleasure of doing good is the only one that will not wear
out.
Chinese proverb
When strict with oneself, one rarely fails.
Confucious
'Tis hard (but glorious) to be poor and honest.
Benjamin Franklin
It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
John Stuart Mill
Patience is the companion of wisdom.
St. Augustine
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a
hundred days of sorrow.
Chinese Proverb
Control your emotions or they will control you.
Chinese Proverb
Hear reason or she will make you feel her.
Benjamin Franklin
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
Chinese Proverb
Keep your eyes on the sun and you will not see the shadows.
Australian Aborigine Saying
It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Make haste slowly.
Suetonius
The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
Chinese Proverb
If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful
stroke of luck.
Dalai Lama
Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.
Aesop
Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the conquest of it.
William Danforth
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every
day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something
no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind
to continually be part of unanimity.
Christopher Morley
Character building begins in infancy and continues until death.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Praise the young and they will blossom.
Irish Proverb
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Unknown
The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear.
William Jennings Bryan
The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly
given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not,
and never persist in trying to set people right.
Hannah Whitall Smith
If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you, instead of
trying to defend yourself you should say: 'He obviously does not
know me very well, since there are so many other faults he could
have mentioned'.
Epictetus
Speak the truth but leave immediately after.
Slovenian Proverb
Tact is the act of making a point without making an enemy.
Clarence Darrow
There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.
Josh Billings
Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Mahatma Gandhi
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict
justice.
Abraham Lincoln
To know all is to forgive all.
Mme. De Stael
Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.
Mark Twain
Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.
Augustine
Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one.
Chinese saying
A man's faults all conform to his type of mind. Observe his
faults and you may know his virtues.
Confucius
Accidents will happen
George Colman
I want to do what is right but I do
not. I do instead the very thing I hate.
St. Paul
It is very much easier to be intolerant, angry, jealous and
resentful than it is to be generous, patient, kind and
considerate.
A.C. Grayling
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands,
hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Henry Louis Mencken
If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best
teach it to dance.
George Bernard Shaw
It is often easier to fight for your principles than to live up
to them.
Adlai Stevenson
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men
to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Men have never been good, they are not good, they never will be
good.
Karl Barth
Diseases of the soul are more dangerous than those of the body.
Cicero
Vices are their own punishment.
Aesop
Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden but it is forbidden
because it is hurtful.
Benjamin Franklin
If you kick a stone in anger you will hurt your foot.
Korean saying
Speak when you are angry and you'll make the best speech you'll
ever regret.
Henry Ward Beecher
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
Friedrich Nietzsche
People show their character by what they laugh at.
German saying
Anyone can stand adversity but to test a person's character, give
them power.
Abraham Lincoln
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him
absolutely no good.
Samuel Johnson
Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common
hatred for something.
Anton Chekhov
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value
of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of
them, there would not be four friends in the world.
Blaise Pascal
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.
Will Durant
Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.
Chuang-Tzu
Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive
to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself
is offensive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Envy is based on an incomplete understanding of the other
person's situation.
George Chapman
Keep your friends close, your enemies even closer.
Sun Tzu
Rudeness is a weak man's imitation of strength.
Eric Hoffer
The old law about an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself but talent instantly
recognizes genius.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.
Swedish saying
Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.
Kahlil Gibran
I've suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them
never happened.
Mark Twain
No one can make us feel inferior without our consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
[...] stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is
so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly
think any gentleman will deny it.
John Stuart Mill
All this world is mad, save for me and thee, and sometimes I
wonder about thee!
Old Quaker saying,
Only a fool tests the water with both feet.
African Proverb
Fools and scissors require good handling.
Japanese
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of
thought which they avoid.
Sören Kierkegaard
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein
I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde
The man who views the world at 50 the same way he did at 20 has
wasted 30 years of his life.
Muhammed Ali
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of
complete fools.
Douglas Adams
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Winston Churchill
No one can be perfectly free till
all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral;
no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
Herbert Spencer
Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily
due to the capitalist mode of production.
Herbert Marcuse
What experience and history teach us is this - that people and
governments have never learned anything from history, or acted
upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
Georg Hegel
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be
proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he
belongs.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The criminal law stands to the passion of revenge in much the
same relation as marriage to the sexual appetite.
James Fitzjames Stephen
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The
savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his
tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Ayn Rand
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and
catastrophe.
H. G. Wells
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon
loses both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the
other alternatives.
Abba Eban
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it
from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
To the philosophical eye the vices of the clergy are far less
dangerous than their virtues.
Edward Gibbon
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for
Socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be
happy.
H. L. Mencken
God can stand being told by Professor Ayer and Marghanita Laski
that He doesn't exist.
