pocket wisdom

What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.
Jane Austen

Science has not yet taught us if madness
is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
Edgar Allan Poe

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Kurt Vonnegut

There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.
Lord Acton

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing.
Dwight David Eisenhower

That’s not a bald head.
That’s a solar panel for the dumbass machine.
John Stewart

Men are from Earth, women are from Earth.
Deal with it.
George Carlin

Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!
John Milton

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Benjamin Franklin

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
Thomas Paine

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

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
George Carlin

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby “it.”
Jerome K. Jerome

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshiper may one day be required to suffer.
E. M. Forster

Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses.
Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
Henry Louis Mencken

A hero is someone who has given his or her life
to something bigger than oneself.
Joseph Campbell

A soul that is kind and intends justice discovers more than any sophist.
Sophocles

Next to trying and winning,
the best thing is trying and failing.
Lucy Maud Montgomery

We are so bound together that no man can labor for himself alone. Each blow he strikes in his own behalf helps to mold the universe.
Jerome K. Jerome

When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.
Jane Austen

I care not how affluent some may be,
provided that none be miserable in consequence of it.
Thomas Paine

How paramount the future is to the present
when one is surrounded by children.
Charles Darwin

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion
which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.
Benjamin Franklin

We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience.
George Washington

The soldier never becomes wholly familiar with the conception of his foes as men like himself; he cannot divest himself of the feeling that they are another order of beings, differently conditioned, in an environment not altogether of the earth.
Ambrose Bierce

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm.
There’s nothing to do but to stand there and take it.
Lyndon Johnson

Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence.
Lucy Maud Montgomery

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing,
and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Oscar Wilde

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.
Gilbert Chesterton

One cannot fix one’s eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.
Jane Austen

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Gilbert Chesterton

Better fare hard with good men than feast it with bad.
Thomas Paine

The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.
Niall Ferguson

The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that
the caprice lasts a little longer.
Oscar Wilde

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.
Charles Dickens

Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,
and unto God the things that are God’s.
Jesus the Christ

If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle
John Adams

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
Christopher Hitchens

Unequivocally accepting Atheism or Religious Dogma, has the same effect. It seals the door on one of the rooms of your intellectual mansion.
Nothing will grow in there, but cobwebs.
~JEF

The properties of ink are peculiar and contradictory: it may be used to make reputations and unmake them; to blacken them and to make them white; but it is most generally and acceptably employed as a mortar to bind together the stones of an edifice of fame, and as a whitewash to conceal afterward the rascal quality of the material.
Ambrose Bierce

Now to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge, well digested and ready at command, to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of rights, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice.
John Adams

If you want to know what God thinks of money,
just look at the people he gave it to.
Dorothy Parker

Men become old,
but they never become good.
Oscar Wilde

Never Explain Anything.
H.P. Lovecraft

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
Gilbert Chesterton

An absolute monarchy is one in which the sovereign
does as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins.
Ambrose Bierce

At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth;
But like of each thing that in season grows.
William Shakespeare

Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.
Charles Dickens

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose
the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
William Shakespeare

It seems to me a hard case to make slaves of those
whom God and nature have made free.
Miguel de Cervantes

To be what we are, and to become what we are
capable of becoming is the only end of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson

He did each single thing, as if he did nothing else.
Charles Dickens

Why, then the world ‘s mine oyster.
William Shakespeare

Where words fail, music speaks.
Hans Christian Andersen

The most interesting information comes from children,
for they tell all they know and then stop.
Mark Twain

To believe all men honest would be folly.
To believe none so, is something worse.
John Quincy Adams

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare

If you don’t mind smelling like peanut butter for two or three days,
peanut butter is darn good shaving cream.
Barry Goldwater

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment.
There is no why.
Kurt Vonnegut

On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.
H.L. Mencken

To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid.
Jane Austen

Any one who has gumption knows what it is, and any one who hasn’t can never know what it is. So there is no need of defining it.
Lucy Maud Montgomery

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
Virginia Woolf

Pain like mine demands new modes of song.
Miguel de Cervantes

Have you ever seen a politician talking to a rich person on TV?
Art Buchwald

All the learnin’ my father ever paid for was
a bit o’ birch at one end and the alphabet at th’ other.
George Eliot

The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud;
and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
Jonathan Swift

I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father,
expects or requires no worship or praise from us,
but that He is even infinitely above it.
Benjamin Franklin

I do not want people to be very agreeable,
as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
Jane Austen

There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.
Benjamin Franklin

The time has arrived when patience becomes a crime
and mayhem appears garbed in a manner of virtue.
Edgar Rice Burroughs

Neither a wise nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history
to wait for the train of the future to run over him.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
Edgar Allan Poe

