| Interesting Quotes II |
| "And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five "The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said - and calenders." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five "It is just an illusion we have here on Earth, that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it's gone forever." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five "What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never knew why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even knew themselves. Nobody understands anybody." - Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon "He who is most creative conceals his sources the best." - Anonymous "We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us." - Dr. Samuel Johnson "The graveyards are full of indispensible men." - Charles De Gaulle "Nobody forgets where he buried the hatchet." - Frank McKinney Hubbard "Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking." - Henry Louis Mencken "Moderation is the last refuge for the unimaginative." - Oscar Wilde "Reality is the other person's idea of how things should be." - John M. Shanahan "Endurance is frequently a form of indecision." - Princess Elizabeth Bibesco "It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." - Andrew J. Holmes "Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight aquaintance and without any visible reason." - Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield "No human thing is of serious importance." - Plato "To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing." - Princess Elizabeth Bibesco "Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes." - Oscar Wilde "Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt." - Dr. Samuel Johnson "A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated has not the art of getting drunk." - Dr. Samuel Johnson "Self-respect is the root of discipline: the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself." - Abraham Joshua Heschel "People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority." - Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield "All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it's the right temptation, put in the right spot." - Henry Ward Beecher "Man, being responsible, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication." - Lord Byron (George Noel Gordon) "Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours should not be numbered by years, days, and hours." - Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas "Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress." - William Hazlitt "Popularity? It's glory's small change." - Victor Hugo "To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others." - Albert Camus "No man is rich enough to buy back his past." - Oscar Wilde "There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell." - Gilbert Keith Chesterton "Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room." - William Hazlitt "Assassination is the extreme form of censorship." - George Bernard Shaw "What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary." - Richard Long Harkness "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." - Henry David Thoreau "I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes." - Carl Sandburg "Living well is the best revenge." - George Herbert "Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent." - Dr. Samuel Johnson "Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling." - Andre Gide "If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it." - George Bernard Shaw "Doors don't slam open." - John M. Shanahan "Only the shallow know themselves." - Oscar Wilde "Religion is a man using a divining rod. Philosophy is a man using a pick and shovel." - Anonymous "All the arts and sciences have their roots in the struggle against death." - Saint Gregory of Nyssa "Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great." - Roger de Bussy-Rabutin "The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss." - Thomas Carlyle "Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." - Mark Twain "Death twitches my ear. 'Live,' he says, 'I am coming.'" - Virgil "Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference." - Cesare Pavese "He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity." - Ben Jonson "Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of." - Benjamin Franklin "We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school-masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us." - Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu "Simple pleasures... are the last refuge of the complex." - Oscar Wilde "Look for the ridiculous in everything, and you will find it." - Jules Renard "Waste not fresh tears over old griefs." - Euripides "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval." - George Santayana "Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me." - Ambrose Pierce "Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: That you are dreadfully like other people." - James Russell Lowell "Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain." - William Hazlitt "Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret." - Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield "The minority is always right." - Henrik Johan Ibsen "I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being." - Anatole France "A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him." - Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux "If I try to be like him, who will be like me?" - Yiddish Proverb "Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes along." - Samuel Butler "Hell is other people." - Jean-Paul Sartre "Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead. And, unlike communism, democracy does not mean having just one ineffective political party, it means having two ineffective political parties... Democracy is welcoming people from other lands and giving them something to hold on to - usually a mop or a leaf blower. It means that with proper timing and scrupulous bookkeeping, anyone can die owing the government a huge amount of money... Democracy means free television, not good television, but free... And finally, democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars over its head - this signifies that when the white man came to this country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees, bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American eagle. I thank you." - "What democracy means to me," Johnny Carson "I like men who have a future and women who have a past." - Oscar Wilde "We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire." - Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld "The friendship that can cease has never been real." - Saint Jerome "Since we are mortal, friendships are best kept to a moderate level, rather than sharing the very depths of our souls." - Euripides "To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it." - Cornelius Tacitus "Treat your friend as if he might become an enemy." - Publilius Syrus "Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never." - Victor Hugo "There are very few problems that cannot be solved by orders ending with 'or die.'" - Alistair J.R. Young |