John B Priestley
It is better to be thought a fool
than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Mark Twain
It is better to swallow words than to have to eat them later.
Franklin Roosevelt
I never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
E. Burke
An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or
even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate
between what you do know and what you don’t. It’s
knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and
it’s knowing how to use the information you get.
William Feather
Wise men learn by other men's mistakes; fools by their own.
Chaucer
If you believe everything you read, better not read.
Japanese saying
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the
man who cannot read them.
Mark Twain
To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.
Confucius
A man who asks is a fool for five minutes. A man who never asks
is a fool for life.
Chinese Proverb
So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no
university has had any justification for existence since the
popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.
Alfred North Whitehead
A clever person turns great problems into little ones and little
ones into none at all.
Chinese
Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world,
for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.
Rene Decartes
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is
constantly making exciting discoveries.
A.A. Milne
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but
if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in
certainties.
Francis Bacon
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter
how improbable, must be the truth.
Sherlock Holmes
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
There is only one nature - the division into science and
engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the
division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to
comprehend the whole.
Bill Wulf
The truth is more important than the facts.
Frank Lloyd Wright
There are two kinds of truth, small truth and great truth. You
can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood.
The opposite of a great truth is another truth.
Niels Bohr
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be
substantially true.
George Santayana
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful
to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
George Santayana
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally
convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of
reflection.
Henri Poincare
One of the first rules of the scientific temperament involves an
alertness to one's own possible fallibility...
Alan Wolfe
I make no secret of changing my mind on one or two important
issues....I've never thought it a virtue to adopt a position and
try to get famous as a person who defends that position, like a
purveyor of a brand name, like you're selling cornflakes.
Hilary Putnam
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by
those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was
misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise
spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a
trout in the milk.
Henry David Thoreau
I've been told that sense are sometimes given to concepts at
Oxford after the gates close to visitors; but that may be a
leg-pull.
Jerry Fodor
When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks
himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
Francois Voltaire
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second.
When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.
That's relativity.
Albert Einstein
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants.
Isaac Newton
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Carl Gustav Jung
Black holes are where God divided by zero.
Steven Wright
We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?
Niels Bohr
Yet it moves.
Galileo
Love the truth but pardon error.
Voltaire
All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by
passion or interest, under temptation to it.
John Locke
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every
problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow
There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.
Cicero
Plato having defined man to be a two-legged, animal without
feathers, Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it into the
Academy, and said, 'This is Plato's man.' On which account this
addition was made to the definition: 'With broad flat nails.'
Diogenes Laertius
We had the philosopher Roger Scruton for supper once and
persuaded him to write my daughter's A level philosophy essay.
She got a D.
Sue Arnold
'I think, therefore I am,' is the statement of an intellectual
who underrates toothaches.
Milan Kundera
By a 'silly' theory I mean one which may be held at the time when
one is talking or writing professionally, but which only an
inmate of a lunatic asylum would think of carrying into daily
life.
Charlie D. Broad
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Attributed to Freud
Consciousness can reduce even the most fastidious thinker to
blabbering incoherence.
Colin McGinn
I do not recommend any legislative action against hermeneutics.
Ernest Gellner
Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.
Bertrand Russell
We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are.
Anais Nin
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.
James Russell Lowell
Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
Marcel Proust
The important thing is never to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer
life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and
that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as
I have received and am still receiving.
Albert Einstein
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer
than we can suppose.
John Haldane
[About C. S. Lewis] Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must
write children's books.
Jane Shilling
[...] we should call every truth false which was not accompanied
by at least one laugh.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is
necessary is only to try to think them again.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion
that he is trying to be funny.
Guy Davenport
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Jean-Paul Sartre
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions are
answered, the problems of our life have not even begun to be
touched.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of
human pursuits.
William James
People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge
waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast
compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and
they pass by themselves without wondering.
Saint Augustine
Humans ought to preserve for themselves an environment adequate
to match their capacity to wonder.
Holmes Rolston III
Wit is educated insolence.
Aristotle
Fish and visitors stink after three days.
Benjamin Franklin
Middle age is when the broadness of the mind and the narrowness
of the waist change places.
Unknown
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being
hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
Erma Bombeck
One good husband is worth two good wives for the scarcer things
are, the more they're valued.
Benjamin Franklin
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese
G. K. Chesterton
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined
life is nothing to write home about either.
Daniel Dennett
In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of
incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
Do not remove a fly from your friend's head with an axe.
Chinese Proverb
A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather
and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
Robert Frost
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
George Santayana
No good deed goes unpunished.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and
read the papers.
Albert Camus
Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation....
Jean Baudrillard
All those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand...
Kurt Vonnegut
Life is a big headache on a noisy street.
Yiddish Proverb