Why did you wish me milder? would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say I play
The man I am.
William Shakespeare

Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose.
Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.
John Adams

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
Kurt Vonnegut

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American
recently passed each other in opposite directions.
George Carlin

Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
HLMencken

Suspicion is a heavy armor and with its weight
it impedes more than it protects.
Robert Burns

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
William S. Burroughs

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel’s as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.
Robert Burns

Revealed religion has no weight with me.
Benjamin Franklin

There’s none so blind as they that won’t see.
Jonathan Swift

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to
observe whether it is not really the assertion of
private interests which is thereby designated.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I was brought up Catholic. I don’t go to receive the sacrament anymore. But it’s important to me to go through this little drill about what my purpose is before I get out of bed every morning.
Elmore Leonard

To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest.
H.P. Lovecraft

There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.
Jane Austen

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travelers notoriously false?
H. P. Lovecraft

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
Dorothy Parker

To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
Ambrose Bierce

I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman’s feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.
Jane Austen

He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.
Jonathan Swift

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!
Jane Austen

After all anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear, anybody is as there is wind or no wind.
Gertrude Stein

The nose of a mob is its imagination.
By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
Edgar Allan Poe

The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.
Ambrose Bierce

It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.
W. Somerset Maugham

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.
Edgar Allen Poe

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
H.P. Lovecraft

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
HL Mencken

A sane person, to an insane society, must appear insane.
Kurt Vonnegut

In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?
St. Augustine

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.
Charles Dickens

You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it.
You’ve got forever; and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.
Jim Thompson

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
William Shakespeare

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith.
I consider the capacity for it terrifying.
Kurt Vonnegut

Throw away holiness and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won’t be any thieves.

If these three aren’t enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course.
Lao Tzu

Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.
JRR Tolkein

The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker

Innocence is like an umbrella: when once we’ve lost it
we must never hope to see it back again.
Punch

Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin
for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
Marcus Tullius Cicero

When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
William Shakespeare

Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like a toad, though ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in its head.
William Shakespeare

Hope is a leaf-joy, which may be beaten out to a great extension, like gold.
Francis Bacon

See first that the design is wise and just: that ascertained, pursue it resolutely; do not for one repulse forego the purpose that you resolved to effect.
William Shakespeare

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Jesus Christ

Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.
W. R. Inge

A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
Adlai E. Stevenson

See first that the design is wise and just:
that ascertained, pursue it resolutely;
do not for one repulse forego the purpose that you resolved to effect.
William Shakespeare

There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead:
they did not seem to belong to the same species;
and it was strange to think that but a little while before
they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.
W. Somerset Maugham

When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
William Shakespeare

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure;
read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out.
The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

Everybody, sooner or later,
sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for
ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Innocence is like an umbrella: when once we’ve lost it
we must never hope to see it back again.
Punch

The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep
that their interests and his own are the same.
Stendhal

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader;
not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
ELDoctorow

I hold any writer sufficiently justified
who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James

Creative writers are always greater
than the causes that they represent.
EMForster

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert

It is unsafe to take your reader
for more of a fool than he is.
WSomerset Maugham

When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and without conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the work practically completed before he sat down to write.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
Elmore Leonard

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all –
no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself –
a game of make-believe, of re-production, very exciting and delightful
to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
Willa Cather

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Almost nobody dances sober,
unless they happen to be insane.
HPLovecraft

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are
broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
WSomerset Maugham

A wise player ought to accept his throws and score them,
not bewail his luck.
Sophocles

The past is a tricky thing, slippery and deceptive,
able to cloud your judgment and
leap tall buildings at a single bound.
JEFitzgerald

The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late.
Daniel Defoe

And the Devil did grin,
for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like a toad, though ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in its head.
William Shakespeare

Ignorance is the curse of God;
knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.
William Shakespeare

A thing derided is a thing dead;
a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
Gustave Flaubert

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself,
and every decent man has a number of such things
stored away in his mind.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Sun Tzu

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe

But I like it because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.
Stephen Crane

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense,
and discover when it is too late that
the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

Every act which has no heart, will be found out in the end.
Cormac McCarthy

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property
to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Gilbert Chesterton

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist.
Children already know that dragons exist.
Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
Gilbert Chesterton

The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
George Santayana

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
William Shakespeare

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary;
men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
Christopher Marlowe

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.
Henry David Thoreau

How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice
when they will not so much as take warning.
Jonathan Swift

It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.
Wilkie Collins

We live as we dream; alone.
Joseph Conrad

The wounded deer dragging its fainting limbs to some untrodden brake,
there to gaze upon the arrow which had pierced it,
and to die, was but a type of me
Mary Shelley

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.
Voltaire

Farewell, fair cruelty.
William Shakespeare

Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man;
and writing an exact man.
Francis Bacon

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the
world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Where so many hours have been spent
in convincing myself that I am right,
is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
Jane Austen

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.
Charlotte Bronte

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.
Jane Austen

If one has no vanity in this life of ours,
there is no sufficient reason for living.
Leo Tolstoy

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little,
repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period,
but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
Francis Bacon

Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine.
Everybody drinks water.
Mark Twain

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires,
is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
Jonathan Swift

Oh, love, that is to be two and yet but one,
a man and a woman blended into an angel.
It is Heaven itself.
Victor Hugo

Great art is never produced for its own sake.
It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
George Bernard Shaw

However mean your life is, meet it and live it:
do not shun it and call it hard names.
Henry David Thoreau

When one has a single thought,
he finds that in everything.
Victor Hugo

Not till we are lost,
in other words not till we have lost the world,
do we begin to find ourselves.
Henry David Thoreau

But surely for everything you
love you have to pay some price.
Agatha Christie

I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous;
that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream.
Louisa May Alcott

I have dreamed in my life,
dreams that have stayed with me ever after,
and changed my ideas;
they have gone through and through me,
like wine through water,
and altered the color of my mind.
Emily Bronte

The past, the present and the future are really one:
they are today.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

What does your conscience say?
You must become who it is that you are.
Friedrich Nietzsche

If we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard,
and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed,
I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.
Virginia Woolf

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man,
but he is braver five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Ambrose Bierce

Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.
William Blake

Prisons are built with stones of Law.
Brothels with the bricks of religion.
William Blake

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
William Blake

To generalize is to be an idiot.
William Blake

You never know what is enough
unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
Robert Louis Stevenson

She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice
and the unaccustomed taste of candor.
It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom.
Kate Chopin

Having leveled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and complacently
admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.
Emily Bronte

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world,
but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
Willa Cather

These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging.
I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.
Hence my optimism.
Virginia Woolf

The old believe everything,
the middle-aged suspect everything,
the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde

He would make a lovely corpse.
Charles Dickens

How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears,
no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly,
and brings nothing but sweet dreams.
Bram Stoker

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art,
should carry its justification in every line.
Joseph Conrad

Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all,
to see life as it is and not as it should be!
Miguel de Cervantes

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.
Charles Dickens

Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.
Lewis Carroll

Diffidence is a sort of false modesty.
William Makepeace Thackeray

I am never afraid of what I know.
Anna Sewell

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
HG Wells

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined,
but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just
the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
Willa Cather

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through
personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Edith Wharton

Affairs are easier of entrance than of exit;
and it is but common prudence to see our way out before we venture in.
Aesop

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
There is really nothing to be said about it.
It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
W Somerset Maugham

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign;
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything
but the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident;
the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
Mark Twain

To love and win is the best thing.
To love and lose, the next best.
William Makepeace Thackeray

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered,
and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing,
a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph.
You can always see that in their faces.
George Bernard Shaw

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when,
whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo

But men must know, that in this theater of man’s life
it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.
Francis Bacon

When writing about transcendental issues,
be transcendentally clear.
Rene Descartes

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire;
it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy,
damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
George Eliot

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose,
a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
Mary Shelley

A fool cannot be an actor,
though an actor may act a fool’s part.
Sophocles

In trouble to be troubled,
Is to have your trouble doubled.
Daniel Defoe

I prefer rogues to imbeciles,
because they sometimes take a rest.
Alexandre Dumas

The good befriend themselves.
Sophocles

There’s nothing new under the sun,
but there are lots of old things we don’t know.
Ambrose Bierce

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling
which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.
George Eliot

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets
and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
Edith Wharton

Alas! all music jars when the soul’s out of tune.
Miguel de Cervantes

Give the people a new word
and they think they have a new fact.
Willa Cather

The declaration that our People are hostile to a government
made by themselves, for themselves, and conducted by themselves,
is an insult.
John Quincy Adams

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved.
I am not sure that you are of the same kind.
But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.
This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave
to tell you that you are very dear.
George Eliot

Discipline illuminates many flaws.
JEFitzgerald

A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket,
and write down the thoughts of the moment.
Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable,
and should be secured, because they seldom return.
Francis Bacon

How could a man be satisfied with a decision
between such alternatives and under such circumstances?
No more than he can be satisfied with his hat,
which he’s chosen from among such shapes
as the resources of the age offer him,
wearing it at best with a resignation
which is chiefly supported by comparison.
George Eliot

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance
when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow